Bummer. I think they started with a valid idea ("an old econobox is not the end-all-be-all for everyone") and went waaaaaaaay off the deep end with it ("an old econobox is the worst possible thing for everyone, and let's go out of our way to insult anyone who owns one").
If I couldn't or wouldn't do a lot of my own work on my cars, I wouldn't own a car from the early 90s. It would be "too old" and "too unreliable", because I would have to pay someone else to figure out what was going on with it and to fix and maintain it. Thankfully I can and do work on my cars, so I feel perfectly confident in having a 1990 car to drive daily.
While I feel there are some good points in the article, primarily about what people generally expect from cars these days versus what was acceptible 16 years ago, they really did their best to hide them under layers of obnoxious sarcasm...
-soD