At 10:40 AM 7/30/98, Sam Scholten wrote:

[snip]

>However, you can't ignore the fact that our friends in Congress
>slapped that sorry-ass 25% import duty on foreign trucks in 1971. Now,
>I'm just as pro-labor as the next guy, but I think that the American
>truck market is nationalistic enough to want to keep buying American
>(trust me, folks) and thus, UAW had no worries about this. However,
>the fraction of the population that comprises the Transporter's market
>gets penalized... and European countries get pissed because they can't
>sell their products here, and slap their own duties on U.S. products.
>

        Hmmm...I could have sworn that the "ChickenTax" applied ONLY to
        commercial grade vehicles like cargo vans and trucks, NOT passenger
        vans.

        Nevertheless, VWs pricing of the EuroVan *IS* outrageous...but
        so is the prospect of replacing the powertrain in one of our
        Vanagons given the Eurospec conversion as an example. To consider
        committing to teh Eurospec conversion for my 90/91 Camper, I'd have
        to have the automatic transmission rebuilt, as well...I figure that
        the whole shebang could well reach $10K! Then I'd have a mechanically
        perfect(?) Vanagon Camper with O miles on the engine/transmission
and
        103K miles on everything else.

      OLTECO                         Ari Ollikainen
      P.O. BOX 3688                  Networking Technology and Architecture
      Stanford, CA                   Ari@OLTECO.com
      94309-3688                     415.517.3519