Yeah, like NO oil filter? Of corse, they provided a screen (to ttrap the larger metal bits). They also came with a carbon-monoxide gas delivery system (they must have hired those Siemens gas chamber engineers). That was the ‘heater’-it was an air exchange around the exhaust maniforld-it would provide enough warm air to keep your toes warm, along with CO-so the VW was a “Auschwitz on wheels”. Add to that the gas tank (mounted in front of the driver, you got free cremation (in event of a crash)!
Socks. When I lived in the Czech Republic, all the socks there came from Germany, and they were shit. Truly, truly awful socks.
I must say that the examples of German engineering I have owned have been 95% sheer brilliance.
The problem is that the other 5% has been enough to drive me to drink.
Take my sewing machine, Pfredd. Pfredd is a Pfaff. 95% of the time he is brilliant; he sews beautiful seams on any material I ask him to. But the small lightbulb over the work area has burned out. Pfredd is a slightly older model, and the bulb is in a position that makes it very difficult to change. You can get the bulb out okay, but getting a replacement bulb in again with just your fingers is exceptionally tricky.
This model originally came with a small tool to make changing the bulb easier. Unfortunately, I bought Pfredd used, and the bulb changing doohickey was not in the case when I bought him. And Pfaff does not seem to stock the stoopid thing as a replacement part any more :dubious:
There is no reason why the bulb has to be this way. It just is. There’s the 5%, and just thinking about it has me looking for a nice sweet girly drink to scream into.
I second (third? fourth?) the notion that German products sometimes need babying. I’ve had several nifty household gimcracks by the likes of Grundig, Leifheit and others which functioned admirably until some tiny plastic pin, tab, dingus or doohickey sheared off after being eversoslightly mishandled, after which they were fully or partly inoperable. So yeah, they might want to reconsider this philosophy of failure-is-not-an-option engineering.
Yep. That’s what I came here to say.
You dont need an oil filter if your supposed to change the oil quite frequently, which with the old oils you should do filter or not.
Reminds me of that old joke, how can you tell a when someone is a VW driver?
Their feet are burned and their hands and ears are frost bitten.
Funny you should mention that.
Years ago I bought a Zeis slide projector. Damn that thing was expensive. But man o man did the optics on it shine. My slides never looked so good.
But, do to a fatal flaw in the design, I managed to break it the first week I had it. And trust me, I was babying the hell out that sucker. I re engineered the fatal flaw and all was well from then on.
But still…
I disagree on Mercedes. IMO, they make the greatest cars in the world. When I have some disposable money I want to buy a W123 with the hydro suspension
I agree on the Beetle though. This car is a piece of excrement and since my father owned several I am talking from first hand experience. Noisy, unreliable, underpowered, uncomfortable. And it was good it was so underpowered because that damned swing axle at the rear made handling very dangerous.
Almost every single other car of the era was better than the beetle. I wonder why they kept making those pieces of crap for so many decades and why all those idiots would go and buy it when there were so many better alternatives available.
That’s a big old Teutonic turd if there ever was one…
That’s what I had in mind.
I was going to come in here to say that very thing… Their toilets aren’t worth a Krap.
But no, I can’t really think of too many things that aren’t of very high quality and German made.
If you hear a German cursing an inanimate object loudly, “Verdammtes,
Scheissding!” and perhaps inflicting physical violence upon it. Then you know that it is -
a. Probably not German made.
b. Soon to be replaced with something German made.
c. Or being redesigned to German specifications (It’s part of their engineering process.)
You rang?? Oh, sorry, I missed the ‘hot’ part. Just a German with …you know…the big brusten…never mind.
Their breakfasts are pretty terrible. I’d rather have an American or English breakfast any day.
I’ll ditto the German car conversation.
I used to own a 1998 Golf. GF currently owns a 2003 Beetle. Brother used to own a number of BMWs.
Technically? Impressive pieces of precision engineering. Practically? Everything breaks if you so much as breathe on it wrong-- then it costs you an arm & a leg to repair. And you can’t even fix the simple stuff yourself. Need to replace a headlight bulb on a new Beetle? Need a proprietary tool at the dealership. New battery on a Golf? Not a standard size you can find at Sears, gotta go to the dealer.
It was that little stuff that turned me off to German automotive products for good. They look very pretty and work wonderfully. . . when they work.
Almost every other car of the era also cost three times as much, and the Beetle was produced for so long because it was so cheap. You might as well be annoyed that a reproduction WWII fighter plane wouldn’t last long against an F-15.
Lots of German things suck because they are overengineered. The Panther and Tiger tanks, for example, used extremely complex engines built to tiny tolerances. That’s great at first, but when things start breaking it makes them a pain to fix.
The original Porsche 911 was, to be honest, a bad car. The rear-engined layout made it difficult to drive quickly, and the 1979-on Turbo was downright dangerous. The current model is so good because Porsche has spent 40 years tinkering with the chassis, suspension, engines, body, electrics, ergonomics…
My '78 Scirocco had an interesting design for the water pump. To get the old water pump out, you had to remove some screws…but one screw was behind a motor mount that was machined onto the chassis. That’s right - you had to remove the engine to replace the water pump. It also leaked grease from the rear wiper motor, leaving a nice black stain covering part of the license plate.
And don’t get me started on Audi’s “O2 sensors.”
Hey! I like techno music! Und die frauleinen mit grossische brusten (cue sound of high-school German teacher spinning in grave–and if he isn’t dead, spinning in his future grave)
Kindly post a photograph, and Herr Doktor will decide whether you are hot or not. Which reminds me of another great German invention- handenbunging!
Hey, say what you will about National Socialism, Dude, it’s an ETHOS.
Which reminds me of another thing the Germans are great at- uniforms