Consumer Reports rates minivans

Yeah, and Paul T. managed to make 2.6s run well and last. And Hemi A. has some ungodly number of hundreds of thousands of miles on the 3.0 in his minivan. *shrug*

As I was saying...

As you were saying...

Exactly, and I've had exactly two issues with engine internals in over

Really, the only major issues with VW drivetrains that I'm aware of that can be attributed to VW (I'm not counting things like the recent ignition coil fiasco or the window regulator thing, which were supplier issues and would have been a non-issue were their dealer network not populated by combusting rectums) are the fact that the G60 supercharger is essentially a maintenance item - you rebuild it every 80K miles - and the close-ratio 020 transaxles were missing a c-clip that caused them to grenade at about 120K miles or thereabouts (the regular wide-ratio trannys are apparently OK, however.)

Of course, we can agree to blame VW for their s***ty heater cores, I'm totally with you on that one. There's no excuse for heater cores that fail every 8-10 years like clockwork on a well maintained car.

nate

Yeah, sounds like the Renault Alliance, Defiance, Appliance, etc. Oh wait... you said every 8 to 10 years. I thought you said every 8 to 10 months.

Toyota MDT in MO

I'll concede the point that the *basic* engine and _manual_ transmission are fine. The stuff that gets bolted on and draped around the basic engine, OTOH...and the automatic transmissions...

I remember getting the recall card for the heater core fittings on our '90 Jetta. Seems they "could" fail and cause a high pressure/high-temperature leak...directly onto the driver's feet.

pressure/high-temperature

The Renault Alliance/Encore recall notice said, paraphrased, that its heater core could rupture and spray hot coolant on the occupants legs, scalding them. I'm sure this did happen to some unlucky people, but everyone else suffered a heater core that weeped coolant just enough so that you could always smell it. Usually a couple months after replacement. Those cars were cool in a lot of ways for the time, but the coolness was more than offset by the godzilla sized s*it designs of virtually every system on the vehicle.

Toyota MDT in MO

Well...yeah, I guess if you cross your eyes and squint and maybe take large quantities of thoughtfully-combined pharmaceuticals, "zero to sixty in forty-five minutes" is cool in a lot of ways ;-)

Yep they left out the engine. But weren't they the ones with pedastal seats in the front so rear passengers had more leg room? That was a decent idea for a small car at the time. And I thought the hood shape was interesting.

pedastal seats

interesting.

Yeah, the seats could move more ways than most modern power seats, including the "astronaut move". And just like every other inovation or standard feature they brought to this compact econo car class, it was with glaring fault. I saw the left side seat tracks rip apart when heavily used (delivery people, etc) causing the driver to flip into the passenger seat on a sharp turn. I'm sure you can agree that's dangerous.

Every theoretically nice feature on these festering, moist, piles of dung was plagued with mass failure rates.

Toyota MDT in MO

About here is where ol' Lloyd would pick up the CR torch.

Did he die or something?

--Geoff

Probably finally realized that he doesn't have much reason to post here since he hasn't owned a Chrysler product in years.

Or got fired and lost his free internet access through Emory :-p

But hey, we've got Glickman as a replacement. And if nothing else at least he's less predictable than Yoid was...

;-)

Talk about being damned with faint praise!

=:-O

-Geoff