Re: Fiat Engineering is Supreme

Italian engineering looks good, even great, but the quality or detailed design....who knows?

The mechanism of the remote-controlled electrically-opening drive gates in our little block is made in Italy by a company that appears to dominate the UK market for this sort of thing, and works fine.

But for bigger, more complex machines? One evil tongue (not Italian) suggested this problem (great looks, poor engg) exists even in my field of certain pharmaceutical process machines, where one of the Seven Sisters is Italian. And a second, small competitor has some really bad design elements, though when you see their machines at exhibitions they look lovely.

(About the process machines I am only commenting about detailed design features - I have heard nothing negative about reliability. Till recently I was selling Canadian-made machines.)

DAS

To send an e-mail directly replace "spam" with "schmetterling"

Maybe you're saying that Fiat doesn't know how to make gears properly, but there is nothing inherently inferior about driving cams with gears - in fact it is the absolute superior bullet-proof method. Think of the cost savings over the life of a vehicle of not having to replace a timing belt (or chain if it is stupidly used to drive a water pump - which does wear out). And I don't think gears are any more noisy than a timing chain. People always say that the disadvantage of a timing chain is that they are noisy. As the owner of both 2.7L and 3.2L 2nd gen. Concordes I can attest that not only is my 2.7 (uses a timing chain) extremely quiet, it is quieter than the 3.2 (uses a timing belt).