Posted on 02/05/2024 3:40:25 PM PST by DallasBiff
The Vega had an aluminum block which would warp if overheated. One of my friends had one and it had an electrical gremlin. The battery would not hold a charge, so we had to push start it a lot.
It is hard to make a list of Carter’s evil deeds in a Hierarchy wickedness, but creating the Department of Education would be near the top.
The justification for the departments creation was that US students were not achieving up to international standards and that the USSR’s students were achieving more.
After the DOE started ’helping’ the downward slide only accelerated.
Things like mandatory Sex Ed and New Math came out of the DOE to help loosen the morals of the country and make it necessary to import engineers from Leftist nations.
It is hard to accept that all of this is the responsibility of a nerd that wore cardigan sweaters inn the White House.
Skynard
Funny. There were aspects of the Vega I kind of liked, but having never had the discomfort of owning one, that is as far as it goes!
I had a 1976 MG Midget, and put about 120,000 miles on it in the ten years I owned it (which is an accomplishment in itself!) but being as how the electrical system was made by Lucas (”The Father of Darkness”) there were many, many times I had to push start that car. It was light enough, and the engine caught readily enough, that I could park on a level surface, push it a few feet and jump in to pop the clutch.
I loved that car, but the malfunctions of charging of the battery...I drove around for a long time with my eyes burning from the emission of the hydrogen gas, so...I consider myself lucky that I never blew up!
The battery setup was asinine. The battery leads just had lead caps that were a friction fit, which caused no end of charging problems. I didn’t know enough about cars when I first bought it as a young sailor in the Navy, but changing those leads out for real clamps was a fix.
After that, I would pop the hoods on other MG midgets that had those stupid caps on them, and could see they drilled holes through them and into the battery post, and had drilled a variety of screws through them.
And then there was the corrosion. Just a crappy design...but it WAS British Leyland!
But it sure was fun to drive...:)
Kind of like me, things were tough but we had a great time growing up. I watched Mom and Dad struggle at times but they persevered and I learned about the destructiveness of liberalism, love of country and the importance of God in my life from my parents in this decade.
Dad would rail at the commie Cronkit when the news came on and about the idiots in government trying to follow the road to Marxism and how the Soviets were so wonderful. He was a Goldwater conservative. Right now he wouldn’t cross the road to vote for 99% of the Republicans in the House or Senate.
The going thought about English cars in the 70’s was if you bought one, buy another for the parts.
Oh, yes, the cars from England, they still make me dream, although I was just a preteen in the Seventies 😀
Still, even then I read about their quality issues.
I became, hovever, a car nut at nine. This passion, as I can remember, was ignited by one of my first car magazines over here from 1977, which featured a title story on Rolls-Royce. And I immediately started dreaming of the then brand-new Silver Shadow II 😄, though I might have had a hard time reaching the floorboard then…
I also admired the 1979 Chevy Caprice Classic Estate which friends of my parents owned. Unencumbered by a catalyst, with no emission laws in Europe at the time, the engine pulled powerfully, too. So much room, and so very exciting and exotic over here!
I remember that time fondly. No matter what was going on in the world, I was a kid, then a teenager, my mom was alive, and there were good times and bad. Not such a terrible time to little Boomer me.
Because interest rates were 20%?
Because we had gas lines, price controls and a Hate America First President?
Is that the 70’s, or today?
We are closing in on reliving the 30s. Still with a worse sound track.
I think my dad had one of those! Heh, he let me borrow it one time, and I drove it into work and the car started acting strange...especially when I slowed down the car at stop signs and would hear an odd rattling noise, and when I went around corners the car acted VERY strange.
I pulled the car over several times to examine the front end, but couldn’t see anything wrong.
When I pulled into the parking lot at work the odd handling was so pronounced with noise and the wheel jerking...when I got out, the front right tire was slanted at a 45 degree angle from the vertical, and there were two lug nuts holding it on, and both of those were ready to snap off.
Apparently, the rattling sound was due to the broken lug nuts that were motionless when the car was in motion due to the centrifugal force, but when you slowed, they all rattled as they fell to the bottom of the hub cap. And the weird handling going around corners was because the tire was ready to fall off!!!
Good heavens, that sounds mighty dangerous. Thank goodness you had no accident! :-)
But...maybe it was not due to a mechanical failure, i.e. the lugnuts - or maybe yes? Could they simply have been weak, because they had been made of iron of inferior quality?
