On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 9:40 PM, Tom Hargrave <thargrav@hiwaay.net> wrote:
I'd say that the VANAGON is no easier to maintain than any other German car
made in the 80's

  Whaa?  You ever work on a Porsche 928?   That was the most tedious car
imaginable.   An absolute nightmare of interconnected relays, shunts,
system-interconnections.   There are three full volumes on the electrical
system alone, each longer than the Vangaon Bently....and the full vehicle
set of manuals is 9 or 10 volumes...   Even Porsche dealers refused to work
on them quite often...32 valves, 4 camshafts, a serpentine timing belt
turning the whole valve train that required frequent service, only
accomplished by taking the whole front of the vehicle off...
    In order to work on anything under the car...You have to jack em up to
even LOOK underneath, and then remove a full belly pan that was fastened on
with a 'wonderful' assortment of fasteners types and lengths onto brittle
plastic extrusions and inserts, most often completely mangled and screwed
up by previous mechanical attempts...

  The 944 Porsche was also a pain in the butt, but only about half as
difficult as the V8 928....still about 10 times harder to service than the
Vanagon.  The 993 (a 911 Porsche variant) was probably not unlike working
on the Vanagon, other than having a lot more performance packed into a
vehicle half the size and weight...Anyone who's worked on a WBX motor would
be familiar with the problems inherent in the 993....but in the vanagon,
you just put a wrench on it and go....in the P-cars, you must first
disassemble a significant portion of the vehicle in order to get that
wrench on whatever you are trying to maintain....

  The Vanagon IS a remarkably user-friendly vehicle to maintain.