Nonsense Thread

[varg]

Enthusiasts are such a small sliver of the buying public and a majority of car buyers do next to no research before buying new cars, I don't think there's any possible avenue we could take that would affect positive changes like making people want to get rid of electronic parking brakes, ridiculous electromechanical thermostats, bizarre engineering decisions like putting TTY hardware on wheel spindles. And then there's the ones that are present everywhere like actuators of all sorts having weak plastic gears and functional controls and gauges being replaced with touchscreens. The manufacturers love that last one, the screens. It's so incredibly cost advantageous to replace the cluster and controls with a screen and the general public (dumb) eats it up because it's "modern". Mr general public, when you see that gauge cluster and set of controls get replaced by a screen in your new luxury car, that wasn't a luxurious modern feature, that set of screens and mounts cost the manufacturer a fraction of what making a nice looking and reliable gauge cluster and set of physical controls would have cost them. They're laughing their way to the bank with that one.

[Chilezen]

Well can't we just.. only spend money on the good brands? The ones that still work long term?

[roguetoaster]

If only enthusiasts could rapidly pass on information to more general consumers about why these systems are bad and will cost them (and us in other ways) long term so that they wouldn't buy that product from day one.

Frankly, we are making our hobby more expensive, and how dare we.

[varg]

I have yet to see a single component design on any VAG product where I thought "nice," or "clever," or "well thought out." Generally it's only WTF were they thinking.

My only instance of "nice" with VAG was finding out just how tunable my friend's B8.5 S4 was with an overdriven supercharger using electronic boost control. Easy to make it pretty quick. However, the same car was burning out its parking brake actuators because of a bad module (WTF were they thinking), uses TTY hardware on the spindles just so that replacing the wheel bearing is harder (WTF were they thinking), is prone to pulley separation with the supercharger being driven by the rubber isolated part of the harmonic balancer (WTF were they thinking, hey wait BMW did this shit too driving accessories off the balancer), oh and the quick disconnects were a bitch as always when upgrading the intercooler system's heat exchanger. I'll never own a VAG car, not a single one of their cars interests me, aside from the ones I'll never be able to afford (the fast 911s and 4.0 cayman).

[rturbo 930]

What year A3 and when did they start using those thermostats?

Seeing failures like that only reinforces my distaste for new cars.