I forgot to say that the previous car, the Golf, I used daily for more
than 45 years and only stopped using it when I had stupidly not
bothered to fix the known leaking windscreen and it eventually
rusted the floor and I couldnt be arsed to cut that out and replace it.

That is a fantastic life for a car that is used every day.

And it required very little in the way of repairs in that time, just
an alternator regulator, distributor thing and an indicator relay.

The distributor arm was almost certainly due to me choosing to
remove it to prevent theft of the car when I was away from home
without taking the car. And the car never spent any time in the
garage or carport either, because I never got around to building one.

My cars have generally had the normal wear and tyre things (brake
pads/discs, tyres, cambelt (and water pump*) at recommended mileage) that
you would expect. My previous Peugeot had to have a new "fanbelt" and that
replacement one lasted only a few thousand miles before it failed. On closer
inspection, it was found that one of the pulleys had warped, *causing* the
second (and probably the first) belt to fail. Sadly garage (the local one in
my village) denied liablility, so I had to pay for both belts and (more
importantly) the labour to fit them.

My present Pug had a failed clutch actuator mechanism (**) - failed in-gear
as I was setting off at the head of a queue of traffic at lights, so without
the ability to disengage the clutch, the car was stuck in gear and I was
stuck blocking the junction. Embarrassing. And this car has had various
problems with its anti-pollution system - extra complexity leads to extra
failure points. A new diesel particulate filter and a new cat (at the same
time) are not nice bills to have to pay for :-(

Still, it's going strong now and is worth a lot more to me as a car than its
resale value.

That's a standard symptom of clutch wear.

Sure, I meant I havent seen that level of wear in any car of mine.

I suppose it you don't do much stop-start driving or having to hill-start on
steep hills, the clutch wear will be less than mine. There is a notorious
1:3 hill near where I used to live and twice I've had to stop and restart
when the car in front of me has got into difficulties. Setting off is
"interesting" on a 1:3 hill: you need good handbrake/clutch/accelerator
coordination. I tried not to think about the wear that it would be putting
on the clutch.

Ah. I remember my first two fuel-injected cars in the 1990s had a big
rotary variable resistor under the bonnet, roughly where a carburettor
used to be, operated by a Bowden cable. I've just checked my present car
and I can't see any sign of something like that so they've stopped doing
it that way now.

Yeah, very crude approach to morphing the design IMO. What brands ?

VW Gold Mark III (1992), Peugeot 306 with the non-HDi engine (1995).


(*) Since the water pump is driven from the cambelt, the garage advises that
while they have dismantled everything to replace the cambelt, they should
replace the water pump even if it seems to be OK, since the cost of the pump
is much less than the labour to replace it later on - kill two birds with
one stone.

(**) Functionally equivalent to the clutch cable snapping. I think the pedal
connects by cable to an intermediate hydraulic actuator which in turn moves
the clutch plate, rather than the cable being directly connected.