I have decided that, with very few exceptions, I am only buying cars made before 1993.

Why 1993?

Because I need a rule.

There was no meeting in Detroit, Stuttgart, Munich, Gothenburg or Tokyo on January 1, 1994 where everyone suddenly agreed to start building worse cars. Some excellent cars continued well into the 1990s. The Mercedes-Benz W124 carried on into the middle of the decade. Some versions of the BMW E30 did too. Porsche kept refining its front-engine transaxle cars through the 968 until 1995.

And I currently own two cars built well after my supposed cutoff: a 2006 BMW 330i and a 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara. I like both of them.

So 1993 is not magic.

It is simply a reasonably safe dividing line.

It is also the year the Volvo 240 finally died after an extraordinary nineteen-year production run. Volvo built 2,685,171 Volvo 240s between 1974 and 1993, plus another 177,402 cars in the related 260 series. The final 240 rolled out of Volvo’s Torslanda plant on May 5, 1993. Volvo still describes the car as one of the most important models in its history.

So if I am going to pick an arbitrary year, the year the Volvo 240 disappeared is not a bad one.

I want something built from good materials and designed by engineers who assumed it might still be on the road thirty years later. I want to be able to understand it, repair it and maintain it. I want it to have its own personality. And if I choose to keep it for the rest of my life, I want the car to cooperate with that decision.

Most importantly, when I hand someone the money and they hand me the title, I want the car to be mine.

Not mostly mine.

Not mine until a server shuts down.

Not mine as long as I keep paying for a feature already physically installed in it.

Not mine provided the manufacturer approves of who repairs it.

Mine.

When someone asks why I would deliberately buy a thirty- or forty-year-old car, my shortest answer is this:

Because I don’t want to be held hostage by car companies and politicians. I want to buy something that was built to be great, made to last, that I can fix myself and drive forever.

That is really what this is about.

I Have Actually Lived With Old Cars

This isn’t nostalgia based on watching old car videos and browsing auction sites.

I have owned old cars.

I had a 1987 Volvo 240 wagon with around 240,000 miles on it when I sold it. It was still running.

I owned a 1985 Chevrolet S10.

I owned a 1984 Mazda B2000 pickup.

I have also owned three rotary-powered Mazdas: a 1986 RX-7 GXL, a 1987 RX-7 Turbo II and a 2006 RX-8.

I loved all three.

People love to tell you rotary engines are unreliable. My experience was different. They are unconventional, and they demand that the owner understand what he owns. Maintain them correctly, pay attention to oil, cooling, ignition and compression, and they can be remarkably good engines.

That distinction matters because I am not opposed to complicated or unusual engineering.

Quite the opposite.

A rotary engine is weird for a reason.

A Porsche transaxle is weird for a reason.

Independent suspension is complicated for a reason.

Electronic fuel injection is more complicated than a carburetor, but it accomplishes something worthwhile.

I don’t want simple cars because I am afraid of technology.

I want technology that earns its complexity.

There is a difference.

The Almost Perfect Car

Right now I am fixing up a 1988 Porsche 944S for our corporate YouTube channel.

The more I work on it, the more I think it might be close to the perfect automobile.

Not the fastest car.

Not the most luxurious car.

Not the safest car ever manufactured.

Not the most practical.

Perfect in the sense that nearly every engineering decision seems to recognize that someday another human being is going to have to live with this machine, maintain it, understand it and repair it.

Working on the 944 is almost comical after spending time inside newer cars.

You need about three wrenches.

Obviously I am exaggerating a little, but not much. The same hardware sizes appear repeatedly. Things are generally accessible. Parts feel substantial. Components that wear can often be rebuilt instead of throwing away the entire assembly.

And the engineering is anything but primitive.

The 944 uses a front engine and rear transaxle, putting the transmission at the back of the car to improve weight distribution. Porsche still celebrates that architecture today as one of the defining characteristics of its transaxle era.

And then there is Gerhard Plattner.

In 1987, the Austrian long-distance driver took a 944 S on a 258-day trip across five continents, covering 384,400 kilometers—roughly the average distance from the Earth to the Moon. That would have been impressive enough.

But according to Porsche’s own account of the transaxle era, the car was running so well that Plattner simply kept going, ultimately putting 500,000 kilometers on the odometer.

