30 Jul
2001
30 Jul
'01
4:48 p.m.
The Vega was a misguided experiment in building a car
that was
intended to last exactly as long as people "normally" kept them <snip>
It lasted 50K +/- 5K miles beautifully. Then it wore through the
coating of the cylinder walls, and in the space of another few feet of
driving, the pistons ate the aluminum block.
On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Geoff Roberts wrote:
Boggle!
I never bought a car with less than several hundred thousand MILES on it
in my life..
My Volvo has around 400,000km on the clock, but the odometer quit before
I got it.
The Renault has around 750,000km second time around.
It sure wasn't intended for us!
They had numbers that told them that people "normally" kept a new car for
50K. So, they designed the car to be reliable for exactly that
long. Kinda like Canon downgrading the CX laser printer cartridge
drum size when they came out with the SX. Except that Canon got away with
that.
GM saved a lot of money by making an aluminum block with a friction
reducing coating (Teflon??). It worked well for a limited time. They
didn't count on second owners with wornout 80K cars getting irate and
telling the world.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com