On Sunday, June 16, 2019 at 11:52:27 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sun, 16 Jun 2019 21:07:17 -0600, rbowman
wrote:

On 06/16/2019 07:38 PM, wrote:
BMW is a whole other thing. It means Bring More Wampum. A ****ing
battery can cost you $500 by the time you get out the door. .

That philosophy has carried over to their bikes.

Pretty soon you figure out why they lost the war. Everything German is
very expensive, over engineered and hard to maintain.
One exception might be the old VW bugs but even they had some strange
stuff, like threaded exhaust fittings. Then of course there was the
gas tank, guaranteed to arrive first at the crash.

IDK about that. The most failure prone thing in Mercedes with automatic
air conditioning from the 70s is this automated widget that controls
the heat and cooling. It's about the size of a grapefruit, has a motor,
gear drive that rotates through positions that make and break circuits
to control the fan, compressor, defrost, etc and it also activates the
vacuum lines that control the flaps. And part of it is a valve through
which circulate hot engine coolant, it controls the flow to the heater
core. Can't see any problems with that thing, right? Electric, vacuum,
hot engine coolant all in one complex place? They had horrible failures,
typically leaking when the plastic housing cracked. When they were
last available they were $750. And who made that? Not MB, but Chrysler
they designed it for their Imperials. But I can see why the Germans
liked it, enormously complicated, elegant and precise when it works.