>A good VW shop in North Vancouver is now recommending to it's
>customers NOT
> to purchaseVanagons as they are "too old" and some replacement parts
> difficult if not impossible to get.
> Your comments please?

from a purely practical point of view, they are correct ...
i would not recommend any of my friends (who are not vanagon nuts) buy
anything more than five years old. certainly no more than ten years
old.

why?

simple ... dealers are in the business to make money. they do NOT want
to stock a lot of parts for old cars. the vw dealer here has NO
aircooled parts at all in stock, and NO vanagon parts in stock. not
even an oil filter. so if i drove my vanagon into the dealer for an
oil change, it would sit there until a special-ordered oil filter came
in. and that's IF the service department decided to do the work.

and it's not just vanagons or volkswagons. Ford and Chevy and Mercedes
and Toyota and Honda all do the same here. they have no one who is
familiar with the older cars, and don't want to take the liability of
having some hotshot young mechanic screw it up because he thought it
was like the new ones.

and it's getting worse. new cars today are pretty much NOT capable of
being worked on by the owner at home. you have to have special tools,
special electronic devices for diagnosis, and a lift to be able to get
at things more easily.
i'm not saying that it can't be done, but that it is getting harder
and harder and harder.
an oil change on a beetle was easy. oil change on a vanagon is MUCH
easier. oil change on a honda is a royal pain, and you can't even do
it without a set of ramps at the minimum. :(

so, from a business standpoint, i suspect that it would be true all
over the country, perhaps even around the world: old cars are not
profitable. so the dealers would rather NOT work on them. :(

unca joel