That 47 Lincoln also didn't have any of the safety gear, fuel injection, brake and suspension technology, and had much less engineering put into it than modern cars. The prices are way higher because engineering, design, and manufacturing costs drive them that way. Your 47 Lincoln also would need a lot more work and assistance to get it to 200k miles, where today's cars should be able to do that a lot more easily. Just my 5 cents (no pennies in Canada anymore
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I agree with some of what you say. You have to remember, the safety stuff, the fuel injection and computers, and brake and suspension technology came about due to the US Govt making laws forcing automakers to change the way they did things, and in turn, it improved the product. No way to know if they would have done all these things on their own, but fuel injection was already in use by the 50's, albeit primitive mechanical systems. You have to think the automakers would have continued to improve their products, just maybe not as the faster pace the Govt required them to do it in.
As to the longevity of vehicles produced back then against now, yes, things have changed a lot. More is know about metallurgy, better, closer tolerances on machined surfaces, and improvements in plastics have all made a huge contribution to the longer life vehicles we have now. I disagree that they didn't have as much engineering in them back then though, they probably had as much engineering as was available at the time. They did pretty good with tables and slide rules since there were no computers yet to design things.
Lincoln had a lot of features standard that weren't even available on other cars at that time, like a vacuum operated power antenna, turn signals, power windows and power seats, and a trunk mounted brake light. It took some engineering to make all those things work.
I will agree that engines and running gears didn't last like they do now, but then again, people didn't drive the miles back then that they do now. A car back then had a life span of 5-10 years, just like now, only in that 5-10 year life span, it would only travel 50-75,000 miles. And another thing, a lot of that driving was done in harsh conditions, rutted, dusty gravel roads and in some cases, no roads other than bare dirt. They had to be engineered to handle all types of terrain, so they had to be tough. If they had of had our modern knowledge of metals and machine work, those vehicles would have lasted 300,000 miles.
Finally, on prices, yes, engineering, design, and manufacturing costs have increased, just like everything else has increased. Union labor is one of the largest reasons manufacturing costs went up, along with the before mentioned Govt regulations that increased costs substantially. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming union employees for getting more pay, everybody deserves more pay, but Civics 101 tells you when you pay out more, you have to recoup that somewhere, and it is recouped in higher product prices. Same as the engineering costs and manufacturing costs, final product pricing is determined by all the costs involved in producing the product plus the profit desired on said product, but you know all that. All that plus inflation leads us to now:
Money just don't buy what it used to!
