Say whatever you want about how the complexity of modern cars is ruining the hobby, and any number of related cliches about things being better in the old days. I will happily prefer tracing wires and checking voltages with a multimeter to tuning a carburetor. That's a personal preference, of course, but there is one modern automotive feature we can all agree causes universal anguish — I'm talking about plastics.

This is not to say that plastics are universally bad. In many ways plastics are a boon to the automotive world. But when plastics get old and aren't designed with long-term service in mind, that boon turns into a cracked, broken, and crumbled bust in the hands of the classic car owner.

For me, plastic turned from an annoying fact of old car life to full eye-twitching rage fuel under innocent circumstances. My dad, climbing into the passenger seat of my 2001 Volkswagen Eurovan, bumped his knee on the speaker grille, dislodging it and knocking out four of the eight tabs that keep it in place. Gluing them back on did not work, obviously, leaving me to order a new one from the U.K. for the dear price of $72, before shipping, with several weeks of backorder delays on top of that. But hey, at least I could order that part. As with many old cars, a good portion of the parts catalog is NLA, leaving owners SOL when a piece of plastic needs to be removed and inevitably breaks.

Keep reading to learn why plastics age and how to slow down the process.