Date:         Fri, 7 Oct 94 10:50:50 EDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         wigley@server.uwindsor.ca (Neil Wigley)
Subject:      Old cars, old f*rts (was: fuel sender repair)


Yeah my first car had no fuel gauge, a small rear window, but real turn
signals; a '57 VW deluxe, bought in Darmstadt in Dec '56, body # 1388121,
engine number 1666045 (don't ask me how I remember all of those). It was
a fabulous wonderful car and I saw a lot of 1957 Europe with it. Learned how
to camp, sleeping inside: you pulled the front seat backs off and laid them
down on the two jerry cans of gas, now lying on the back floor. The jerry
cans were important because outside of Germany gasoline could be as much
as $2/gallon; inside Germany, at the quartermaster Tankstelle it was 13
cents/gallon.

cans were important because outside of Germany gasoline could be as much
as $2/gallon; inside Germany, at the quartermaster Tankstelle it was 13
cents/gallon.

In those days a VW was pretty fast on the autobahn, thanks to 36 hp (SAE).
You had to compete with Messerschmidts, Isettas (also known as the Egg) and
a strange thing called the Janus (as in January) in which the two passengers
sat back-to-back, as I recall. Needless to say, it did not corner the
market, though it may have saved a few marriages :-)

The only fast cars were the Mercedes and the odd BMW sedan, maybe an Opel
or two. And, of course, lots of Dodges, Cadillacs, etc., all bearing GI
license plates.

DKW (Das Kleine Wunder, or was it Des Knaben Wunsch? The small wonder, the
boy's wish) was called 3=6, because 3 cylinders two-cycle should, in theory,
be the same as 6 cylinders four-cycle. They later merged with Auto-Union,
makers of the Audi. The name Audi is Latin for 'listen', which is 'Horch'
in German. The name was suggested by the schoolboy son of Herrn Horch.

NSU almost went bankrupt in the late 60s thanks to the Ro-80, the first
Wankel-powered car to be offered commercially. It was a wonderful sedan,
competing quite favorably with Mercedes and BMW, at least for the first
30,000 km. At that point the engine blew, and NSU, of course, was
obliged to give you a new one.  VW bought them out, and shortly thereafter,
I believe, merged with Auto-Union.

Neil Wigley
'87 Vanagon
U of Windsor