Enthusiast documentation of the Luna project dates that milestone to December 17, 1987, and records the car being serviced at roughly 20,000-kilometer intervals.

That detail matters more to me than the number.

He didn’t coax a dying machine across the finish line for a publicity stunt.

He reached the original goal, looked at the car, realized it was still fine, and kept driving.

That is the kind of engineering I am talking about.

Almost forty years after somebody in Germany assembled my own 944, I can still take it apart. I can see what the engineers were trying to accomplish. I can repair it, put it back together and drive it.

There is something deeply satisfying about that.

Good Complexity and Bad Complexity

My 2006 BMW 330i demonstrates where things started getting murkier.

I love that car.

Mine has the M suspension, and it is a genuine driver’s car. It isn’t absurdly powerful, but the power is always there when you ask for it. The steering is excellent. The suspension is excellent. The proportions are right. The interior still feels like it was designed around the driver rather than around a television screen.

When you are actually driving it, you understand why people became obsessed with BMWs.

Then you have to fix something.

BMW apparently decided the starter deserved a private apartment underneath the intake manifold.

Replacing it means removing a ridiculous amount of equipment and unplugging what feels like a rat’s nest of wiring. Since you are already in there, you start thinking about the PCV system, crank-position sensor and everything else buried in the same neighborhood because you certainly don’t want to do all of that twice.

The oil-pan gasket is another masterpiece. These cars leak, but replacing the gasket can require supporting the engine and dropping the front subframe.

The water pump and thermostat are crammed into miserable locations.

The eccentric-shaft sensor lives inside the valve-cover area.

The valve cover itself barely has enough room to leave the engine bay.

Ironically, replacing a transmission mechatronics solenoid was one of the easier jobs I have done on the car.

None of that makes the E90 a bad automobile. I still love driving it.

But the engineering priorities changed.

And that leads to one of my basic rules about automotive design:

A part eventually failing is not bad engineering. Designing the car as though that part will never need to be replaced is.

Everything wears out eventually.

I don’t expect a car to operate indefinitely without maintenance.

I expect the opposite.

I want to maintain it indefinitely.

Design it accordingly.

But New Cars Are Safer

Before going any further, this is the strongest argument against what I am doing.

And it is true.

Modern cars are safer.

Not theoretically. Statistically and structurally.

NHTSA credits decades of improvements in vehicle design and restraint technology with enormous reductions in occupant fatality risk. Modern vehicles benefit from stronger passenger cells, multiple airbags, stability control, better restraints and crash-avoidance systems that simply did not exist during much of my preferred era.

I am not going to pretend otherwise because it would make my argument easier.

If maximum crash survivability is your overriding criterion, buy the newer car.

I accept that tradeoff.

But I am also deliberately attracted to older cars that were leaders in safety engineering in their own time.

The Volvo 240 had front and rear crumple zones, a reinforced passenger compartment and four-wheel disc brakes. Volvo’s work in occupant protection was serious enough that the 240 became deeply associated with the company’s safety reputation.

The Mercedes W124 was an extraordinarily sophisticated safety design for the 1980s.

The Porsche 944 used a carefully engineered chassis and offered increasingly advanced safety equipment as the platform evolved.

I am not proposing commuting in a Model T.

I am making a conscious trade between competing values: modern crash protection on one side, and repairability, simplicity, durability, autonomy and long-term ownership on the other.

Adults are allowed to weigh those things differently.

What Actually Kills a Modern Car

This is where I think the discussion about modern reliability often gets confused.

Modern engines are good.

In many ways, they are astonishingly good.

Metallurgy is better. Machining tolerances are better. Lubricants are better. Fuel injection is better. Ignition systems are better. Engine management is better.

A properly maintained modern engine going 200,000 miles is no longer particularly remarkable.

The engine increasingly isn’t what kills the car.

Everything built around it does.

A relatively inexpensive sensor fails, but it is integrated into a much more expensive assembly.

A control module dies, and the replacement either costs thousands of dollars or eventually becomes unavailable.

A transmission may be treated as a replaceable unit instead of something designed to be rebuilt.

A wiring harness is routed through the one place that turns a small problem into a full-day teardown.

A perfectly functional mechanical system becomes useless because the electronic system controlling it has failed.

That distinction is not just my impression.

