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Not another dime.
I'm another one of those people who is loyal to my 3rd gen 4runner - also a '97 as per the terms of this thread as I understand them - but it won't last forever, I assume, and I am always on the lookout for what will replace it.
Pretty open to this because even though I am one of those philistines who likes the Jeep Gladiator, I'm leery of Jeep reliability. I hear good things about Ford these days from everyone I know who follows vehicles featuring, I guess, anything popularized after about 1990, because I don't think my 4runner has any technology that couldn't have been pretty easily executed a decade prior.
Here is a question: do Ford trucks currently have a "no big touchscreen display shit just regular goddamn dials FFS" option? Because all I really want is my 4runner with its A/C, power locks and power windows, but with a super efficient modern engine and about another 3000 lbs of towing capacity. That is half the appeal of these vaguely retro-looking vehicles to me: I think it tricks my brain into expecting less proprietary electronic foofarawery. I mean really I want 4 door sheet metal and a bulletproof, offroad-capable, tow-rated drive train.
I think I end up giving some version of this rant every other vehicle thread so I apologize if everyone is sick of it. But am I alone in feeling like vehicles have gotten absurdly overcomplicated? It just seems like everything I actually want could be executed easily for fifteen grand and 3000 pounds, and instead I'm always looking at price tags of $40,000 and curb weights of 4500 lbs to accomodate the 25 servos in the back seat to give it electronic posture memory or something. That's why I was briefly interested in those Mahindra jeeps - pretty low-tech little buggy. But landed in Canada and not even road legal they're still twenty grand here.
Maybe I'm just poor and ranting about something that nobody else cares about. Although I guess it's just what you prioritize: I can't help looking at a sixty thousand dollar car and going "man, that's twin 300hp HO Evinrudes I could have, why would I spend that on some dumb thing like a vehicle I would use every single day that includes not just an engine and a propellor but a multi-gear transmission, and even an entire climate-controlled structure you can sit inside in luxury? What am I, gay? Get real, that's retarded."
Realistically I would actually probably think "sixty grand would take a lot of my mortgage". I'm not actually flippantly throwing around big outboard money. In reality, my boat would technically take a single 300hp outboard but it would also mean that I probably couldn't pin the throttle, unless I wanted to become part of the very exclusive club of private citizens who'd placed something into Earth orbit. I met a guy with a 250 on the same boat and it's fairly scary at full tilt and he's only taken it there once or twice, in perfect conditions, for a few moments. An Evinrude 300 wide open would probably have only the prop in the water, and run about 80 mph. Which, on a forty year old fishing boat, is probably not the greatest decision I could make.
Although I have been looking for ways to defy my own mortality recently so this is suddenly becoming uncomfortably tempting.
Okay, out on the Bronco, maybe back in on the Evinrude.
I think everything has some kind of backup camera as a legal requirement now, so there will at least be a little screen.Originally Posted by misanthropist
We had a pontoon boat that would go 40mph. Did that once, for a few moments, before everything we had (except the cooler...) blew overboard.
If I could buy a brand new '97 4Runner and a brand new 97 M3 today, I would.
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Not another dime.
I could accept a backup camera display. I just don't want some kind of mandatory touchscreen integrated navigation/engine management/climate control system like it seems like all my old coworkers' trucks had.
Certainly not the worst decision you could make (but I might not be a good judge of these things). Technology has made 100mph on land, and even on snow, positively pedestrian, but 100mph on water is still pretty darn exciting.
I can't imagine not owning at least one vehicle with points. Hope we never find out, but I think I'll be mobile after the EMP.
To get back to the thread at hand, the most-recent rendering of the 2-door Bronco, above, has some cues that make it vaguely Bronco-ish. The four-door with the white roof several posts back could be equally passed off as a next generation Toyota.
This is one of those things that a lot of people seem to care about that just doesn’t bother me anymore. People get wrapped around the axle about the appearance of a care relative to some dredged up long-dead name (or even a new generation of an active model). I just don’t care. About the limit of my “care” extends to when they take a vehicle that used to have a certain performance of capability and then turn it into a Turd and make it look lame but even then I only really care about the missed opportunity.
In this case I don’t care what they call this thing. I like the look and concept of it.
For automobiles as a whole, I largely agree. Specific to these intentionally retro models I think looks vs original are pretty relevant since "nostalgia" is a key marketing ingredient. When your marketing material and press releases starts saying "inspired by the 1st generation...." or "heritage-inspired" (GM speak) then it probably ought to be relatively true to the referenced out of production vehicles.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.
Think I had a 97 M3 and loved it. Replaced it with a 2001, or whenever it got bigger, and hated it.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
I agree: Infoscreen = Good / Touchscreen = Not So Good
One of the early implementations of this was the Buick Riviera. A friend had one and one day he couldn't turn the heater on until after he added windshield washer fluid.
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