Re: American vs German Quality

Why then are you always the first to jump in with a reply any time CR is mentioned?

Matt

I'm done with this thread, but I'll leave it at this. In reagard to CR surveys, there is no reason to believe that Ford owners would under-report problems relative to GM owners, and there is no reason to believe that GM owners would over-report problems relative to Ford owners. Based on CR surveys, the Ford 4.6/5.4 engines are probably more reliable than GM V8's. I've had both, and have had no problems with either, but continue to believe that the Ford engines are good engines. Otherwise, 90% or so of the U.S. taxi companies would not continue to use them. Taxi companies are in business to make money, and if their cars were complete "pieces of shit" which frequently had major enginge problems, they would have a hard time making money and would buy different cars from the Crown Vics that most of them now use.

Once a Daniel, always a Daniel............................!

That's a fact. It was a rhetorical question. :-)

Matt

They don't. MANY police fleets have tried them, and they do not hold together. They're fine for park police and parking patrol, and some fleets use them that way. But for cruisers, they just don't hack it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why they don't hold up. My own front-drive vehicle has surpised the he// out of me by accumulating

215,000 miles (93 Eagle Vision TSi 3.5). But its driven pretty mildly and cared for very well compared to a cop car..

and front drive

True, and a lot of the local taxis are minivans as well as Tauruses, Intrepids, and Monte Carlos. FWD seems to endure better in taxi service than in police service.

there is obviously a

That's true, they are NOT "that terrible." Which is my point- it took over 10 years to get them to be "not that terrible," and they're still not quite where the Windsor engines were when they went out of production. The Modular engine was designed as a light-duty, small, lightweight V8 for FWD applications. It got pushed into heavy-duty truck and RWD vehicle service as a cost-cutting measure (by reducing the different number of engine families that had to be produced).

Air cooled Vee Dubs were a lot more durable than that. Especially the

1200's. They would really last, and were very reliable.

They needed lots of valve adjustments, and relatively frequent oil changes since they had no filter, but if the received the maintenance, they would hold up. I put almost 100K miles on a '65, the last 1200 sold in the U.S., and everything except the clutch and throwout bearing was original. They definitely required lots of routine maintenance, though, compared to today's cars. If you didn't adjust the valves every 10K miles or so, you could very easily end up with a burned valve because they would get too "tight."

Not my experience. My valves always got loose, and not that often.

Mine only got tighter than they were set a time or two, but it did happen. Some points of wear make them get tight, and others make them get loose. I probably checked them more often than necessary, but at the time I had more spare time than money.

I used to work with an avid air-cooled VW aficianado. He insisted that overheating an air-head was the quickest way to cause the valves to "tighten" because the valve stems would actually stretch under the spring tension, allowing the lash clearance to close up and thus leading to a valve leak that would burn a valve.

And yes, he was ALWAYS pulling the engines out and doing maintenance. He had over 200k miles on one of them, but probably no more than 30-40 k without some form of fairly major dis-assembly.

O.K. I'm curious, what major work was required at 30-40k. I'm assuming we're talking about stock engines and not modified racing one's right?

Stock engines, and the Bug was a '63 IIRC. The Bus was more like a '68. I don't remember exactly what all he did to them routinely, he was probably more of a maintenance fanatic than he really had to be. He did claim that pulling the engine was far easier than doing ANY work on it in the chassis. He finally replaced the Bus with a Vanagon in the late '80s, and not long after that he got rid of all his VWs. The Vanagon put him off them for good, I'm afraid.