The Sunday News
Lovert Mafukure
Japan has been churning out many used cars into the Zimbabwean market over the years and hundreds of thousands of used Japanese cars have found homes in our garages. Japanese cars are somewhat cheap and reliable most of the time.
They have proven over time that they are nice simple cars that are not complicated at all although you will find some rotten eggs in each basket.
European cars are not really as popular as Japanese cars for a few reasons I have come across.
Some of the finest cars in the world are born out of Germany. Germany for years has tried to outdo itself with fine luxury and reliable vehicles.
Overtime however, the reliability standard has gone down.
Remember the VW Beetle, the Old beetle not the latest wanna-be supercar from the science fiction movies? Yes, that one. The first beetle was made in 1945 under the directive of Adolf Hitler.
The beetle to this day is the longest running car ever made. Some 21 million of them were made and now they have become rare collectibles and a lot of them still run on their original platform with original engines.
That says a lot about German engineering of old.
One wonders where they went wrong with their design because they made a car that was good enough to last over half a century but now all you hear about VW is emissions scandals and Golfs catching fire! Hitler must be turning in his grave!
The Golf 1 that replaced the beetle in 1974 still runs up to this day. A few original VW Golfs are running all over the world. It is evident that the German engineering of old is indeed everlasting.
Too much plastic dominates the German engineering of today.
Most of the good things about German engineering have been replaced with plastic.
One engineer once said that German cars are over-engineered; the Germans do not believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
They have complicated solutions to simple problems. A mechanic who has ever worked on a VW will testify to that fact.
An example is the famous VW Golf Mk4. They used too much plastic on it, the door panels start breaking, cabby holes break on all of them, thermostat housings break, crack and leak, cars overheat and it’s an endless cycle of problems.
Millions of plastic parts are used in door mechanisms too and in no time they start breaking and disintegrating. The reliability standards have gone down over the years and the cars have just become a pain.
Most German cars come with many plastic parts that give in to pressure and break or simply just crack.
If I was a businessman I would want to be a German, if I was a consumer I wouldn’t buy German but go straight JDM! Here is why, you see, the Germans are clever, they know if they use plastic parts you will keep on having to replace the thermostat housings because overtime due to plastic expansion and contraction they crack.
You keep on making them money long after you buy your car if you want to keep it running. You just become their cash-cow.
They keep milking you. It’s the same for all these German cars, BMW, VW, Audi you name them.
The Japanese on the other hand make trouble-free cars. You would wonder if they even make money because some of their cars just do not break down . . . we know those die hard Toyotas.
It is a documented fact that in the 70s, the British Motor Company BMC was making losses with every sale of every mini. Reliability wasn’t all that well up with European cars and their cars kept breaking down until the introduction of Japanese cars which are simple, efficient and up to the task.
To this day, cars like Toyotas still live up to their reputation.
I have noticed a disturbing trend with cars from Europe.
They record mileage in miles and not kilometres and a lot of them come with very high mileage. Some of them you see with mileage as high as 200 000 miles! That is well over 300 000km and people will think these are kilometres.
The majority of the folk up in Europe use their cars a lot more than our eastern friends and while mileage fraud is rampant in the East . . . their tidiness makes up for it.
I mean you can literally get a car in showroom condition but it will be well over 100 000kms and over 10 years old. In Africa it’s a different story, a car with 10 000km looks battered, maybe it’s our roads! Yeah let us blame it on the potholes.
Without proper spares back up on all these European cars, owning one sometimes proves disastrous.
If I had to choose between European and Japanese, I would go for JDM because of the simplicity. Simple engineering and simple solutions to simple problems.
They build cars to last in Japan and not for one to keep knocking at the dealer’s gate for some repair work.
So, Europeans did it once, they made all the reliably strong cars in decades past.
The Peugeots, those 504s and 404s, strong cars and today they still run, but along the way, they lost it somehow and by the turn of the century the Toyota corolla was the worst best-selling car world over for one simple reason.
It was a simple car, with simple engineering and simple solutions to its simple problems maybe the Europeans need to learn a thing or two from that.
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