You know when you're getting old when;
(A) Hair begins growing out of your ears
(B) Your nose hair turns white
(C) You spend 90% of your time talking about what you don't want in life and only 10% actually talking about what you do want.
Copyright Dox @2007
;o)
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Dox,
Saw this on a motorcycle website today. Sums up what you say in a different way. BTW I score on two of the above !
""Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream"".
If you want it get it.
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Dox - do you call yourself Dox because your real name is Steve Dore?
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Dox - do you call yourself Dox because your real name is Steve Dore?
Who's Steve Dore?
Its a school nickname and the statement is an observation of mine
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A stevedore works in the docks. :)
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Here is a classic example of why VAG bashing goes on.
I have never previously had a VW, as I previously thought them to be dull, uninteresting and overpriced. I had tho always assumed them to be very well built and very reliable.
When I actually ended up with one to find out that they are
A: built just as good or bad as every other car
and
B: actualy become the first car to leave me stranded in 23 years
then one becomes quickly a VW basher as one feels let down. Its that shock to realise they are no better than any other european marque.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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and they are still dull, uninteresting and overpriced. I have had Tesco supermarket trolleys with more interest and character.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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OP, can you honestly say you had nothing better to do on Easter Sunday than post the same old crap?
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To be fair to VAG, mine, and my families VW's have never let us down and proved good value for money. My original Mk1 GTi (AUM 880X) was faultless for 3 years and it was driven very enthusiastically. My fathers Passat estate (PKY888M) likewise, as was its replacement (RWX 567R). A few years ago I bought I bought an R reg Polo 16v at auction, ran it faultlessly for 18 months and sold it for what I paid. My current 2.4D VW Transporter I have owned for 9 years, and with sympathetic driving and regular oil changes, runs as reliably now as the day it was bought.
Maybe because these VW's were all of an older era, with less complicated electronics etc they proved reliable, and the quality of interior trim was not a serious issue then and my expectations were far less.
On the other hand, my last 3 cars have been Subarus, all bought at 4 years old, and all proved very reliable. Maybe I've just been lucky with car ownership...lets hope my 'new' 12 year old LR Defender proves as reliable!
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"lets hope my 'new' 12 year old LR Defender proves as reliable! "
And then you go and say that, if it's listening it will break down out of spite - you should know that !
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>>and spend proportionately more on the oily bits, so that they don't go wrong.>>
The Japanese, for many years, have always insisted that key suppliers provide parts and components that have a very low failure rate whether for cars, hi-fi, TV sets etc.
Sony, for instance, when it built its now closed CRT TV manufacturing plant at Bridgend, "forced" its component suppliers initially to reduce components failure from about one in "a handful" to less than one in a million in a comparatively short period of time.
Nissan adopted a similar philosophy at Sunderland as did Honda and Toyota when starting UK production.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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There's nothing wrong with valid and evidenced criticism of any make or of one's experience with a vehicle. The likes of TVM and Aprilia make such criticism and as their clearly know their subject, argue their corner articulately and with intelligence, it's a positive contribution to the forum.
What is deeply tedious, reeks of desperation and points to a huge insecurity is constant irrational railing against one manufacturer be it Ford, VAG or MB, the most obvious example being the almost constant anti-VAG trolling from whatever forum ID Type, cardriver, wontane, martiansweeney, and I'm guessing surveyor bob decides to use. Characters like this show time and time again how little they actually know about the subject matter and how to argue a point and so they are forced to concoct evidence and hide behind a multitude of IDs. Thankfully, apart from this one character's crusade, this forum has AFAICT largely escaped the negative influences of trolling and long may it continue.
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What is deeply tedious, reeks of desperation and points to a huge insecurity is constant irrational railing against one manufacturer be it Ford, VAG or MB, ...
I was reluctant to post in this thread (feeding the troll), but I agree 100% with this - there aren't very many regular posters on here and we should be able to spot these threads a mile off and just ignore them.
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The Japanese, for many years, have always insisted that key suppliers provide parts and components that have a very low failure rate whether for cars, hi-fi, TV sets etc.
Agreed.
The other big factor in the reliability of Japanese cars in my opinion is their long-standing experience with electronics, and this becomes more and more relevant with each passing year when you look at the way car design has gone in the past decade, and will go over the next two or three. Japan has been producing low cost, yet reliable and well designed electronics for decades, and with modern cars sprouting ever more ECUs, wires, motors and switches, they've simply got a lot more expertise and experience to fall back on than anyone.