J.D. Power’s 2026 Vehicle Dependability Study found that problems reported after three years of ownership rose to 204 per 100 vehicles, the highest level since the study was redesigned in 2022. Infotainment was by far the most troublesome category, at 56.7 problems per 100 vehicles. Smartphone integration—Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity—has remained the industry’s most frequently reported problem for three consecutive years.

Meanwhile, gasoline powertrains actually improved.

That is almost a perfect illustration of what I am talking about.

The engine got better. The screen got worse.

The mechanical life of the automobile has gotten longer while its economic life can become shorter.

And the gap between those two numbers is where ownership dies.

A machine does not need to be physically worn out to become disposable. It only needs to reach the point where the repair costs more than the owner believes the machine is worth.

My Volvo had around 240,000 miles when I sold it and was still running.

Gerhard Plattner’s 944 S went 500,000 kilometers and reached that number almost as an afterthought because the car was still functioning perfectly well.

Those cars weren’t immortal.

They were repairable long enough to become old.

That is the difference.

Repairability Is Part of Ownership

This is larger than whether I enjoy turning wrenches on Saturday morning.

Repairability is part of ownership.

If I own a machine but cannot diagnose it, cannot obtain the information required to repair it, cannot buy the components required to repair it, or require manufacturer-controlled software to make a replacement component function, my ownership has been diminished.

The Federal Trade Commission reached a remarkably similar conclusion in its 2021 report to Congress, Nixing the Fix.

After examining manufacturer arguments involving safety, cybersecurity, intellectual property, liability and repair quality, the FTC concluded that there was “scant evidence” supporting many of the justifications offered for repair restrictions.

More specifically, the Commission found scant evidence that repair restrictions were necessary to protect consumers and technicians from injury, and it found no empirical evidence that independent repair facilities were more likely to misuse customer data or that broader access to diagnostic information inherently introduced cybersecurity risks.

That matters because safety and cybersecurity are frequently invoked whenever manufacturers argue that owners and independent shops should not have complete access to the machines they supposedly own.

The federal government’s own research also shows where this issue may be heading.

The Government Accountability Office’s 2024 report, Vehicle Repair: Information on Evolving Vehicle Technologies and Consumer Choice, examined the growing role of vehicle telematics—the wireless flow of information between the automobile and the manufacturer.

There is an important caveat: automakers and independent-repair stakeholders interviewed by GAO generally agreed that telematics data were not currently necessary to perform most repairs.

That is worth saying plainly.

The crisis is not that independent shops suddenly cannot repair today’s cars.

The issue is the direction of travel.

GAO found that direct manufacturer access to telematics can give dealership networks advantages that independent repair shops do not have. A dealership may remotely diagnose a fault before the car even arrives. An automaker can identify needed service and proactively contact the owner.

The independent shop cannot compete for work it does not know exists.

That is a very different model from the one I grew up with.

For most of automotive history, the concept was incredibly straightforward.

Your water pump failed.

You bought a water pump.

You installed the water pump.

Your car now had a new water pump.

Nobody needed permission from a server.

Nobody needed a software subscription.

Nobody needed an account with the manufacturer.

The vehicle didn’t care whether the person holding the wrench worked at a dealership.

That is ownership.

Rebuild It, Don’t Throw It Away

Old-car people sometimes face the opposite problem: the part simply doesn’t exist anymore.

That is real.

I am not pretending otherwise.

If you own something obscure enough—a vintage Rolls-Royce, Bentley, exotic Italian car or even the wrong version of an otherwise common old automobile—you may eventually discover that the component you need disappeared from normal inventory twenty years ago.

Then things get expensive.

Or you get creative.

But there is an enormous philosophical difference between an old component being difficult to obtain and a modern component being impossible or impractical to service.

Older machinery was frequently designed around rebuildable assemblies.

A housing didn’t become garbage because a seal failed.

You replaced the seal.

A bearing failed.

You replaced the bearing.

A bushing wore out.

You pressed in another bushing.

A starter stopped functioning.

You rebuilt the starter.

The expensive metal body of the component might survive through several generations of wear items.

This mentality extends far beyond cars. We once expected expensive mechanical objects to be serviced.

Now we increasingly replace modules.

I would rather own a machine that occasionally forces me to get creative than one deliberately designed to make creativity impossible.

Materials Matter

This is the part where I can probably become insufferable because I studied material science and have strong opinions about plastic.

Very strong opinions.

Plastic has unquestionably improved certain products. There are applications where polymers make tremendous engineering sense.

