I used one almost every single work day at the dealership for 7 years and never broke a single screw off with it. YMMV, I guess.

Not always, my customers had two of these that self destructed due to oil sludging before 100k, and the oil was always changed on time using a major name brand oil and a good filter.

Those are easy to remove with the right tool, about 30 bucks: http://www.amazon.com/Lisle-29200-Ha…

I know, right?!

A client of mine had one of the first ones, bought new. It was fun when it was running right, which wasn’t often - at least the dealer had nice service loaners. He sold it with a year left on the warranty, because 18 warranty repair trips to the dealership was enough.

Welcome to Just in Time production methods, where they have a place to park the run of finished cars but no place to put all the parts to assemble that particular run of cars if they don’t get built for some unforeseen reason.

Come on, Torch, do your homework.

Damn near every ‘92-’95 Civic hatchback.

The problem is, you're also getting hammered on continued depreciation if you buy one of these cash sinkholes. They don't magically stop depreciating like an anvil off a cliff just because you bought it.

Having service managed several major market exotic Italian dealerships, I would take a nice CTS-V wagon over that Maserati any day that ends in “Y”, especially if I was planning on doing long road trips.

TL;DR

Riding my ‘02 Sprint ST solo across the country from the east coast, I had been on the road for several weeks when heading to Seattle from L.A I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway. Well north of San Francisco near Fort Bragg it had gotten dark and was slowly raining and foggy when i went into a sharp inside…

Eh, the vast majority of liter-class Dirt Wings (including mine) will never see more off-road than a well groomed fire road most of the time, and the manufacturers know it. Most people can’t handle the dirt worthy 990/1190 KTMs anyway because of their high seat heights and picking up any 450+ lb bike in the dirt by…

So, I take it that you don’t know for sure either?

Why would you buy the 4?

Yup, hydroforming uses water under pressure, and I haven’t seen anything so far from an actual legit source that says that VW was using hydroforming for these faulty cams. If you have, could you link it here? (Not being a smartass, I’m genuinely curious).

Right, like Ford did with the SHO cam/cam gear. The question is, what are they using under that pressure to move the metal? I seriously doubt it's just air.

You’re correct, it was the cam gear. And (again, IIRC because it’s been a long time since I researched this for a customer) these things are being swedged on (at least on some cars) is by forcing a fractionally larger ball bearing down the hollow cam tube under pressure, so in those cases I’d guess you couldn’t have a…

Joint effort, but mostly Ford and built to Ford’s specifications. And to clarify, it was the swedged-on cam sprockets that walked on that interference motor (with disastrous results), not the lobes themselves.

Yup, still true: