Date:         Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:51:06 -0600
Reply-To:     Jarrett Anthony Kupcinski <kupcinski@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jarrett Anthony Kupcinski <kupcinski@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Friday Philosophy: On Reliability
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My mother hates VWs, especially vans. She, like many, believes they are unreliable. When I traded my then 4 year old Honda Accord for a Vanagon, she shook her head and muttered something about me being just like my father. And while I disagree with her about the sensibility of my purchase, I have to concede that because of Volkswagens, she’s visited more than a fair share of garages across three continents. Maybe she’s entitled to her opinion.

Reliability is an interesting concept. For everyone who decries the Vanagon’s lack of dependability, there is a guy who objects and points proudly to his own rig with an odometer reading of over 200,000 miles. That seems like a lot in a world where most people get rid of their cars at the 100K mark, but let’s do some math. Assume the aforementioned van was manufactured in 1986. To rack up those 200K miles, the driver would have to travel about 7500 miles per year, which isn’t really a whole lot to expect out of a vehicle.

We could measure reliability in other ways: dollars spent per mile driven, minutes of uptime, days before the first major breakdown. Wouldn’t it be fun to see a page full of these kinds of Vanagon stats, complete with snazzy infographics? This is what consumer magazines do to lend an air of objectivity to their pages. And it seems like we should be objective on something which a) costs so much, and b) we depend upon so routinely. But while these numbers might be wonderful measurements of something, they aren’t reliable indicators of, well, reliability.

The problem is none of those kinds of statistics take into account half of the reliability equation: the driver. A vehicle and its pilot are a system. The optimal running of that system isn’t just about how well the machine is assembled at the factory. It’s also about how it is maintained and driven, and that is the function of the driver. Even the most ruggedly engineered vehicles fail eventually if they aren’t cared for. 

Vanagons are pretty rugged, as any Syncro owner can tell you. But they’ve also got points of failure, like long, unprotected fuel lines. Fail to maintain these, and your ride will become a toasty testament to your negligence. It won’t be the van’s fault, even if you didn’t know there was a potential problem.

Many people fail to understand that they are part of the system, and they are then disappointed when their cars fail. In some sense, however, it’s the driver who has failed. Perhaps what is really needed is better engineering of the driver.

Of course, that is exactly what the Vanagon List is about.

Jarrett Kupcinski
89 Westy