Another car questions + opinions

[MadMan]

Many late 90s and mid 2000s GM cars had the seatbelts entirely mounted to the seat. Cadillacs, Buicks, etc. Those would be exactly what you are looking for. However, A. Good luck finding those in your country, and B. those were those god-awful power seats that you couldn't really adjust up or down.

Let me explain. See, a NORMAL 6+ way power seat operates by having forward/back, front up/down, and rear up/down, and the rear part of the seat is connected to the back of the seat. So when you control the rear up/down, it moves the back of the seat with it. Now what GM (and a few others) decided to do, was to make the seat bottom separate from the seat back. So only the rear of the seat bottom would move up/down, and the seat back stays in one place. Sounds good on paper, but in practice, you'll find that it somehow manages only to move your ass up and down, instead of moving your whole body up or down.

In other words, those seats are terrible for tall people like me, and for short people. Because you get no real height adjustment.

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Now, the thing you need to understand about old cars is that everyone understood that they required regular maintenance. They had to be greased and oiled, and valves lapped, and cylinders honed, and brakes adjusted - a lot of big heavy maintenance. However, it was also a lot easier back then. Cars were simpler, so were repairs and maintenance. In those days, pulling a cylinder head and grinding valves was maybe a 1 hour job. Ordinary cars today, doing that, easy 10 to 12 hours. So they were considered very reliable. Even today, our measure of reliability includes how easy it is to fix.