The toxic tyrannical culture that killed Volkswagen

I didn't watch the video, but I do think that VW went down the tubes by lowering their reliability while increase the price of their cars.

It used to be that if you wanted a good quality car that didn't break the bank you bought a VW. Now you buy a Toyota or Honda, although the general economy means that some of us can no longer afford even the cheapest of the Toyotas or Hondas. It's weird how economics work.

 

Yep it's sad watching VW going downhill but it's not like they aren't responsible for it. I mean, who decided to replace as much as possible inside the engine compartment with plastics? Good grief! My son-in-law has a 2019 VW Jetta GLI with a 2.0l Turbo and I've helped him use my lift to do maintenance on it. Plastic oil pan and an insane rubberish drain plug that requires a special tool to unscrew it. (Or just grab an extra-large flathead screwdriver.) The thing takes only premium fuel which can really hurt when gas is $4.50 for unleaded and $5.30 for premium. It, also, takes a "special" motor oil and the VW dealer doesn't even sell it because it only buys in bulk and they told me VW Germany will only ship them like a minimum of 50 cases and they don't have any place to store it. (So my SIL uses Liquid Molly which is $50 for 5-qts...and, of course, the Jetta takes 6-quarts!)
He said all VW owners know they aren't long-lasting vehicles....about 5-years and 100,000 miles you'd better start looking to trade it in. It is a fast car, though....got her up to 102 on the expressway up to Denver with plenty of power left from that turbo.
But Toyota's in trouble with, yet, another 3rd recall on the V-6 engine....come on, Toyota, get your friggin act together!! NOBODY wanted Toyota to replace their V-6 and V-8's with turbo engines....will go down in history as another boneheaded mistake by Corporate beauracrats...
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haven' considered a vdumb since our 70's rust bucket rabbit

 

Computer simulated engineering. These parts are simulated to try to get some 200,000 miles or so out of them at the lowest price point possible. But computer simulations aren't always an accurate representation of reality. Some companies, like Toyota, put even more testing into their research and development making them tend to be more reliable.

But you've considered Toyuck-a, and now G-Muck.

 

yes, had pretty good luck with Toyuca-a over the last 20+ years, gen 3 excepted.

back to G-Muck because of hearing good things, and low price.

I will even consider vdumb again if they can entice me, but id4 won't do it.

 

Yep, my wife, already has her retirement car...her 24 Corolla AWD Hybrid....great little car! I'm, still, waiting to replace my 14 Tundra V-8 with a truck that can pull our camper....will need a good one when I'm retired and we visit places on our bucket list. The last thing I want to worry about is the V-6 in the Tundra blowing up on us so I've been looking at all the other makers of trucks and, to be honest, not very impressed. A similar Ford F-250 will run me over $70K but those engines AND transmissions aren't the best things.....very sad state of affairs for truck owners right now.

 

Gee.....I wish MY company was "going down the tubes" like Das Volkswagens are.

Not a particular fan of the company (nor the one in Aichi, for that matter) but facts do not care about how people 'feel.'

 

VW (and Volkswagen Gruppe -- formerly Volkswagen Audi Gruppe, VAG ) have been the poster child of a particularly German way of building cars since about the late '80s (generally not luxury cars, tho now they're not exempt either)...

VWs used to be pretty damned unkillable, even if you needed listen to savvy owners for how. I still see diesel Rabbits with beds toodling around here on Maui, tho rust has claimed most of them. Couple of 1st gen GTIs, too. And of course, Beetles will never go away completely -- not when you can overhaul or build up the engine on your workbench, and drop it into your car yourself w\ no helper

But that hasn't been VW since the '90s. They know they can't invest in the kind of testing needed to produce long-lived cars anymore, for 3 reasons: 1) takes too long for models to come to market, losing market share; 2) longer R&D means more time spending money and less time earning revenue selling under-developed so-so-reliable units; 3) emissions will demand new designs in 5 model yrs on the market anyway, why make them last 10+ yrs. So why not just build higher-performance cars built so-so, and let the customer bear the cost of component failure, like all luxury cars are developed?

