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Black88GTA posted:2 seater MR layout, all over the place, cheap as gently caress, parts / chassis everywhere, all mechanical repairs / upgrades easy and fully documented all over the internet. When you think about it, there was literally nothing else that fit all of this criteria out there at the time everybody started dumping the ACVW chassis and turned to molesting Fieros for kit cars. Now I think early Miatas might qualify as well, but the horde of Miata based kit cars just hasn't hit yet. It's a fascinating thing for me because there are essentially no fieros here so non-turbo SW20's fill the same ecological niche; a couple of years ago there were heaps of them running around dressed up like F355's.
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Sep 21, 2015 04:05
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Black88GTA posted:2 seater MR layout, all over the place, cheap as gently caress, parts / chassis everywhere, all mechanical repairs / upgrades easy and fully documented all over the internet. When you think about it, there was literally nothing else that fit all of this criteria out there at the time everybody started dumping the ACVW chassis and turned to molesting Fieros for kit cars. Now I think early Miatas might qualify as well, but the horde of Miata based kit cars just hasn't hit yet.
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Sep 21, 2015 04:38
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You forgot the biggest reason for Fiero = body kit base: all the body panels are plastic and non-structural and easily separatable from the steel space-frame underneath, making it trivial to put a whole new body shell over the frame without resorting to angle grinders, sawzalls, or welding.
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Sep 21, 2015 05:14
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Unmolested Fieros are going to be worth so much money one day
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Sep 21, 2015 05:53
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Slavvy posted:It's a fascinating thing for me because there are essentially no fieros here so non-turbo SW20's fill the same ecological niche; a couple of years ago there were heaps of them running around dressed up like F355's. Wasn't Top Gear Live accused of using MR2s body-kitted to look like Ferraris in their shows?
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Sep 21, 2015 09:19
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8ender posted:Unmolested Fieros are going to be worth so much money one day Lolno With the possible exception of the 88 Fiero GT, the majority of them were boring, hateful little cars.
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Sep 21, 2015 10:48
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MrYenko posted:Lolno I agree with you about the cars but this is how stupid american classics are born. Tons of people wreck them to build weird poo poo and then when they're all gone they suddenly become unobtanium and people wax on about what a quirky one of a kind classic american car it was.
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Sep 21, 2015 14:19
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http://i.imgur.com/bMaHIuY.gifv
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Sep 21, 2015 14:53
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torpedan posted:Hyundai was fined $300 million for overstating the fuel mileage on 1.2 million cars, but from what little reading I did on that fine it may not have been fully intentional on their part. I would expect VAG to face a much steeper fine though as there is no doubt on intent and they misrepresented the actual emissions put out by the vehicles as well as the fuel mileage (assuming my memory is correct, these are measured at the same time as counting everything that comes out of the engine allows you to determine the fuel consumption as well.) My job is in engine management software and diagnostics so I might be able to shed a little light on what might have happened and how VW may not have intentionally put this "cycle beater"(software logic/calibrations that has the sole purpose of preventing diagnostics from running or causing a failure during diagnostic testing) in to their US production vehicle. I would be inclined to believe that this "cycle beater" may have been created for non EURO/OBDII emission regulation countries such as China. It's not uncommon for our China customers to request these types of software changes to prevent the check engine light from coming on "prematurely" (in their opinion). This is perfectly legal because these countries dont have to obey any sort of stringent federal emission testing. This cycle beater may have accidentally been baked into VW's base software without them knowing, though this doesn't make it right and is rather sloppy if true. We fight back with our China group/customers all the time when they request these kind of things but ultimately, they usually get implemented anyways. We then have to track these things just in case we use a portion of the China software in our other packages. EDIT: Looking at the official letter for the violation, I take it back, this looks to be very intentional considering it explicitly tracks the FTP. United States EPA Letter to VAG posted:Each VW vehicle identified by the table below has AECDs that were not described in the application for the COC that purportedly covers the vehicle. Specifically, VW manufactured and installed software in the electronic control module (ECM) of these vehicles that sensed when the vehicle was being tested for compliance with EPA emission standards. For ease of reference, the EPA is calling this the "switch." The "switch" senses whether the vehicle is being tested or not based on various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine's operation, and barometric pressure. These inputs precisely track the parameters of the federal test procedure used for emission testing for the EPA certification purposes. During EPA emission testing, the vehicles' ECM ran software which produced compliant emission results under an ECM calibration that VW referred to as the "dyno calibratoin" (referring to the equipment used in emissions testing, called a dynamometer). At all other times during normal vehicle operation, the "switch" was activated and the vehicle ECM software ran a seperate "road calibration" which reduced the effectiveness of the emission control system (specifically the selective catalytic reduction or the lean NOx trap). As a result, emissions of NOx increased by a factor of 10 to 40 times above the EPA compliant levels, depending on the type of drive cycle (e.g., city, highway). atothesquiz fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Sep 21, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2015 15:09
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"Dammit this is so easy in GTA!"
