There Is a Difference Between a Reliable Car and a Durable Car
Everyone says they want a durable car. They really want a reliable one.




I'd say we were a secret society, but that implies that we were capable of keeping secrets, which we were not. Nor were we a select group; I don't recall that any selection ever occurred. Instead, let's call us this: a collection of close-to-minimum-wage teenaged losers who worked at car dealerships during the day and gathered in the long evenings of the early Nineties to eat cheap meals, swap stories, and engage in the occasional impromptu parking-lot race.

Joe was the hardest-working of us; he had risen to assistant manager at his parts department in about the same time it had taken me to quit or be fired by five different dealerships and/or captive-finance organizations. He was disciplined and frugal with his money, but nonetheless, he drove a brand-new Toyota XtraCab with Fittipaldi five-spoke wheels and two Rockford Fosgate amplifiers mounted where the rear passenger seats were supposed to go.

Lately, Joe's day job had become a hell on earth. A few years before, his dealership had started selling a new six-cylinder car, an aerodynamic new design to replace the tired old soldier that used to serve as the company's entry-level sedan. The oldest of those cars were now celebrating their fifth birthdays. They were long out of warranty, but they ate parts like crazy. Joe couldn't keep stock. Everything from the air-conditioning units to the suspension components to the stereos. "These things are junk," Joe fumed. "They come in on flatbeds five times a day. You'd have to be an idiot to buy one."

Can you guess what the car was? Would it help if I told you that the car had a single windshield wiper? "Dumbest (expletive deleted) thing I've ever seen," Joe would snarl. "They sit there in the service bay and the whole car rocks back and forth when you turn it on, and water gets tossed onto the mechanics' toolboxes." One more clue: These were straight-six cars, occasionally available with a manual transmission. "No way they'll last half as long as the old ones," was Joe's constant refrain.

If you're old enough to remember the Eighties, you've probably guessed that the bane of Joe's existence, that notoriously junky six-cylinder flatbed-rider of a sedan, was in fact the almighty Mercedes-Benz W124 300E. How can that be? Good W124s fetch serious money today, up to 30 years after they were built. The W124 entered the automotive Pantheon in earnest when it became the base for the Zuffenhausen-assembled 500E, but they were all brilliant automobiles, and they have become justifiably famous for durability.

Note that I did not say "justifiably famous for reliability." The W124 is not necessarily a reliable car. Not in the way that a brand-new Camry would be a reliable car. In fact, as someone who has owned multiple vehicles from the classic era of Mercedes-Benz, including a 560SL and a 190E 2.3-16, I can state with authority that none of those old Benzes are reliable as such. They are chock-full of complex and delicate feats of engineering that often go awry. The W126 560SEL is arguably the greatest luxury sedan in automotive history and there are plenty of them on the roads with a half-million miles or more, but I defy you to find one where all of the power features work.

As fate would have it, I was visiting Joe for lunch one day when a very well-known 380SEC coupe arrived for service. This car, which had been covered in the print magazines of the day, had racked up over 800,000 miles in under 10 years. The owner used it for cross-country travel, and whenever it required service, he just stopped at the nearest Benz dealer and had it performed immediately. If the dealership found any other problems, he paid for them to be repaired promptly, without much regard for cost.

The minute the SEC was loaded onto one of the two-post lifts, we popped the hood and crawled all over it. Sure enough, it was an 870,000-mile S-class coupe. The engine was original. But everywhere you looked under the hood, there were shiny new components with recent stickers on them. We estimated that the big Benz had seen over 250 oil changes. "A Toyota truck," Joe declared with authority, "would do this mileage with nothing but basic service."

"Yeah," I retorted, "until the frame rusted into powder at the four-year mark." Joe and I had spent the previous summer doing rust repair on an '83 Toyota 4x4. It was just seven years old, but it needed to have the bed pulled, acid-dipped, and repainted. The frame, too, had needed rust repair.

Those were the cars we considered "reliable" at the time, in an era where brand-new cars often failed to start in cold conditions and a 100,000 reading on an odometer was un-ironically called "the miracle mile." In point of fact, what they were was durable. The same way a VW Beetle was durable. The basic parts—engine, transmission, suspension—lasted a long time. It was possible to repair or refurbish everything back to running condition. But it was well understood that you needed to do a complete engine rebuild at or before that miracle-mile mark. Imagine if a manufacturer sold a new car today that needed a complete engine-out rebuild at 80,000 miles. Consumer Reports would instigate a riot. There would be blood in the streets.

Yet the alert reader will notice the presence of plenty of W126 Benzes and VW Beetles on the road long after most of the cars built 10 or even 20 years after them have been recycled into Chinese top-loading dishwashers. That stubborn durability that the old cars showed sometimes, that deliberate or inadvertent over-engineering and over-specification, is a thing of the past. The 1995 Camry was probably the best car in the world when it was new, and I never knew anybody to have serious trouble with them. But one by one they've simply disappeared. They were engineered very thoroughly to meet certain durability targets. Having met them, they fade away into the junkyard like forgotten soldiers.

Durability and reliability are not the same thing. The first-gen Land Rover Discovery was not reliable. I had two brand-new ones. I know. But they are durable. The basic bones will last a long time. You just have to keep working on the thing, and it will keep going through abysmal conditions . . . with every idiot light on the dashboard shining bright. My mother had a 2000 Hyundai Elantra that was perfectly reliable. It gave her 150,000 miles without so much as a bad alternator. Then one day we looked up and it was a rusted-out hulk with an insatiable appetite for parts that were no longer in dealer inventory. We couldn't have kept it going at any reasonable cost.

I have come to believe that engineering reliability into a car takes all sorts of admirable human qualities: intelligence, persistence, self-awareness, willingness to follow best practices and enlarge upon them. Building a durable car? That just takes stubbornness. You just throw more and better materials at the thing, and you refuse to worry too much about conforming to the fashion of the era. Just 10 minutes riding around with me in my 560SL would have made it plain to you why it was durable. Everything on it weighed a ton and felt like it had been beaten out of a pig iron by a medieval blacksmith.

By contrast, my Accord features intelligent materials choices and components that bear all the hallmarks of a zillion CAD iterations. I would be highly surprised if anything went wrong with it in the foreseeable future. But I doubt the tricky single-cam 24-valve V-6 will last as long as the simple, understressed V-8 in the 560SL.

EVERYBODY SAYS THEY WANT A DURABLE CAR, BUT WHAT THEY REALLY WANT IS A RELIABLE CAR
Everybody says they want a durable car, but what they really want is a reliable car. Ten trouble-free years, 15 if it can be managed, and then consign the thing to a junkyard. We all understand that model very well now, because consumer electronics work that way. You don't repair an iPhone. You expect it to work perfectly until the day you throw it away and forget about it. An iPhone that required weekly maintenance would be unacceptable.

That's the challenge that faces all of the luxury-car manufacturers nowadays. Their cars have to be just as reliable as a Honda, but some of the customers will complain violently if the product can't match an old R107-generation SL for durability. Even if they don't keep the car that long. The worst part is that they don't just to have to match that old SL; they have to match the perception of that old SL as a perfect and trouble-free perpetual-motion machine.

A few months ago I stopped by and visited Joe at the dealership. He'd been the best of us, making it to parts manager when I was still working construction-site cleanup, but having reached that position he'd simply stayed there for the rest of his life. "How are those new Benzes?" I inquired, watching a shiny new SL AMG get a final detailing in the hospital-clean service bay.

"Oh, they're pretty good," he said. "I mean, you have some problems. But overall they're okay. Nothing like the old ones, though. Remember those W124s? They lasted forever!"