Take the Golf GTI, a model with a cult following globally, for good reason. Good ol' Gruppefuhrer Ferdinand Piëch deemed in new millennium, VW would be a luxury brand (Phaeton), Audi would be in Formula 1, and all VWs would become technological marvels -- the then-new 4th-gen GTI would indeed be this, with the first Golf Rs also debuting in this gen. Haldex AWD, VR6 engines, keeping up with LT-powered C4 Corvettes around tight technical tracks, that sort of hyperbole. But they fell apart inside, almost as soon as you drove them home (knew a friend with a non-GTI 4th-gen -- that thing was a pile of dealer warranty repair receipts) -- which in turn drove forums to find solutions to keep their pride and joys present at the dozens of VW meets arounds the country for this gen in particular... thus their following. I want to drive something that performs like this, so need my boys' help to make that happen.

But do you find OEM-stock / lightly-modded 4th-gens still driving around ten yrs later? Faaack no. Their 'devotees' have long since bought 5th-, 6th-, or 7th-gen GTIs, and left all the problems past 80K, to someone who wants them -- those who have no idea what kind of commitment they've bought under that thin Plexus craigslist pseudo-shine...

Plus, the Germans seem less afraid of just going full-cynical on components, esp if they can be made of thermoplastic. I would never buy an ICE-powered vehicle, with a plastic f***ing oil pan. Was hard enough trusting plastic valve covers, but they seem to have proven their worth, at least in the 8-yr-lifespan chiseled into bonds tying their engineers' hands (also don't hold hot oil in them, just drips off). Toyota thank the gods have resisted this well-you're-just-gonna-lease-it-anyway builder's brief, and have a steel pan with a metal drain plug, just as has worked for 100 yrs. 'Well Herr Customer, you're not supposed to take your Golf off-road, that's why you hit a root and cracked your plastic oil pan bitte, warranty denied'. Have you lived in any big US city lately, VW execs? Potholes from our crumbling infrastructure are cracking them just as much as a spruce root. What are you saving with a 2-cm-thick thermoplastic pan, vs, a steel one, a pound? Plus, a steel one loves 270F oil in it, not so much the same plastic as in your stepladder*

There's a perception that 'the candle that burns twice as bright' is worth the clout, despite the 'burns half as long' part. This attracts the sort of crowd that buys 15-yo Phaetons, stances them, then drives them around with rusted exhausts, one working headlamp and non-functional interior switches -- I have a badge. Ignoring of course, what they really have -- a shitestack designed to be bolted (or glued) together by assembly robots and no one else, made to last for the first owner exclusively -- which these people are not.

Toyota I like, because worldwide, those suits still give two shites about how their cars perform long-term -- meaning after 10 yrs. But this current gen of more complex models (my 5G included) seem to've partially abandoned this idea you can find a 5G Prius LE still pulse-gliding along, in 2040. Cam phasers that constantly run as long as the ICE is ON? Doesn't point to a car that will flip its odometer with oil changes and owner maint. Turbos were the first sign they've lost their way, just like the company did 20 yrs ago, chasing volume

Buyer beware -- even for Toyota hybrids. Hope mine lasts as long as I expect it to, but if it doesn't, not like the company didn't warn me

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* nor wet rubber cam belts and oil pump drive belts, Honda (1.5L turbo L15B7) and Ford (1.0L, 1.6L, 2.7L EcoBurst motors) assaulted loyal customers with. They've -- surprise -- not lasted their warranty periods w/o massive engine damage. What were you thinking...? Exactly -- can't, when you're blinded by greed, and don't give two shites about plausible-deniability-bilking you dry

 

German engineering slogan KICS = Keep It Complicated Stupid! owned a late 70's rabbit and learned my lesson quickly

 

I don't know what was wrong with your 1st gen Rabbit, but I had a second gen, and it was dead simple and seemed immortal. It still used the same transmission as the 1st gen. I could swap out CV axles in less than 15 minutes. There were a lot of things I found that were borrowed from the Beetle, or at least seemed to be.

The original Beetle and second gen Golf/Rabbit were cars I knew inside and out, along with my 1993 Mazda 323 Now, comparing the Toyota Avalon, it's been a good car. I really shouldn't complain about it. On the other hand, it better be, as it cost me over 10 times the price of my Golf, Beelte or Mazda 323. So far, I've driven the Avalon about as long as I did the Mazda 323 and Golf, about 7 years or so. But this time I think I'll just keep driving the Avalon. I feel I should have done the same with the Mazda 323, the Golf and the Beetle. I'm still kicking myself in the rear end for having gotten rid of them.