But “we can mold this out of plastic” and “this should be made out of plastic” are two completely different statements.

My 2019 Wrangler is a good example.

I actually love my Jeep.

It is a six-speed manual. Underneath the modern conveniences, it is still relatively primitive in the best possible way. I can work on it. I understand what it is doing. It looks like a Jeep. It gets around 22 mpg in my use, which I consider pretty damn good for a four-door brick with four-wheel drive.

I plan to keep it for life.

But I hate the start/stop system.

I don’t particularly want Uconnect serving as the command center for the vehicle.

And I hate the plastic oil-filter housing.

Think about the environment that component occupies.

It sits on top of an engine around significant heat, repeatedly cycling from ambient temperature to full operating temperature and back again thousands of times over the life of the car.

An engineer understands thermal cycling.

An engineer understands creep.

An engineer understands embrittlement.

An engineer understands that polymers and metals behave differently across temperature and time.

So when I see plastic used in a location like that, my first question is not whether plastic was possible.

My question is whether it was selected because it was the best material for the lifetime of the vehicle or because it reduced manufacturing cost.

Those goals are not the same.

Cost optimization for the manufacturer is not necessarily optimization for the owner.

Save a few dollars on a component across hundreds of thousands of vehicles and the manufacturer saves millions.

If that choice leaves a later owner replacing the assembly after the warranty has expired, the economic burden has simply been transferred down the road.

I would rather pay more up front for the component that lasts.

Build the part once.

Build it correctly.

Let it remain there for the life of the machine.

That is how I think durable products should be designed.

My Jeep also represents another dividing line I find myself thinking about.

It was built before COVID.

I am increasingly grateful for that.

I am not going to pretend I have a giant dataset proving that every pre-COVID car is better than every post-COVID car. I don’t.

It is simply an instinct formed from watching what happened to manufacturing during and after the pandemic: shortages, substitutions, disrupted supply chains, labor problems and immense pressure to keep product moving.

Maybe time will prove that concern wrong.

But when I look at my 2019 Wrangler, I am happy it came from the world immediately before that disruption.

More importantly, it demonstrates why 1993 is a rule and not a religion.

My Wrangler violates the date.

It still satisfies enough of the philosophy that I intend to keep it forever.

I am not worshipping a year. I am selecting an engineering philosophy.

Cars Used to Look Like Something

Older cars tended to communicate what they were designed to do.

A BMW E30 looks like an E30.

A Mercedes W124 looks like a W124.

A Volvo 240 looks like a Volvo 240 from a quarter mile away.

A Porsche 944 can be identified instantly.

But this is not merely an argument about taste.

The shape often told you something about the engineering mission underneath it.

The Volvo 240’s upright proportions and substantial front and rear structures reflected Volvo’s obsession with passenger protection. Its form followed a safety strategy.

The Porsche 944 looks completely different because Porsche was solving a completely different problem. Long hood. Low nose. Broad fenders. Rear transaxle. Driver-centered cockpit. Its proportions follow from the mechanical architecture and the pursuit of balanced handling.

One car says safety.

The other says balance and driver involvement.

You can almost read the engineering brief by looking at them.

That was true of countless cars from the period.

Luxury looked like luxury.

Economy cars looked economical.

Sports cars looked like sports cars.

Utility vehicles looked utilitarian.

Even genuinely strange-looking cars were often strange because somebody was pursuing an aerodynamic, packaging or engineering objective.

Modern vehicles increasingly converge on variations of the same crossover silhouette.

There are legitimate reasons for that. Crash requirements matter. Aerodynamics matter. Fuel-economy requirements matter. Interior space matters. Platform sharing matters. And manufacturers build what consumers actually buy.

But that convergence says something about the changing mission.

The industry’s dominant task increasingly seems to be satisfying the same regulatory requirements, packaging targets, aerodynamic demands and broad consumer preferences with as little market risk as possible.

That isn’t evil.

It may even be rational.

But it produces a different kind of automobile.

The engineering mission once gave the car its identity.

Increasingly, compliance with the mission gives everything roughly the same shape.

That is why this belongs in the same essay as repairability, materials and ownership.

The question in each case is the same:

Who—or what—is the product being optimized for?

The Car Is Becoming a Software Platform

This is where this essay runs directly into something I wrote about in Enshittification and You.

