Are we been conned

Years ago all my cars were rear wheel drive,Chevette's,Anglia's,Escort's etc.The gearbox and diffs did'nt have drain plugs only fillers which you put your finger in and if you could feel oil all was ok.You could not change the oils and they ran for thousands upon thousands miles with no bother.Now the new oils have "magic"additives and they have to be changed every couple of thousand miles.Are we conned into this or is modern engineering inferior to that of years ago

I thought it was the other way round :huh:

In The Olden Days everything had a drain plug, and you were forever changing the lubricants, even the torque converter had a drain plug if you had an auto.

Admittedly, the oils had better additives than nowadays (thank the PC tree-huggers for that, any decent additive will pretty much guarantee cancer, or raise the air temperature by 50 degrees)

Nobody ever bothered with back axle oil then, they were used to rumbling whining differentials

The reason why the Jimny has such short service intervals is because driving it through muddy water or sand wrecks it. If you drive a pavement princess then you could forget about half the oil changes.

I cant recall having any diff that didnt have a drain plug, or a removable rear plate at least.
I used to change my diff oil on my LSDs constantly to prevent early death from spirited driving.

I do agree that service intervals could be furthur apart, although 15,000 ks on my Suzuki is pretty fair.