Originally Posted By: TomYoung
Originally Posted By: ARCOgraphite
Purists?!
Most chassis don't deserve a manual. Cars are steering and driving pretty poorly these days. safety geometry kills steering feel?
Completely untrue. Handling is better than ever. Chassis are stiffer, tires are wider and grippier and engineering is built into even the lowliest Toyota Yaris (which handles great). You don't know what you are talking about. Or perhaps you miss the awesome handling of your 1978 Granada.
Only someone who doesn't understand the difference between handling and grip could write this.
Tires are wider?
Sure, and any pig of a platform can be made to have plenty of grip with lots of rubber. It won't handle well, though.
Chassis are stiffer?
Not really. Any decent unibody design of the past four decades is plenty stiff, except for those that use subframes, sometimes correctly called snub frames.
The Yaris "handles great"?
You must have driven a different breed of Yaris from the one I sampled. Is there a Lotus Yaris that I somehow missed?
The reality is that a good handling car is one that you can take very close to its limits on a back road with no worries. If you inadvertently push too hard, it's easily and intuitively recoverable.
Many cars that were considered to have good handling then and now have surprisingly little grip as measured on a skidpad. As measured by a driver on the road, they're awesome.
I could suggest a few decades old designs that were very entertaining and safe to drive, from the first generation of the Z-car through early generations of Civics, the W115 or W123 as well as any BMW through the late nineties.
Today's overweight designs rely more upon various nannies for safe handling than upon anything resembling good design or engineering.
Today's drivers seem too inept and distracted to manage three pedals and a shifter you actually have to use.
A pity. Driving should be fun, as much of it as most of us have to do.