 

no offense intended

 

A sad reality about the otherwise really-neat Godzilla gas ICE (7.3L OHV V8), is their engineers saw fit to interference-fit the cam drive gear to the crank. So if you use it for purposes it was supoosedly designed for (towing, hauling)... the gear walks on the crank, and causes first limp-home then no-starts. What does machining keyways in crank and gear, and a woodruff key cost, $15 per unit? Nope -- they did it anyway, thinking it wouldn't be a problem unless it were used outside intended service limit -- which is theirs to determine with vague wording in the manual,, if any.

The fix for this in off-road speed shops, is to TIG the gear to the crank, then grind that off when needed. But FFS Ford -- people have wanted that big petrol V8 decades now, after the non-replacement of the good old (but old + dayum-thirsty) 7.5L EFI 460 with the 6.8L Triton V10... which having driven both up and down a 10K-ft mountain for years, can confidently say the V10 has zero mpg savings for that duty, but needs nearly a thousand more revs to do even close to the same things (1500-lb trailer and 1-ton+ of customers, 15-passenger E-250). A good old OHV V8 but with multiple efficiency improvements, was just the ticket. With a key & keyway for the cam gear, pls

Transmissions: is Ford still using that 10-spd(?) they joint-developed with GM? Last I checked (maybe 2021) it wasn't well-liked. Well what the hell were you thinking, domestics, reducing the width of the clutches to stuff in more ratios, then shifting with more often because they're constantly hunting for the most-irritating gear to be in, driver stomping out of it anyway?

There's a reason semis use manual transmissions, and that's related to why these over-6-ratio a/ts tend to fail, no matter which supplier makes them.

 

Most new semis now have either automatic or semi-auto gearboxes - even though they are nearly exclusively RWD and they have between 10 and 18 cogs plus sometimes as many as 4 for reverse.
It makes all kinds of sense if you consider the cost of clutch replacements.

Believe it or not, It's still possible to buy a three pedal car in the US, although for most Gen-Z drivers rowing through your own gears is about as attractive as wearing a red hat with you-know-who stitched on the front in gold letters.
This may make more and more sense considering all of the problems that the OEMs are having keeping those eight and ten speed gear boxes working over 100,000 miles.
All of THIS despite the fact that replacing clutch pads in a car would probably not be that much less expensive than rebuilding a transmission.

Thanks to the climate industrial complex my '23 GMC has a 8-gear transmission that's probably about as reliable as a CNN or FNS breaking news story - but I'm hoping that it stays together long enough for me to age out of wanting to tow or haul things so that I can replace it with one of these goofy uni-body FWD things that are cosplaying as a real truck.

As for the manuals?
Perhaps..... someday.
A guy can still daydream......

Speaking of which.....
The astute researcher will discover that and ONLY ONE new three-pedal pickup remains available for sale in the US market.
(Hint: It's NOT actually MADE in the USA )

 

I've driven those new automatic 18-speeds. They still have a clutch that can wear out. I guess it might not wear out as quickly as with an imperfect driver. On the other hand, they do seem to shift all over the place when it isn't necessary and require driver input to stay in an appropiate gear.

I am a bit confused of how a clutch replacement could cost almost the same as rebuilding a transmission. I've replaced clutches before, and it was only a couple hundred dollars. But I've never spent less than $1,000 to rebuild a transmission.

A friend of mine bought a used Ford Escape with less than 100,000 miles on it and the transmission blew up 3 months after he purchased it. And he was quoted between $6,000 to $9,000 to fix it. He ended up paying a bit over $6,000. That sounds a whole lot more expensive than what any normal OEM clutch could cost in a similar sized car.

 

What new cars today are available with three pedals?

According to everyone's favorite source:
Replacing the clutch on a 2025 Ford Mustang generally costs between $1,400 and $3,200 in total for parts and labor. The exact price depends heavily on whether you use factory (OEM) components or upgraded aftermarket performance kits

(Honda is similarly priced......so is Toyota.)

 

I'm not sure what has changed in the cost with the newer ones.

In all the manuals I've owned, access to the clutch merely required taking the tranny off and setting it aside. Like, undoing maybe 8 bolts around the bellhousing, slipping a driveshaft out the back (for RWD), unhooking a clutch linkage and shifter linkage.

I've owned an FWD manual but never did a clutch on it. The FWDness would have made that more work (two driveshafts, transaxle maybe above a subframe that has to come out, and so on).

But still, just getting the tranny out of the way is enough. Any rebuilding inside one has always been a much bigger can of worms in my experience.