I've just reconnected the device after years of non-use (at least 5 years in a box!) and it looks like it survived three or four house moves in two different countries without skipping a beat! Still spinning and syncing with jEmplode like the day I packed it . I can't believe how well engineered this device is, pity I lack the skills to connect it to the car, it's still got its sled and amplifier!! . Probably the remote works as well, but I can't find it.


Edit: Added an image of the unit working

Survived 5 years in a box? Mine's lasted 10 years in a car with really rough suspension. I never take it out.

Well, before the box it was of course mounted in the car . IMHO the real weakness of the Empeg is that people change cars quite often these days and for people who are not very confident with car audio (such as moi) shifting the empeg from car to car tends to be a pain in the arse.

That could be more a weakness in the people, not the player!

I'm still driving the same vehicle I purchased two years before the empeg first became available for purchase.

Cheers

With scrappage schemes and punitive taxation for old vehicles (based on emissions, not engine size or power), keeping an old car is becoming increasingly uneconomical in the UK. There are other reasons for changing cars as well, in my case the car was a total loss in an accident (the empeg wasn't there, thank god) so I had to replace it as a matter of course. The Empeg is still the coolest car player ever but many modern cars don't even come with a DIN slot anymore and having something the size of an ipod you can carry in your pocket instead of a fragile brick like the empeg is much, much more convenient. Pity the software of all those devices is still inferior to the empeg. Practical example: At some stage I used the empeg as a home jukebox, but then I switched to an xbox media centre (same use, but it could do video as well, of course). I was shocked to how un-intuitive playlists were compared to the empeg, amongst other things, but the thing had its advantages (bigger and cheaper parallel ATA hard drives, for one, and video) that outweighed the badness of the software. I suppose it's the same with ipods and even more with iphones, where you can have a playback device that you can use on the bus, in the car, to receive calls and surf the internet for a fraction of the empeg's weight.

Huh ? In what way does the scrappage scheme make keeping an old vehicle less economical ?

And you have the taxation the wrong way round. Tax for older vehicles is decided on engine size, not emissions.

Well, more often than not with scrappage schemes you get more (equivalent) money for your old "banger" than what the car itself is worth. So you basically acquire a, say, 10K asset for 8K, so you're quids in to start with. Considering that automakers usually add their own incentives on top of the government one, and that a 10 year old car is likely to be less efficient and more prone to breakdowns than a brand new one, you're likely to save on upkeep, fuel, tax and insurance (newer cars, for example, are (usually) more difficult to hot-wire than old ones so harder to steal). It depends on the car you trade in and the one you acquire, of course. With 'eco' cars being all the rage at the moment, the savings might be very interesting.
For old cars (2001-) the tax is linked to displacement (my bad) but a new one is still potentially more economical. A Vauxhall Corsa base model from the year 2000 pays 125 a year. A 2010 Corsa base model pays zilch the first year and 30 quid per year afterwards. Over 10 years you save 920 squids in tax if you buy the new Corsa than if you keep the old one. Plus you don't have to MOT for the first three years (at ~50 a pop), fuel consumption will probably be more efficient especially if you buy an 'eco' model and you'll enjoy all the benefits of owning a new motor (warranty, lower insurance, reliability etc.).

My car with the empeg is a 17 year old Volvo 240, so yeah, the empeg has been in the same car it's whole life.

Thankfully, it's not overly onerous to keep a car that old here in California.

Let's see... My empegs are used in the Bristol (22 years old), in the Land Rovers (43, 35 and 32 years old) and in the only "recent" car, the Morgan, only 7 years old...

Who needs new cars? They just have all sort of crap like drive-by wire, ABS, traction control and other weird black boxes that go wrong...

Ah, yes. I remember the Good Old Days. Cars were much simpler then, and you could work on them yourself.

[rant]

Which was a damned good thing, because they needed a lot of work. Remember tuneups every 3,000 miles -- new points, plugs, condenser, and every other tuneup a new set of plug wires? Remember carburetors with leaking needle valves and sinking floats? And automatic chokes (chokes!) that were so problematic that your auto parts store had a whole shelf full of products to "repair" sticky choke pulloffs? Remember when 12 month, 12,000 miles was the industry standard warranty and lots of people traded in their car every year because they needed that warranty coverage? Remember when most people got rid of their car after 40,000 miles because by that time it was well and truly worn out?

Now look at us. Here we are stuck with pieces of junk that will easily run 50,000 miles without ever having a wrench touch them. Replace the timing belt at 85,000 miles, spark plugs at 100,000. 250,000 miles is not uncommon. If we step on the brakes on an icy road, the car slows down and stops in a straight line. We walk away unscathed from accidents that would have certainly killed us in the 1960's. We go twice as far, three times as far on a gallon of gasoline as we used to go, in a car with better acceleration, better braking, better top speed, and hugely better cornering and handling.

And, you know what? These cars are less expensive today than comparable cars of the Good Old Days. Not in terms of the number of dollars or pounds or deutschmarks, but in terms of how many hours you have to work to buy a new car. It's about the same or less today as it was back then.

Of course it isn't all gravy. My little Honda Fit has given me trouble. Let's see... 25,000 miles, had to change the oil twice, and a few weeks ago the Check Engine light came on, had to take it to the Honda dealer where they found a broken wire (probably VSS sensor) that they spliced, and... uh... that's it, the entire service history of my car after a year and a half. Oh, wait, I had to refill the windshield washer bottle.

Do I want to go back to the Good Old Days when cars were simple and reliable? WHEN PIGS FLY, that's when!

[/rant]

Sorry, julf. You hit one of my hot buttons with that one.

tanstaafl.

Amen, brother!

My '92 Volvo just had it's first repair, a harmonic balancer, at 200K miles.

But then, Volvos have always been reliable and long lived....

My old Fords would get maybe 40K miles before they became maintenance nightmares. Chevys would go half that... Both would be dead by 100K, when a Volvo of that era was good to 250K easy.

Now everything lasts forever.

I am not disagreeing, Tanstaafl.

Modern cars have become (mostly) reliable, cheap and easy to drive,
with comfort and performance that would have raised a lot of eyebrows
30 years ago. But at the same time they have become consumables. And
that is no problem as long as you view them as just a means of transport.

But then some of us run Linux on our computers instead of buying a new Mac...

Julf

Mine's spent the last 6 years in two of these:



Which pretty much has no suspension at all!

The hard disks are pretty shot now, been getting a lot of seek errors over the past 6 months, so time for either a new one or a move to CF cards. Otherwise though the Empeg just works, day in, day out.

Wow.. right-hand drive, too!

The VX220 is originally a Holden, Australian GM subsidiary, so it is natively RHD as the Aussies drive on the left like us. The only native RHD country which was not a British colony at some stage is, strangely enough, Japan.

I thought the VX220 was a Lotus with a Vauxhall badge on?

Uh, I got confused with the Monaro VXR, which is a Holden. The VX200 is a close relative of the Lotus Elise, as you correctly stated.

Early on Japan licensed car designs from England. I wonder if that's why...

Samoa just changed over, as they wanted to buy cheap cars from Australia instead of cheap cars from the US.

http://jalopnik.com/5551040/why-old-cars-suck

This article echoes your points, Doug.

It's brilliant, and well-researched.

tanstaafl.