Must be a slow news week to go on about this, but that’s why I bought a Volkswagen 10 years ago (I also didn’t go to GenCon, happening now in India-No-Place). When I was a prisoner of Austin’s mediocre mass transit system and visiting Houston every other weekend in 1996, I noticed all the older VWs still running up and down the main avenues. I made a mental note to get one if the day ever happened when I could buy a car, little did I know it would be sooner than I anticipated nor planned.
At 100,000+, it’s holding up adequately. The oil change guy said it’s leaking transmission fluid so that’s something else I’ll need my mechanic Toby to check into while I’m having the airbags’ circuitry repaired. If it weren’t for Toby, I wouldn’t be wavering on my decision to make the next car a VW. Due to all the ineffecient, large, fuel-sucking designs of the last several years—Taureg, Phaeton and the new, unimpressive Rabbit (23/30 mpg, what crap!)—I have a feeling that GM has planted their inept people’s brains into VW’s decision makers. The future is better mileage through cleaner diesel, hybridization and/or improved efficiency, not ethanol (poor energy output versus gasoline) or hydrogen (no one has the technology to crack water, it still comes from cracking petrochemicals). I have debated with the wife over a used diesel VW Beetle that we could experiment on with biodiesel, which does produce more energy than what’s put into it by a factor of 3.2. With all the fast food we Americans eat, there’s a pre-built infrastructure courtesy of MacDo, Wendy’s, Jacques dans la Boite, Burger King, etc!