Wow. The fact is nothing would have happened because the car would keep running for years to come.
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Look at all the GM 5.3 and 6.2 engines eating lifters and camshaft. You are living in a fools paradise
Back then my oil of choice was Castrol GTX10W30. I used it for decades until my current car. It calls for “Dexos” full syn 05W20. Now Chevy says 0w20is ok! I’m going to stick with 5w20.
I had to replace a broken speedo cable on my vw. I figured it out. It ran from the Speedo through the wheel hub. The cotter pin was the tell tale.
Having some interest in a new car lately and being concerned about the engine problems across manufacturers, several sources point to the epa standards and the attempt to deal with them. Close tolerances, microscopic, metal shavings, direct. Injection, four cylinders with turbos instead of a v6, start/stop, etc. So I remain unimpressed with all the new sheet metal out there, yet gonna have to do something. Could vw be worse than ford?
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I was the one who posted “lubricating the Speedometer Cable…” It was one of my 1954 Dodge Meadowbrook (with the Red Ram Hemi…) maintenance requirements (along with lubricating the leaf springs…) But the one detail I disliked the most was checking the brake fluid level…
You had to remove the driver’s side rubber mat, unscrew a port hole in the floor, and there was the master cylinder??? Not the first time I checked it… All I saw was caked on mud, dirt, and road debris… I poked a screwdriver into the debris and hit the master cylinder… washed it off, brushed it off, and dried it off and when I got the cover off, I poked the screwdriver in and it barely came up wet… Went and got a flashlight and talk about the “Black Hole of Calcutta”…
With a long neck funnel, I emptied that contents of a brake fluid can and I still could not see the fluid level… Went and got another can and it was finally filled up… The car was 11-years old when I got it and when I told my neighbor (who sold it to me…) about it, he said, “What master cylinder?” he never checked it…
And as I wrote other times about this wonderful old car, my neighbor always had trouble starting it on cold wintery mornings back in New York State. I found out a couple of years later that the gas station owner who serviced this car, would mix straight 30w oil in for winter oil changes… His way to pump up Winter Battery Jump Service Calls… probably never checked the brake fluid level either…
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But, that was in The Good Old Days, when cars were just… better 
… according to one or two people in this forum. Surely, having the master cylinder buried underneath the floor was a good thing!
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Between those particular 2 choices . . . I’d choose Ford
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There is a 1950s or 60s car that has it buried worse than the VW Type 1. I can’t recall what car it is.
I worked a a large lab and the head of one of the departments was a Dr Seuss. He pronounced his last name as “Seese” though. I often wondered if he changed the pronunciation to separate himself from the children’s author.
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In the summer of ‘77 car journalist P.J O’rourke wrote about driving a 56 buick for a friend frim Crescent city Florida tivLA and fresh out of a barn that car had bad points, thermostat issues, and vapor lock. Luckily everyplace they broke down someone who’d owned one just like it would offer to help. So short notice they packed no tools or parts but eventually found parts.vthe last straw was reverse going out once they’d arrived and had to circle the block and try again. Pj grew up in a Buick family owning a dealer in Ohio.
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Conversely, the head of the Restaurant and Hotel Mgt. Dept. at the local community college was Dr. Pepper. He was very good-natured about people constantly making comments about his name.
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In 1970, I had a '60 Pontiac Catalina, 389, with a 4-speed Hydra-Matic, a really nice riding car… I was driving from Albany NY to Buffalo, NY, about 300-miles. Suddenly, without notice the engine just quit, no sputter, no backfire, just as if I had turned the engine off… I figured it had to be electrical… My friend who had all the automotive savvy of a worm, said I probably put the rotor in backwards… 
Luckily the day was relatively nice and it was still daylight… Sure enough there was no spark. I had heard of something from an old mechanic and for some reason I checked the points and sure enough, the contact on the swing arm on the points was gone…
With a pair of needle nose plier making a slight adjustment to the arm and playing with the dwell setting, I was able to get the car started and we limped into Syracuse and bought new point at an auto parts store. And of course, my friend told the parts guy, I would not have had to replace the points if I had not put the rotor cap in backwards… 
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When I was in college, I had a Physics Professor buy the name of Harold Hu (pronounced “You”). On the first day of class, he told us that we may call him, “Mr Hu”, or “Professor Hu”, or “Doctor Hu” but we may not call him “Hey Hu”.
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There was a long-time baseball columnist (now retired) at the Baltimore Sun. The lead in for his first column was something like:
My name is Peter Schmuck. No, it’s not a pseudonym, it’s my real name…
Your come back shoulda been: “How did it run earlier in the day?”
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Except 0W-20 wasn’t available or even thought of back in “the good old days”. So absolutely no relevance to the discussion.
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You’re complaining about one company’s apparently-poor engine design. Somehow… engines in many models made by Honda/Acura, Toyota/Lexus, Mazda, Nissan, Subaru, Ford, and Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep seem to do just fine with the same grade of oil.
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My mom was an Actuarial for an insurance company back in the day, so she saw tons of names, the ones that made her laugh the most was the Legs family 2 sons, Harry and Fuzzy… Yes that was their real names…
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Rick has tunnel vision, since he sees ONE engine family’s failure and therefore he thinks it is the oil causing it instead of the engine design, and the same for brakes, he thinks that because most of semis run drum brakes that they are best for automobiles and light trucks…
Funny, I called him out on the fact that semis also run straight front axles and air brakes, so why are they not being used in automobiles and light trucks…
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