>
> "Rubber Headgaskets"?   What were they thinking when they built that?
>

I think it's a fundamental difference in philosophy of Automobile Ownership
between we North Americans and Germans, a sort of "diligent maintenance" vs
"fix it when it breaks" mindset. It seems to me that an automotive engineer
here would look at the waterboxer design and say "What happens when they use
hose water instead of 50:50 coolant and you get corrosion, or worse, when
there's a coolant leak and they drive it a little after that?" I imagine the
German engineer would look at him with bug-eyed astonishment and say, "WHY
would anyone DO that?!?" Even the base model Vanagon is heavily instrumented
compared to (say) an 82 Oldsmobile with nothing but a TEMP idiot light that
really ought to read THAR SHE BLOWS. A coolant level sensor is essentially
UNHEARD OF for  domestic cars of that vintage, but VW engineers clearly felt
it was necessary for catching problems BEFORE they cripple the vehicle.

>  Does anyone know why they never brought the South African inline motor to
> world wide production for the vanagon?

I believe the SA inline powered Transporter was developed BECAUSE there was
no longer world-wide production of the Transporter and the wasserboxer was
NLA. VWSA probably looked at the T4 and said "Nah... I think we'll just
update the T3" and gave it a new engine, bigger side windows, and a new
dashboard.

--
John Bange