John Davis and Pat Goss Discuss 25 Years
of Automotive Evolution

John Davis: Pat, you know, here on your Goss' Garage set, do you realize in 25 years we've gone through three different Goss' Garage sets, and you've appeared in over 650 segments. Now, that's a lot of car care!

Pat Goss: It sure is. And to think about it, that it almost didn't happen. In the pilot show, Craig Singhaus was the mechanic and it was called MotorShop. Now, if things had worked out differently maybe I would have been doing the High Road segment and driving the Weinermobile instead of Craig.

John Davis: Oh, I think everyone is happy it worked out just the way it did. But, you know, still, things have changed a lot in 25 years.

Pat Goss: Oh, they sure have! What's really amazing is how far technology has progressed. Back in 1981 we didn't have computers in our offices, much less in our cars. Looking back at some of those early shows, it's shocking just how crude cars were in the early '80s, and how much we take for granted today.

Take brakes for instance. ABS was virtually unheard of. We were impressed then when a car had four-wheel discs. A good stopping distance on the test track was some 30 feet longer than today's average. That's about the length of two big SUVs, and was usually accompanied by copious amounts of tire smoke!

While radial tires were by then universally accepted, they were also universally mediocre in performance. Exotic cars like Ferrari and Porsche wore rubber unsuited for today's econoboxes. 13-inch wheels were the norm, while 15's were a big deal. That's a far cry from today's 22-inch monsters.

A luxury car was anything with leather seats and power windows, or better yet, cruise control. A cassette deck was considered state of the art, navigation required a passenger and a map, and dual-zone climate controls, well, that meant you opened both front windows.

The typical car came equipped with a three-speed automatic, or maybe a four-speed manual transmission. Who would have thought that five and six-ratio gearboxes would become the norm, and that anybody would ever need seven gears? The CVT transmission came and went with the Subaru Justy in the early '90s, but is back and now better than ever in mainstream cars from Saturn, Ford, Audi, Nissan, and others. And if you wanted an all-wheel drive car in 1981, you had to shop for an Audi or a Subaru. Now there are at least 20 manufacturers offering the all-wheel drive advantage.

Yes, indeed, John, we take many things for granted these days that were dismissed as science fiction 25 years ago; active suspensions, navigation systems, tune-ups every 100,000 miles. But there's one thing that auto engineers haven't been able to do away with, despite all the computers and sensors and billions of development dollars, and that is simple preventive maintenance. I said it in our very first show, and it still holds true today. The one single thing that is most important, as far as the life expectancy of your automobile's engine, is changing the oil.