I work for a Japanese company (non-automotive), and having had factory tours and meetings with designers and production staff, can honestly say their R&D, production philosophy, and QA processes are simply staggering in their thoroughness and detail compared to other (European and American owned) companies I've worked for in the same sector. From what I've read about the way they run their car factories and select their suppliers, I have no doubt their cars are designed and developed in the same painstaking way.
What the Japanese don't do anything like as well as the Germans is styling and interior trim, the two things that make a car desirable in a showroom, and a company car park. Compare a BMW 3 / Audi A4 or even a well specced VW Passat against a Lexus IS for example and there's no contest. The Germans have far nicer "touchy feely" interior plastics, a cleaner, more elegant design and a nice sprinkling of aluminium and chrome in those perfectly sited places that only the Germans seem to be able to get right. Modern British design tastes have far more in common with the minimalism of the Germans than the busy, button-fest approach of the Japanese, and I will admit that every "high end" Japanese car I've ever seen has leather that looks like PVC, and masses of buttons and switches on every surface.
But when all is said and done, that's not engineering. If you were forced to bet a year's salary on which of those four cars above would, over 100,000 miles of hard use, develop the fewest faults, have the fewest breakdowns, or cost the least (both in time and money) to service and maintain...... well, you'd have to be pretty mad not to back the Lexus in my opinion.
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My sentiments exactly DP.
My previous 3 Subarus (2.0 Legacy estates and Impreza non turbo) ) have all been bought at 3/4 years old and run reliably during my ownership. My last, an R reg GLS, (sold privately and with great difficulty I must add, some 18 months ago) was only let down by its poor quality interior. The oily bits never failed, and I have noticed the same with the latest Legacy Sports tourer. My Californian friends have the latest model, and having travelled many miles in it around ski resorts during Feb & March of this year, its only downside is the quality of interior trim.
Compared to a friends new A4 it comes a very poor second, but like her first Subaru, she plans to run it for 10 years and her priority is reliability...well it would be if you ski every weekend during the winter months in the Sierras and dont want to get stranded in a storm!
The ex Mrs Legacylad runs an IS SportCross (bought on my recommendation) which does have a better interior trim than the latest Subarus IMHO....as an aside I got her tickets for the launch of the LS400 back in the early 90's and she has wanted a Lexus ever since but it has not been practical for her job...it still is'nt! Only since our 'parting' has she been able to afford one and I hope to buy it off her when it is several years old and my bank balance has recovered.
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I agree with pretty everything you say DP, and I guess that if I had to put money down on reliability over that mileage then I too would probably put it on the Lexus, though for my tastes it would be a long old 100,000miles.
One of the biggest problems with these type of discussions is that, even if we disregard the troll, when either camp tries to be absolute and polarize a discussion in such a way that bears no resemblance to reality. The styling and interior finish of cars from the Far East isn?t uniformly dire and dishwater dull. Likewise cars from without the Far East are not uniformly unreliable and hopelessly engineered. To try and argue that such extremes are the norm tends to show that one is arguing on the basis of blind prejudice rather than evidence.
Yes, on survey evidence Japanese cars are currently more reliable than non-Japanese cars but the corollary of that is not, as some here would have you believe, that our roads are littered with non-Japanese cars whilst whisk past. The level of reliability of most other cars, whilst being behind the Japanese, is at such a high level that it is not generally a big enough to generate concern amongst prospective buyers or to outweigh concerns about the rest of the Japanese car. When I think of the cars that myself and my wife have driven over the last few years, almost 200,000 miles, I can?t see what we would have gained by driving a Lexus and a Honda; how would better engineering have helped when neither of us could stand the dull cabins and the rest of the package, with the exception of the Honda diesel engine, was similarly meh. Lexus did a company test drive day here last year and to my knowledge, the only person who chose one was a lady who didn?t even attend.
These days, to allow your car choice to be dictated by being the most reliable is like allowing your choice to be dictated by the top speed. Sure, there will be exceptions, but generally most competitors within their class are now so reliable and sufficiently fast that neither of these two factors will be relevant to the owner over the period of his ownership. I drove to the Lakes and back at the weekend and broken down on the roadside I noticed a new shape Audi Allroad, 2 VWs, 2 Fords, 2 Toyotas, Honda Civic and numerous Kia/Proton/Hyundai type things. So that tells us damn all apart from the fact that in a 700+mile trip, with tens of thousands of vehicles on that route at the time, I saw a handful of cars at the side of the road, new and old, Japanese and non-Japanese and I?ll bet you that every one of them was cursing the car and swearing that they wouldn?t buy another.
Interestingly in view of survey results, I didn?t notice one French or Italian car on the verge..
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