“a turning radius somewhere between a container ship and a mid-century ranch house”

The problem continues to be - what are the alternatives? It would be great if we could stop salting roads because upwards of 7 billion dollars a year in application and subsequent damages.

Let me give you a little more data. Yesterday I climbed under my ‘06 Sierra to replace the rotted out rear bumper. What I found under there, were two giant holes in the trailer hitch. I have towed 4k pounds with this truck as recently as 7 weeks ago. This scared the crap out if me.

I’m gonna grab some 1/8" steel and my Harbor Freight welder and GO TO TOWN.

Whenever I see one and get excited and whoever I'm with asks what the big deal is, I say "you know what a Bugatti is? That Passat basically has half of a Bugatti engine powering it!" Then I get a funny look and have one less friend.

Yeah, I’m just going to pound it out to the point where it looks “good enough”. Worst case, employ some filler. Not going for a concours-level restoration, but bring it back to a state where it could be reliably (as reliable as a W8 could be) used as a daily.

This Passat isn’t just special because it has a standard transmission. The W8 itself is rare car with effectively a one-off engine. The W8 engine was created, used in the Passat, then never used again. The closest thing to it is the W12 of the Phaeton or W16 of the Veyron. So it’s a weird piece of VW history in a…

Lots of good stuff here!

Wow, this is going to be interesting.

That’s not a “pound it out” dent. That’s a “cut it off and weld on a new one” dent.

I can attest to how rare the Passat W8 is in the real world. When I was 16 years old, I was riding my bike, and a Volkswagen Passat W8 made a right turn on red — when I had the right of way. I hit the hood, the roof, and then the pavement.

True! I consider them both Holy Grails given their very very low volume. Funny enough, my partner tried to surprise me by having the sunroof fixed while I was away. Not a single body shop was willing to give her a reasonable quote, but all of their owners wanted to double, triple, or quadruple my money and buy it off…

Weirdly, it's the only thing on that car that can be fixed without putting the car into the "service position". lol

I might be worse than David considering my collection is bigger. Thankfully everything runs, though, even this zero oil pressure TDI!

Little did you know, Jalopnik was hoard level this entire time! lol

But but David and I have to combine a smart and a Jeep into one!!

Please provide a street address of your location. I may or may not be from the future to terminate you before you collaborate with David Tracy, leading to humanity being overrun by machines collectively known as Shitbox in 2029.

Frankly given his obsession with oddball Chryslers the danger of a meth neighborhood is that he'd expand his collection.

The only vehicle in this whole list that’s actually interesting is the Crossfire, because it’s a weird vehicle that’s not totally ugly, totally awful or totally busted.