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Sep 21, 2015 15:13
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atothesquiz posted:My job is in engine management software and diagnostics so I might be able to shed a little light on what might have happened and how VW may not have intentionally put this "cycle beater"(software logic/calibrations that has the sole purpose of preventing diagnostics from running or causing a failure during diagnostic testing) in to their US production vehicle. That's all well and good, except then how was the software designed to only disable emissions equipment when the vehicle was not being emissions tested? Part of the routine was specifically to check if the vehicle was on a dyno being emissions tested and if so, make sure to run as clean as possible. VW even admitted to making it cheat so that it would pass EPA testing, so your argument is null from the get go. It was never an accidental code inclusion.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:44
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HotCanadianChick posted:That's all well and good, except then how was the software designed to only disable emissions equipment when the vehicle was not being emissions tested? Part of the routine was specifically to check if the vehicle was on a dyno being emissions tested and if so, make sure to run as clean as possible. I just edited my post to reflect exactly what you just said.
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Sep 21, 2015 15:55
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Did VW think no one would notice? How would they conceal it if they corrected it later? Seems there is a lack of planning or gross hubris on vw.
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Sep 21, 2015 18:55
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I just hope VW didn't just do another Cadillac to passenger diesels....
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Sep 21, 2015 19:02
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I wonder what the odds on other manufacturers lineups having a mysterious increase in emissions next model year will be.
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Sep 21, 2015 19:13
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Did VW think no one would notice? How would they conceal it if they corrected it later? Seems there is a lack of planning or gross hubris on vw. I'm more pissed that nobody else in the industry looked into how VW had an effective monopoly over diesel cars for that long. You used to hear stories of engineers taking apart competitor's cars to see what made them tick, guess that doesn't happen anymore. Seems like the industry is paralyzed by sheer laziness now.
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Sep 21, 2015 19:16
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Did VW think no one would notice? How would they conceal it if they corrected it later? Seems there is a lack of planning or gross hubris on vw. Gross hubris? VW? Naaahhh 
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Sep 21, 2015 19:42
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CommieGIR posted:I just hope VW didn't just do another Cadillac to passenger diesels.... DPFs were pretty much the death knell for diesels in this decade. Cut emissions yes, but also cut power and mileage by a huge margin also. Although, the sooner that there are no longer assholes fogging up the road because they stood on the throttle the better.
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Sep 21, 2015 20:16
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veedubfreak posted:DPFs were pretty much the death knell for diesels in this decade. Cut emissions yes, but also cut power and mileage by a huge margin also. Although, the sooner that there are no longer assholes fogging up the road because they stood on the throttle the better. Unfortunately, the crowd doing that is the one driving the larger industrial diesels and are tuning their Dodge Rams to roll coal for kicks.
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Sep 21, 2015 20:18
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1500quidporsche posted:I'm more pissed that nobody else in the industry looked into how VW had an effective monopoly over diesel cars for that long. You used to hear stories of engineers taking apart competitor's cars to see what made them tick, guess that doesn't happen anymore. Seems like the industry is paralyzed by sheer laziness now. I always thought it was weird that VW, a company that can't even make a turn signal without filling it with coolant, somehow had the only engineers who could pass US diesel emissions without using urea injection.
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Sep 21, 2015 20:45
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I'm curious what brand value VW has left in the US now. Literally the only positive thing people said about them in recent years was their diesel engines.
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Sep 21, 2015 20:55
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1500quidporsche posted:I'm curious what brand value VW has left in the US now. Literally the only positive thing people said about them in recent years was their diesel engines. My brother loves VW's and buys their gas cars. Seriously. They're so bad to  But, well, he's happy, so I won't say anything. I just smile and laugh when he complains about putting $1500 into his old Toyota van with almost 300k km on it, as he drops 2k on stupid poo poo for his Passat with less than 40k km.
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Sep 21, 2015 21:27
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Siochain posted:My brother loves VW's and buys their gas cars. I love VW too but I'm not oblivious to the fact that their quality is in the shitter and they've lost their charm over the past 20 years. The GTI is a watered down bloated shadow of its former self. I've always thought that VW's problem was that it IKEAized itself and went for cheap and fashionable, while being relatively inoffensive but not something you would expect to last. There was a point (I think it was the Mk3 golf) where the coolant overflow tank went from being a shape purely dictated by the shape of the engine bay and packaging to this stupid ball with a bright blue cap and VW's font used for the warning. It looks like a storage container straight out of the IKEA catalogue. I always see that loving overflow tank when I'm at the junkyard and I like to think the moment the design for that stupid thing got approved was the moment VW fell. Some loving hipster engineer fresh out of university was more interested on making the engine bay look nice versus the functionality of it, so he sacrificed space and the Mk3 became just a little fatter to fit that stupid loving coolant tank in there versus designing one with space in mind, eventually everything suffered a death by a thousand cuts. That's when VW became poo poo.
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Sep 21, 2015 21:55
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Yesssss everyone on this page is literally on the same page (  ) about VW being the only diesel passenger car manufacturer that has/had a US presence.I guess it's easy to pass the weirdly restrictive emissions when you're cheating.