The most important change happening to the automobile may not be electrification.

It may be the transformation of the automobile from a machine into a platform.

Once the product becomes a platform, the sale no longer has to be the end of the company’s relationship with your wallet.

Software can be updated.

Features can be activated.

Features can be deactivated.

Services can expire.

Subscriptions can renew.

Data can be collected.

New revenue opportunities can continue long after the vehicle leaves the dealership.

I covered the clearest example in that other post: BMW’s attempt to charge a monthly subscription for heated seats already installed in the car, a program it abandoned under customer pressure while keeping the broader idea of software-enabled functions on demand.

That entire concept offends me.

If the heating element is physically installed in my seat, I bought the heating element.

I don’t want to rent permission to send electricity through it.

The old transaction was:

Here is money. Give me the machine.

The emerging transaction increasingly resembles:

Here is money. Give me permission to use your machine.

No.

I don’t want my car to need permission to be a car.

And Then There Is the Surveillance

This isn’t theoretical either.

On January 14, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission finalized its order against General Motors and OnStar after alleging that the companies collected and sold consumers’ precise geolocation and driving-behavior information without adequate informed consent.

The Commission approved the order 2-0 and described the underlying conduct as an “egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust.”

For five years, GM is prohibited from disclosing certain geolocation and driver-behavior information to consumer reporting agencies. Other provisions of the order remain in place for twenty years.

Your car can know where you went.

How you drove.

How hard you braked.

How quickly you accelerated.

That information can have economic value to somebody other than you.

And this problem did not suddenly appear in 2026.

In 2023, Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included project examined 25 major automotive brands. Every one of them failed Mozilla’s privacy review, the first product category in the project’s seven-year history where that happened.

Mozilla reported that 84 percent of the brands could share or sell personal data and 76 percent said they could sell it.

My 1988 Porsche has never sold my driving habits to anyone.

It doesn’t know my driving habits.

It knows nothing.

It is gloriously stupid.

I turn the key and it runs.

That is all I require from the relationship.

The Financial Cage

This may be the part of the argument that matters most even if you don’t care about cars.

As I write this in August 2026, Americans paid an average of $49,855 for a new vehicle in July, according to Kelley Blue Book data reported by Cox Automotive. That was the highest average transaction price of 2026 to that point, although still below the all-time record reached in December 2025.

Experian’s first-quarter 2026 data make the financing side even more striking.

The average new-vehicle loan was $43,925.

The average new-car payment was $770 per month.

And the average loan term had reached 69.5 months.

Nearly six years.

More than 35 percent of new-vehicle loans now extend beyond six years, up from roughly 31 percent only a year earlier. Experian’s first-quarter 2026 automotive credit data show just how dependent affordability has become on longer loan terms.

We have normalized the idea that transportation should consume hundreds and hundreds of dollars of household cash flow every month for most of a decade.

And that changes far more than what sits in the driveway.

A permanent $700, $800 or $900 monthly obligation changes how much emergency savings you need.

It changes the salary you must replace before leaving a job.

It changes how easily you can survive a layoff.

It changes whether you can take a lower-paying opportunity with more upside.

It changes whether you can start a business.

It changes whether one spouse can stay home.

It changes how aggressively you can invest.

It changes whether an unexpected medical bill or home repair becomes an inconvenience or a crisis.

And yes, it changes how much nonsense you may have to tolerate from an employer because the payment is due again next month.

That is what I mean by a financial cage.

Debt doesn’t merely cost interest.

It reduces optionality.

Every recurring obligation narrows the range of choices you can safely make.

A mortgage may provide a home.

A business loan may finance an asset that produces income.

Education debt may increase earning capacity.

But borrowing for six years—or longer—on a rapidly depreciating consumer product so that you can replace another functioning consumer product deserves more scrutiny than our culture gives it.

The monthly payment hides the real cost remarkably well.

A $2,000 repair on a car you own outright feels expensive because the money leaves all at once.

A $770 payment feels normal because it disappears quietly every month.

But $770 a month is $9,240 every year.

Over 69.5 months, that is more than $53,000 in payments before we even start discussing insurance, registration, fuel or maintenance.

Suddenly spending a few thousand dollars rebuilding the suspension on an old Mercedes does not sound quite so irresponsible.

And there is another critical difference.

Eventually, the repair ends.

The payment returns next month.

