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I'm vastly amused by the fact that this Italian supercar is humbled by the same annoying automatic seatbelts that I, to this day, cannot stand. It was DOT regulation at the time, so all US-market cars in 1991 had them, but ... you just don't think about that when you think about Ferraris.

Incidentally, "testa rossa" is Italian for "redhead" -- I believe it was a reference to the fact that at least some of these had red valve covers (or something like that -- anyone know?) in the engine. Most are red to go with the meaning of the name.

Don't care much for the wheels. I'd think a good set of BBS wheels, like the ones on this car, would be nicer. But if you have that much money to spend on a car, you have the money to drop $1500 on a good set of wheels and tires.

I've got no plans in the immediate future to chip my Golf 2.0, but I did put in GTI headlamps with fog lights (cost me all of $250 buying parts used; I now have much better lighting in bad weather.) When the car's ten years old and the powertrain warranty runs out, I'll swap in a VR6 engine and a Tiptronic tranny. It'll cost $5,000-$7,000 I'm sure, but that's a lot cheaper than a new car.

Yep, just about any VW engine will fit in any VW body. All the mount points are there.

Then there's big brake kits, those Bosch Xenon HID upgrades you mentioned (1,300 or so for a Golf/GTI), adding the MFA computer to a car that didn't come with it (now that's a very cool hack -- someone on the VW site I'm on has done it), etc. etc. ...

I've played with a VAG-COM on my car. Nifty. :)

Are you a Vortexer?

Check out this article [theregister.co.uk]. A VW dealership is suing for a post on a message board. Both the poster and the message board have been named in the trial.

Oh, by the way, that thread's still active, and now has nearly one thousand posts on it--of course they're overwhelmingly in favor of the defendants in the suit...

Given the page views at vwvortex, i'm sure many have heard of the lawsuit that the Jim Ellis VW dealership in Atlanta, Georgia brought against George Mantis. The dealership sued Mantis recently, alleging that the comments Mantis posted to a VW web forum were libelous/slanderous.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you have a read (although the length of the thread at this point easily rivals some of the longest ever seen even on /.). It started out with a few disgruntled customers, and when the dealership tried to snuff the thread by serving papers to both Mantis and VWvortex, it became a giant stink, with international media coverage and even a grassroots legal defense fund. If you look at the timestamps about 7 pages in, you really get a sense of how fast and across how many vectors information can travel.

FYI: The dealership seems to be backtracking now, and supposedly will be in settlement talks this Friday. Hopefully this translates into an even stronger position for Mantis to deal from.

This article is actually about Volkswagen's diesel technology history and how TDI (Turbo Direct Injection) came about and how it's changed over the past 25 years. After the history lesson, they go on to discuss what they're going to do with diesel in the next few years. Even though this revolves mostly around VW, they were one of the 1st companies to use it succesfully in non-commercial vehicles and they're an industry leader in the technology now.

I've got a 2000 2.0L Golf GLS (it's white, and I love it!). Just to see if I should indeed regretting not purchasing a TDI due to the 44/49 ratings, I computed the monthly payment on a TDI (on my current loan) and the 2.0L that I got because gasoline is far easier to find where I am and because the up-front cost was lower.

It turned out that the answer is no; there is no cost savings, at least on my 36-month loan, if I had done so. I pay about $490 a month; a TDI would have cost about $540 monthly. The extra $50 in monthly payments is about the same as what fuel costs, depending on how I drive and what the fuel prices are.

This goes to show that until diesels either sell closer to the cost of a standard gasoline engine, or the price of gasoline and the price of diesel diverge significantly more, many others will also decide to keep the utility and easy fuel availability of a standard gas engine. Furthermore, under current US laws, diesel fuel is higher in sulphur than the fuels available in Europe, so diesel vehicles do put out more pollution. This can be solved by better fuel-content regulations.

On the other hand, I hear the TDI gets a lot of oomph if you put an Upsolute chip in it. :)

Are you on the VWVortex.com forums? :)

VW doesn't stop you from going out and putting a different head unit in your car (in fact, some people I know on an owner's board have put in RioCars or whatever they're called these days), but dealers can't run their diagnostic system on the car most of the time if you've done this. The Jetta and Golf (and I suspect the New Beetle, Passat, Cabrio, and Eurovan "suffer" the same problem) depend on the stereo for some of the system functions.

Is that restrictive bundling? Or is it done for a good reason? I personally wonder why the designers didn't better allow for the possibility of aftermarket upgrades.

the link http://www.vwvortex.com/news/07_00/07_03/index.htm l

I have a VW TDI Jetta and love it. ITs clean quiet and peppy (I can't call it fast since I had a GTI before the diesel)