I think with pickup trucks there lingers a perception that bigger will do more work… or maybe a perception that other truck owners will be under the impression that the driver of a bigger truck does more work. The “mine’s bigger than yours” perception. Except for the less common uses of pulling cabin cruisers, 4-horse trailers, flatbed trailers with front end loaders, or 40’ fifth-wheel campers, where mass really does count, the old pickups were just as capable.
Hopefully Ford bringing the Ranger back will reverse the “bigger truck” trend. I liked my small trucks.
The condition for having a VW franchise was a commitment to have one year’'s supply of parts in stock. VW did not want to fall in the same trap as the others.
Also mechanics had to be VW trained.
In the fifties, wile hitchhiking my car was laid up. A couple in a beetle gave me a ride.
Along the way there was something they had to checkout on the car and the wife went to the glove compartment to find the closest dealer. We had lunch while they did whatever needed checking., if the car had needed a normal wear part, the dealer had it in stock.
If you drove a GM import like a Vauxhall, the dealer would not likely have trained staff and parts would take forever.
I suspect your Rabbit from the 1970s had K-Jetronic
If so . . . that was NOT electronic fuel injection. It was mechanical. The later KE-Jetronic had some electronics, but it was still essentially a mechanical fuel injection system.
If it had D-Jetronic, that was a very early electronic fuel injection, but I don’t think this is what your Rabbit had
Although front wheel drive existed since the horseless carriage era, I think it was the original Honda Civic that really made it the standard for small cars.
Yes, the original Mini Cooper was FWD but it didn’t really start the FWD revolution.
In 1968, Yamaha introduced the DT-1, a purpose built 250cc one cylinder off road motorcycle that was street legal. It revolutionized the off road motorcycle market. Suddenly all the scramblers that were essentially street bikes with block pattern tires and high exhaust pipes were obsolete.
Supposedly, you could assemble a complete car from the parts (both mechanical and body parts) that VW dealers had in stock. Obviously, they didn’t have a belly pan/chassis sitting in their parts dept., but they supposedly stocked everything else.
Yes, I was very impressed when in my university town a VW dealership started up. Nice building, well trained staff. Lots of service space!
I compared it with a Renault and Skoda dealership which were really gas stations with minimal inventory and even less trained staff.
A dentist friend bought a Jaguar XKE in the sixties and the BMC (British Motor Corporation, the parent ) supposedly was to service it. They could not and the dentist bought $800 worth of tools, a lot in those days, and trained himself to do tune ups, etc.
In my neck of the woods, there was an NSU dealership that really was just a small gas station, and it wasn’t even on a main road. Buried in the midst of a residential area where few outsiders visited, it was just not a good location for a dealership.
This gas station began selling the NSU Prinz (which was actually a decent-quality little car) circa 1970, and after just a few years, their VW “parent” merged NSU with Auto Union, in order to re-create the old Audi marque. At that point, the gas station ceased to be a car dealership.
miata – the quinessential roadster or girl car, depending on who you ask
The British invented it. Americans tried to build it. The Japanese perfected it. Now, the Italians rebadge it
For me, the fifth generation Civic changed my perception, and led me to buy a sixth generation Civic.
Before the fifth generation, the Civic was an unreliable econobox. After that, it became a zippy economy car with a decent power to weight ratio, and after seeing a couple friends buy and enjoy their fifth generation Civics, it made an impression on me.