"greybeard" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

I'll bet you loved the "Chevy and apple pie" commercials they were
running
a
few years ago. The apple pie is good, but it didn't help the cars very
much.

I'm not enraptured with my S-10, but impressed that my total maintenance
costs of the years I've owned it have come to just over $2000, including
new
tires. It spends most of it's life behind my garage, I don't drive a lot,
but short trips are probably harder on it than even driving ten miles one
way and back. Most of the time the temp gauge doesn't even come off the
peg
and I know that's hard on an engine.

I'm sure it's a long-lasting vehicle, but most of them are these days. I got
11 years and 130,000 miles on my Mazda 626 and it probably would still be
running if some dope didn't pull out of a side street and hit me head-on.

There aren't a lot of bad engines being built, compared to, say, 30 years
ago. Some of the Toyotas made in the mid-'70s had fewer head bolts than they
should have, and had a reputation for blowing head gaskets. But they fixed
that a long time ago.

For that matter, the old Ford 4-cyl. (2.0/2.3, Ford's first OHC production
engine) had too few oil passageways. They'd run bearings out if you drove
them hard.

The standards are a lot higher today. If a company gets a rep for building
bad engines, or bad anything, they get pounded in the marketplace.

--
Ed Huntress