I am not trying to spend nothing on transportation.

Cars cost money.

Old cars cost money.

The goal is to direct that money toward maintaining something I already control rather than continually committing future income to replace it.

That distinction reaches far beyond automobiles.

Financial independence is not simply having a large income.

It is having enough control over your obligations that you can make decisions without every decision being dictated by next month’s bills.

A paid-for car that occasionally needs repair can contribute to that freedom.

A permanent car payment does the opposite.

What About Electric Cars?

I know where this discussion usually goes next.

Someone will tell me that keeping old gasoline cars is environmentally irresponsible and that I should replace them with an EV.

I’m not going to turn this essay into a lifecycle analysis of lithium mining, battery manufacturing, electrical generation, petroleum refining and carbon accounting.

That deserves its own argument.

And if we are talking specifically about lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions, I should acknowledge evidence that cuts against my own skepticism: the EPA concludes that a typical electric vehicle produces lower lifetime greenhouse-gas emissions than an average gasoline vehicle even after accounting for battery manufacturing.

I am not going to dispute a finding simply because it is inconvenient to my broader argument.

But there is an assumption inside lifecycle analysis that is particularly interesting in the context of this essay.

The Argonne National Laboratory modeling underlying the EPA comparison assumes a lifetime of roughly 173,151 miles for both the gasoline vehicle and the EV.

That is a perfectly reasonable assumption for comparing powertrains.

But my entire argument is about the assumption underneath the assumption.

How long should the car itself remain useful?

A vehicle that survives 350,000 or 400,000 miles spreads the environmental cost of manufacturing it across vastly more use than one discarded around 170,000 miles.

That does not prove an old gasoline car is environmentally superior to an EV.

It does make durability itself an environmental variable.

And that is the part of environmentalism I find much more compelling than constantly replacing functioning products with newly manufactured ones.

Use things for a very long time.

Repair them.

Maintain them.

Rebuild them.

The greenest engineering decision may sometimes be making the product worth keeping.

What I Would Actually Buy

So what qualifies?

A Mercedes-Benz W124 certainly does.

A BMW E30.

A Volvo 240—preferably one without rust.

A Porsche 944.

A Mercedes W123.

An early Lexus LS400 deserves consideration because Toyota entered the luxury market trying to prove what it was capable of building, and the result was an extraordinarily ambitious automobile.

Old Toyota pickups and Land Cruisers belong in the conversation.

There are Hondas from the same period I would happily own.

And Mazda rotaries obviously get a pass from me.

But age alone isn’t enough.

There were terrible cars in 1988.

There were unreliable cars.

Cars with miserable electrical systems.

Cars that rusted before the loan was paid off.

Cars built cheaply.

Cars with engineering solutions that were interesting but unnecessarily miserable to work on.

I love the Saab 900 aesthetically, for example. It was distinctive, used good materials and was undeniably clever. But Saab occasionally got a little too clever for my tastes. A front-mounted four-cylinder installed backward and tilted on an angle may be fascinating engineering, but fascinating and pleasant to repair are not necessarily the same thing.

My goal isn’t to collect eccentric engineering exercises.

The car has to satisfy a fairly demanding standard.

It must be durable.

Repairable.

Distinctive.

Independent.

And sensibly engineered.

“Sensibly engineered” does not mean conventional.

A rotary engine is not conventional.

A Porsche transaxle is not conventional.

The question is whether the engineering accomplishes something worthwhile for the machine or the person driving it.

Engineering should solve problems.

It shouldn’t merely relocate them into the owner’s garage twenty years later.

Three Wrenches

Which brings me back to the 944.

I can stand over a 1988 Porsche with ordinary tools and understand what I am looking at.

I can remove something.

Repair it.

Rebuild it.

Put it back.

And drive the car again.

When something breaks—and something eventually will—I don’t resent the car for it.

It is almost forty years old.

Things break.

What impresses me is that somebody who designed it decades ago seems to have anticipated that reality.

They expected someone to work on it.

That may be the fundamental difference between the automobile I want and the automobile industry I increasingly distrust.

So yes, 1993 is arbitrary.

There will be exceptions.

My Wrangler is already one.

But as a general rule?

Give me the Mercedes.

Give me the E30.

Give me the old Volvo.

And after spending enough time underneath the one sitting in my shop right now, maybe most of all:

Give me the Porsche.