someone said:Quoted message said:I always thought it would be a great project to teach a course in
mechanical design using the 1950's VW Beetle as a subject of
everything you can do wrong in car design. You'll notice that no
one makes use of any of the design concepts on which that car was
built, be that wheel suspension, chassis design, and most of all
motor and transmission. You can put your finger on almost any part
of that car and find a multitude of errors, ones that other car
designs had discarded before WWII.
Quoted message said:I would say that the fundamental design concept of the current 911
(water cooling aside) is the same as the original VW- flat rear
engine, so that would seem to invalidate your statement that NO ONE
makes use of ANY of the design concepts. There is at least one maker
still using at least one of the design concepts. Of course, there
never were that many air-cooled flat fours, anyway. I do have a
water-cooled flat four in my Subaru, though.
Location of the engine is not the problem although it presents other
problems that most car designs recognize. Front suspension, steering
gear, engine and controls all get along well in a front engine car.
Baggage and spare wheel storage do fine alone in the rear. The front
end mechanisms interfere with luggage space and make that a minimal
space with rear engines.
There will always be "recumbents" in the bicycle industry and
similarly, rear engined cars in the auto industry. They do not make
up the mainstream or any part of it. There is no excuse for air
cooling in cars without some special purpose in mind.
Quoted message said:Obviously, every single part of the car has evolved over the course of
the ~70 years since Porsche designed the original Volkswagen (before
WWII), so it was a twenty-year old design by about 1955.
That's what PR will have you believe. Porsche never designed any part
of the VW. In fact you can't find a single drawing, that he
made. That work was done by engineers after he brought the car in from
Czechoslovakia where he had seen it and sold the concept to the German
government. The main appeal was that everything about it was
different and that Porsche was a good salesman of the idea. The same
was true for the American market.
Quoted message said:Whatever its flaws, I am not prepared to say that they were more
than other cars being built up to about 1970, when the Japanese
really began to have an impact. In keeping with its name, one thing
interesting about the VW was that the engine could be removed
without an engine lift. You could actually unbolt the engine, lower
it onto blocks and lift the car over it and pull the engine out. I
helped a friend do it once.
That was one of their great PR claims, that one could remove the
engine in less than 15 minutes. To that I ask, how often did you need
to remove the engine from your... Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge, Nash... In
contrast, VW engines were out on the repair bench all the time. Let's
not get into the details of transmissions, torsion bar suspension and
all the other odd features.
Jobst Brandt
