Date:         Fri, 30 May 1997 11:02:58 -0400
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Derek Drew <drew@interport.net>
Subject:      Spare parts in 2003

At 01:36 PM 5/30/97 UT, you wrote:
>Hi Derek,
>
>now I realize why I din't hear from you for such a long time. I guessed you 
>were traveling around with your Westie. Sorry, for mixing up the email adress 
>and glad to hear you got it in the end.

For a variety of reasons, I sometimes do not get to my noncommercial (fun)
email for up to a month after I receive it. If I am busy, and if the email
is involved (fun or too interesting) then it can be even longer because I do
not have time to compose a response. I wish I  had more free time.

>I passed a lot of material around in the meantime to Tom Forhan, Ron Lussier, 
>John Babiak and Lloyd Allison in Australia. E.g. the lightweight article is on 
>the SW homepage now. Probably you would have wanted to add some of it to your 
>homepage too, sorry again that you didn't get it on time.
>
>>From my point of view, we should try to convince all syncro drivers to build 
>up a wordwide network for syncro information.
>
>This is the only way we can convince VW to carry on with spare-part supply. In 
>germany laws do exist, which say that spare parts have to be provided for the 
>following ten years after the specified model is abondoned. Unfortunately they 
>do not say at what price... 

The big problem with spare part supply is mostly for the transmission
pieces, right? Do we have reason to think that these should continue to be
available from South Africa? It seems like the other two wheel drive pieces
will always be available for a long time.

>I am not quite sure what will be after the year 2003. If there are enough 
>people interested, one could try to convince VW to release the tooling rights 
>for the special syncro parts or give them back to Steyr-Puch again. 

You will propose this at that time and then SP will appoint you president of
that division.

>I als think it might make sense to have a similar new model like the Type II 
>syncro in the future. For the moment only the Mercedes Sprinter 4x4 is halfway 
>similar to it.  (Tom Forhan has a broshure about it, or see the "brothers and 
>cousins" pages at "vanagon.com" and "Westfalia owners"). This model is simply 
>great, with a strong engine a lot of space, acceptable driving comfort, very 
>high quality and many different body versions. The pity is that Mercedes 
>doesen't produce the 4x4 as a factory version, but the swap is done 
>afterwards. The shop who do it, can only serve 2 - 3 customers a week, so the 
>price is tremendous. (about 70,000 DEM for a 2,8t empty panel van with 2,9l 
>TDI and 125 HP - not very much more than a syncro 16'' would be nowadays with 
>TDI, Airbags and all that modern stuff ) Mercedes say for them it won't make 
>sense to intergrate it to the assembly line below a number of 500 per year and 
>VW announced they will definitely not produce a heavy duty T4 syncro version 
>unless they can sell at least 5000 of it. So the only chance would be a large 
>order by the military and there is no large budget for that at the moment. 
>They bought a few thousand Mercedes G within the last years.
>
>But if all syncro drivers of the world (dreamin' a bit) would unify and demand 
>better spare part supply or a succesiv model, VW at least could not deny any 
>lomger, that there exists demand for such a vehicle. 
>
>I recently talked to Thomas Roennberg - the journalist who wrote the syncro 
>16'' TD Test from the vanagon list. He told me that 4x4 sales is alredy  going 
>downwords in Europe, because the trendy people tend to buy little roadsters at 
>the moment. Manufacturers also complain that sales of RV's and campers are 
>going down and almost only retired people still buy campers and no young 
>families as it was years ago. So indusrtry will have to think about making 
>these classes more attractive and I feel that a compact 4x4 camper might be a 
>nice niche. The other argument is that 4x4 vehicles tend to become more and 
>more similar to normal cars in their body-work and suspensions - like the 
>M-Class from MB or all those light-duty Off-Roaders like RAV 4, the new Honda 
>etc. So heavy-duty 4x4 will have to become more similar to their commercial 
>Van brothers  providing also a suitable basis for 4x4 campers.
>
>I think a new 4x4 van might be a very up-to-date concept soon. 
>
>
>Bye Tom N.
>
>At the moment I am not surfing the net so much because the HDD on my notebokk 
>crashed a week ago and I am operating with am old 486 DX 66 again which no 
>real fun downloading pictures and viewing them.
>
>I was thinking about a special syncro 16'' web-page as well, but with my 
>actual harware it will be a hard job to build and edit pages.
>
>
___________________________________
Derek Drew                           New York, NY
drew@interport.net