1981 Lancia Spider

[cmcpuma]

I'm thinking on selling my Volvo and use my 1981 Lancia Spider as my daily driver.

The car has been a project and would like to know if this is recommended or not. Please send me your thoughts.

[VXSpider]

I am currently working on mine to be a partial daily driver as I will have my Subaru as my other partial daily driver too so I put less miles on both. But I have heard the Beta Spyder is a realy fun car to drive.

[SubGothius]

If your car is already a sound driver now to begin with, and you have a backup plan for transportation "just in case", it should be manageable. My '79 LBZ has been my daily driver for... 5 years now? 3 of those years involved a daily 20-minute commute across town. I haven't exactly babied it, either, just routine maintenance like oil/filter, belt and tire changes.

Just bear in mind it is a (nearly for yours) 30-year-old car, so there will be occasional downtime due to wearing out a part here or there that needs replacing, and parts are probably still easier to come by than, say, a Honda of similar vintage!

There was nothing I couldn't have fixed over a weekend if it wasn't for my being a stubborn DIY'er on a shoestring budget (and sometimes no budget at all) learning how to repair things myself as I went along, so I tended to take on the challenge of going cheap'n'resourceful (but always Done Right) rather than quick to throw my wallet at immediate parts and repairs. No fancy garage laden with tools, heck, no garage at all, just out in the parking lot or curbside with a bag o' wrenches and a socket set mostly. You can choose the cheap way or the quick way for most things, just not both at the same time, and you'll wind up with about the same result in the end anyway.

[79ottozagato]

That's half the fun of owning something like you have. Sure, things are going to break, malfunction, bite the dust. But instead of getting frustrated I try to learn from it. I'm more interested in what causes something to not work and how to repair it. It's a sense of accomplishment when something you've never attempted before actually works out. If it's already broken, what do you have to lose. You might surprise yourself.

[SubGothius]

After all these years and DIY repairs, now as I drive my car around town I can visualize in my head exactly what every part in my car is doing and how it's doing it. That's a lot more than I ever had before, even when I first got the car, when I was really only aware of how stuff worked on general principle.

I've also gained a real respect for the Lancia engineers involved in the car's development at every turn, having understood and serviced their handiwork myself. E.g., the rear suspension design is brilliant in its simple yet effective elegance, as is the jointed-driveshaft solution to eliminate torque steer, and the shift linkage is so fiendishly brain-bending yet effective that one wonders at the talented man in Lancia Engineering who must have devised it.

That reminds me of another thing I like about my Beta: most of the bits unique to the car were engineered by olde-skoole Lancia engineers still on staff since before their salvation by FIAT, from the era when Lancia was a true peer to Mercedes, so most of those parts either don't tend to need replacing, or you can get a perfectly good one off a wrecked parts car. Most of the other commodity bits that typically need replacing anyway tend to be in common with FIATs, or fairly generic commodity parts (e.g., various Bosch units), or otherwise readily available from FIAT parts vendors.