Discussion
dinkel said:
These over a bug every day in the week. Electronic fuel injection!
Yeah, but that's D Jetronic, Pidgeon may disagree with me and perhaps I'm just a luddite, but that system caused loads of problems on aged CSL BMWs!
I'd get one and convert to K Jetronic!
I like the Fast Back- is that also a Type 4?
Fastbacks (and notches and squares) are Type 3s.
And you really don't want a T4. It may have had fuel injection (rather reliable) and a nicely developed flat four but the rest of the car was truly dire. VW really didn't plumb depths this deep again until pretty much anything they built after 1983. The idea was sound - let's go up market. Let's build a bigger car that will go down well in the US and which we can charge premium money for in Europe. Let's go for unitary construction, four doors, efficient heaters, powerful engines and modern suspension. They started off well and the flat four was a nice unit and after that the whole plan just went belly up.
Firstly it is hideous. I know that T1s, 2 and 3s were hardly lookers but these took it to a new level. The unspeakable horror of the frontal treatment was only equally by the cock eyed rear door/third window of the fastback version (no hatch – doh!). The estate looked marginally better but still rubbish. I’ve seen the notchback prototype in the museum at Wolfsburg and I rather wish I hadn’t. Tedious interiors with lashings of black vinyl and stick on wood didn’t lift things any.
Dubious behaviour in cross winds, dire brakes and a petrol heater which although interesting had the nasty habit of setting the car on fire if it wasn’t maintained properly didn’t make the car popular with owners. The fact that each and every model year it was significantly revised in an effort to get the thing to sell is an excellent measure of the “correctness” of the original design. In 72 the 411 became the 412 with heavily revised and still awful styling and an extra 100cc didn’t make things any better at all. The engine was now far too powerful for the brakes, the heaters still caught fire and they even took the retrograde step of giving the option of carbs rather than fuel injection. Surely the dingos at marketing could not have thought that consumer resistance to the car was down to the fuel injection?
Two years later the thing was dead and buried. The shame of it was that at the same time VW was busy pissing away an advantage it could have got with the K70. Modern design, front wheel drive, water cooled, OHC, all alloy engines. But no, they insisted on pushing this pile of old cack. It gave us a decent engine to retro fit to notches and ghias but that’s all it ever did.
And you really don't want a T4. It may have had fuel injection (rather reliable) and a nicely developed flat four but the rest of the car was truly dire. VW really didn't plumb depths this deep again until pretty much anything they built after 1983. The idea was sound - let's go up market. Let's build a bigger car that will go down well in the US and which we can charge premium money for in Europe. Let's go for unitary construction, four doors, efficient heaters, powerful engines and modern suspension. They started off well and the flat four was a nice unit and after that the whole plan just went belly up.
Firstly it is hideous. I know that T1s, 2 and 3s were hardly lookers but these took it to a new level. The unspeakable horror of the frontal treatment was only equally by the cock eyed rear door/third window of the fastback version (no hatch – doh!). The estate looked marginally better but still rubbish. I’ve seen the notchback prototype in the museum at Wolfsburg and I rather wish I hadn’t. Tedious interiors with lashings of black vinyl and stick on wood didn’t lift things any.
Dubious behaviour in cross winds, dire brakes and a petrol heater which although interesting had the nasty habit of setting the car on fire if it wasn’t maintained properly didn’t make the car popular with owners. The fact that each and every model year it was significantly revised in an effort to get the thing to sell is an excellent measure of the “correctness” of the original design. In 72 the 411 became the 412 with heavily revised and still awful styling and an extra 100cc didn’t make things any better at all. The engine was now far too powerful for the brakes, the heaters still caught fire and they even took the retrograde step of giving the option of carbs rather than fuel injection. Surely the dingos at marketing could not have thought that consumer resistance to the car was down to the fuel injection?
Two years later the thing was dead and buried. The shame of it was that at the same time VW was busy pissing away an advantage it could have got with the K70. Modern design, front wheel drive, water cooled, OHC, all alloy engines. But no, they insisted on pushing this pile of old cack. It gave us a decent engine to retro fit to notches and ghias but that’s all it ever did.
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