I have heard of such or similar mechanical faults at the time, since many cars in the Seventies did indeed suffer from quality issues (I must confess cases that in many I don’t know exactly why).
Volkswagen, as well as Alfa Romeo, had terrible problems with rust for several years, since they had been buying sheet steel from the Soviet Union, and rustproofing of car-bodies was still a far cry from what it is today.
I still remember quite a few people at the time, that, in terms of quality and passive safety, there was either Mercedes-Benz or the rest. My folks used to drive Mercs, the (then) smaller ones, and as plain and boxy as they were and looked, they were really solidly constructed and built, and they never failed to proceed.
How are the mighty fallen! :-(
Without a doubt. Thanks to the dementia riddle pedophile potato in the white house.
I don’t think it was weak lugnuts. Just one of those things! When you mentioned Mercedes, it made me think of my first trip as an adult to Germany (except for a port call we made at Wilhelmshaven, where I went with ten guys to a real live beer hall, and we all enthusiastically and drunkenly banged our mugs on the long, narrow table, singing in a language none of us knew, until mine broke in my hand!)
When I was in the Navy, two years after my liberty in Wilhelmshaven, I took my skis on the carrier with me when we left Pier 12 in Norfolk (people thought I was a whack-job...I have no doubt I was the only man on that ship with snow skis!) to go skiing when we were over in the Med.
I bought a train ticket from Naples to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, and when the train left Naples, I was in a total panic because the train I was on was heading South, not North (the coast of Italy was on my right) and I was sure I had gotten on the wrong train! I didn’t speak Italian, and nobody seemed inclined to help me anyway, so I was miserable for about a half hour until I realized the train had made a big loop and was heading North.
I fell asleep, and woke up as the train stopped at a station in the Italian Alps after midnight. My eyes, stiff and blurry with sleep watched the platform as we pulled in, and they had vendors selling little cups of expresso from trays to the people on the trains, exchanging money and tiny white ceramic expresso cups through the open windows.
In my naïveté, I ws sure there would be snow everywhere at the end of November (this was in 1978) but...there was none. I grew increasingly concerned when instead of being white, the mountains we went through were largely green.
I was quite deflated, and stood in that train station in Munich, not really knowing what to do.
Then, a young, shapely woman with long blond hair walked by carrying a pair of ballet skis. I ran over to ask her where there was snow, and she said the only place anywhere was glacier skiing on the Zugspitze...so...that was where I went!
But the thing that blew my mind was, all the taxis were Mercedes! I couldn’t wrap my head around that...I thought “How do Lederhosen-wearing taxi drivers afford Mercedes?”
I had a great time, even though I barely knew how to ski. (I had gone skiing once the year before, and found it so insanely fun I immediately went out and purchased ski gear!) While I was skiing on that nasty glacier ice on a t-bar ski lift, no less, a helicopter landed on the glacier, guys with machine guns got out, and some guy went down the glacier, they picked him up, and took him back up to the top!
I had zero experience with any kind of lift other than a tow rope, and I fell down after going about 20 feet, and the free end of the t-bar came around and whacked me in the face nearly taking my eye out, but...I held on grimly for dear life, and that t-bar dragged me all the way up to the top. I wasn’t letting go!
After skiing each day, I simply went back to the little monk-sized room with white walls and nothing else, and slept after eating something for dinner.
That sure was a fun trip...so long ago.
I have such fond memories - would totally go back even though it was often rough
Shoot, I even remember when I was in school, my bedroom was in my parent’s basement.
Had my (basically) quadraphonic (remember that?) stereo system set up - on comes “Love Will Keep Us Together” on the FM radio - it really sounded great, echoing around.
Back in the days when you could hear Chicago, Doobie Brothers, love songs, Theme from Rockford Files and other great stuff on the FM radio - all inside one hour
“I have such fond memories - would totally go back even though it was often rough”
Ditto.
No complaints on the music.
The Cars are among my playlist entries.
Fascinating to read, sir, and I‘m glad you had such a swell time in Germany then - and you got out of your endeavors unharmed. 😀
And about the Mercedes taxis: in those days, almost all West German taxidrivers used 200 Ds from the firm with the three-pointed star. They were not cheap to buy and slow as molasses (it was said that to measure their acceleration, you needed absolutely no stopwatch, a calendar would more than suffice), but they were almost unbreakable. They ran and ran.
So I wouldn‘t be amazed that, in the long run, using a Merc 200 D as a taxi was cheaper than anything else on the car market.
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