Originally Posted by
sjanzeir
The points are not on the distributor cap. The points are underneath the distributor cap. A burned out set of points can leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere, but it takes less than five minutes and costs 12 bucks to fit a spare, and you're on your way again. Which is more than I can say for your average modern-day CAN-bus conveyance. In this day and age of 20somethings who take a course or two on OBD2 and run around with cheap laptops shamelessly calling themselves "mechanics," these are dying skills. There was a time when all the maintenance kit you needed to drive coast to coast consisted of a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a spare set of ignition points, condenser, and radiator cap.
Breaker points were pretty much obsolete by the late 1970's. Besides nostalgia, there is no reason to own a car of that era. I'll admit I like to bash unnecessary technology like touch screens. But in the grand scheme of things, cars are way more reliable now than anything built pre-1990.