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Sep 21, 2015 22:06
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Phone posted:Yesssss everyone on this page is literally on the same page ( Somewhere the Mazda engineer whose job it was to federalize the mazda6 diesel is running to his bosses office yelling "see, I loving told you it was impossible."
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Sep 21, 2015 22:10
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Phone posted:Yesssss everyone on this page is literally on the same page ( Most people's first response when you mention the diesel Cruze is either "Really?" or "You mean they're trying to be like VW?"
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Sep 21, 2015 22:26
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nm posted:Somewhere the Mazda engineer whose job it was to federalize the mazda6 diesel is running to his bosses office yelling "see, I loving told you it was impossible." I fully expect that this is actually true. It will also be interesting to see the other fall out as the current euro emissions are similar to the US ones.
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Sep 21, 2015 22:37
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How not to drive at the 'Ring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z13vGps9yoY
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Sep 21, 2015 22:42
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Ether Frenzy posted:How not to drive at the 'Ring: Please tell me he survived because, gently caress.
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Sep 21, 2015 23:05
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1500quidporsche posted:There was a point (I think it was the Mk3 golf) where the coolant overflow tank went from being a shape purely dictated by the shape of the engine bay and packaging to this stupid ball with a bright blue cap and VW's font used for the warning. It looks like a storage container straight out of the IKEA catalogue. I always see that loving overflow tank when I'm at the junkyard and I like to think the moment the design for that stupid thing got approved was the moment VW fell. That coolant reservoir is in a ton of poo poo (pretty much everything VW made past ~1991, including stuff like the Eurovan) so I'm guessing they did that more to keep the unique parts cost down.
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Sep 21, 2015 23:13
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Quite a few manufacturers went to spherical coolant tanks around that time period. I think it has something to do with a semi-pressurized overflow system. The E250 and E350 of the same era did the same thing in fleet vehicles with the diesel engines.
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Sep 21, 2015 23:20
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Mister Kingdom posted:Please tell me he survived because, gently caress. Guy seems to be out and walking around at the end of the video, and the first attendant at the scene doesn't then check anyone inside, so it would seem he at least lived for a while
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Sep 21, 2015 23:51
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Ether Frenzy posted:Guy seems to be out and walking around at the end of the video, and the first attendant at the scene doesn't then check anyone inside, so it would seem he at least lived for a while They're called the walking dead, because even though they fell fine now and are walking around, once they get home their insurance company is going to kill them.
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Sep 22, 2015 00:14
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Powershift posted:They're called the walking dead, because even though they fell fine now and are walking around, once they get home their insurance company is going to kill them. Also the Ring management will be throwing the book at him for repairs to the track Manual supremacy 
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Sep 22, 2015 00:28
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did that guy get shot? he just lays down what?
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Sep 22, 2015 00:29
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So my guess is VW will have to update the software which will probably make the car drive worse and or/get worse mpg. Maybe a side of accelerated engine wear. Owners will sue, win, and VW will have to either buy back the cars or pay a lot of $$. EPA will take them to the cleaners, the fine will get mostly whittled down to ~1billion or so, and we will have a whole new set of regs for emissions and testing. VWs affected will sell at a discount as hipsters flee the brand for a few years and enthusiasts will buy them up and run custom maps that make them illegal again. How'd I do?
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Sep 22, 2015 01:02
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Mercury Ballistic posted:So my guess is VW will have to update the software which will probably make the car drive worse and or/get worse mpg. Maybe a side of accelerated engine wear. Owners will sue, win, and VW will have to either buy back the cars or pay a lot of $$. EPA will take them to the cleaners, the fine will get mostly whittled down to ~1billion or so, and we will have a whole new set of regs for emissions and testing. VWs affected will sell at a discount as hipsters flee the brand for a few years and enthusiasts will buy them up and run custom maps that make them illegal again. And then everyone will re-flash their ECUs anyways 
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Sep 22, 2015 01:07
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Mercury Ballistic posted:and enthusiasts will buy them up and run custom maps that make them illegal again. That was what I meant here
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Sep 22, 2015 01:13
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Seat Safety Switch posted:That coolant reservoir is in a ton of poo poo (pretty much everything VW made past ~1991, including stuff like the Eurovan) so I'm guessing they did that more to keep the unique parts cost down. One of the things I admire about old VW was how creative they've managed to be despite being limited to parts bin engineering for the majority of its history, I've got no issue with it being a standardized part. What I do take issue with is it looking like this:  Geirskogul posted:Quite a few manufacturers went to spherical coolant tanks around that time period. I think it has something to do with a semi-pressurized overflow system. The E250 and E350 of the same era did the same thing in fleet vehicles with the diesel engines. What's the engineering advantage of the bright blue cap? I'll admit its a stupid thing to be mad at but it does bother me for whatever reason that they took a functional part and turned it into some bauhaus design piece. F1DriverQuidenBerg fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 01:29
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Hah that looks like an big ol spice jar.
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Sep 22, 2015 01:58
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