10 ms·

A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

350 points by visviva 1y ago

haunter 1y ago
https://archive.li/yl7z2 https://archive.li/yl7z2
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Some previous discussions: 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489
- dang 1y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 - July 2023 (303 comments) A few things to know before stealing my 914 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 - April 2022 (417 comments)
fallinditch 1y ago
This story reminds me that I have a recurring nightmare: I am driving a car and the brakes hardly work at all, so I am in constant fear that something will go terribly wrong. This nightmare was born from a real experience with my first vehicle, a VW micro bus that had horribly squishy brakes.
- RHSeeger 1y ago
  Many years ago, I was driving down the highway on my way to work and, when I pressed the breaks to slow down, the pedal just... went straight to the floor. I had to use the emergency break to slow down, get off the highway, and pull over. Luckily that still worked (I've owned many a car where that was the first thing to go). So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it inspected the previous day... and they didn't mention anything was wrong. I did not go back to that inspection place again.
  - fallinditch 1y ago
    Wow you were lucky. There was a driver in the UK whose accelerator got stuck, then his brakes burnt out and he was on a notoriously busy road traveling at 135mph - he survived! See https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-m-doing-135mph-and-can-t-stop-6106928.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-...
    - wat10000 1y ago
      This is what happened to quite a few people with the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. There was speculation that it was caused by bugs in the engine control unit. Officially the cause was found to be floor mats coming loose and holding the accelerator down. (I bought a new Toyota shortly after this and the dealer was very careful to show me how the floor mats worked and how to make sure they were properly attached.) The brakes of a car in good working order should be able to overcome the engine and stop the car even if the engine is stuck at full power. But you have to do it decisively. Push the brake pedal to the floor and keep it there until you've stopped. What often happens is people are (very naturally) confused and not sure what to do, they'll brake but not hard enough, stop braking when it doesn't seem to work, try again, etc. This can heat up the brakes to the point where they're no longer effective enough to stop the car, and then you're really in for it.
      - red369 1y ago
        I agree with what you said about brakes overcoming the engine. I've seen tests which show it works on even monstrously over-powered cars, but it can feel like it's not working and if the driver reacts wrongly to that, then it may no longer work. I think stopping the power from going to the wheels needs to be an easy option. I wish there was more importance given to being able to easily do this. I think the two options are shifting to neutral, or turning off the engine. I tested in a late-00s automatic BMW, and you had to hold the start/stop button for what felt like a very long time to turn the engine off if the car was in Drive. In an emergency, I think most people would give up long before it turned off. In that car, it was easy to change to neutral though, so I don't have a criticism about that design. What concerns me is cars with the same approach for the start/stop button, but where it is hard to get to neutral. I think in the Toyotas which had unintended acceleration issues, it wasn't easy/intuitive. Edit: Another comment reminded me of something I forgot to mention above. You don't want turning off the engine to be the first resort because you lose power steering, and eventually, power assisted brakes.
- CitrusFruits 1y ago
  I have that exact same nightmare! The harder I press on the brake, the less it does, as if the brake power is following a logarithmic curve. Although I don't really know why I have that dream, no specific experience comes to mind.
- thr0w 1y ago
  Yeah I have the squishy/very soft/not really working brake nightmare.
  - fallinditch 1y ago
    Perhaps symbolizes a feeling of being out of control in some aspect of one's life? By all accounts quite common: https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamInterpretation/comments/nnndju/car_brakes_barely_work_everytime_i_drive_in_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamInterpretation/comments/nnndju...
    - thr0w 1y ago
      Less interested in interpretation, more interested in the fact that lots of people have the same nightmares (squishy brakes, class test and you haven't been to school in decades, etc.). Here's one - I desperately need to make a phone call or send a text or enter an address into Maps, but I just make typos over and over. Anyone else?
- Stratoscope 1y ago
  My first girlfriend, Kate, bought an old VW Bug for $200 from someone on Page Mill Road up the hill from Palo Alto. I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling. Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too. With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke." Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop. The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on. Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother. Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it. I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor. Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job." We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name. Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop. Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way. Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
- hn_acc1 1y ago
  Same here.. I'm usually driving some conglomerate of my first 3 cars (all VWs) - MK1 Jetta GLI, MK2 Golf GTi 16v or VR6 Corrado (or sometimes a Scirocco which is related to the Corrado). And gear shifts are like 30-50cm long, and then the brakes start to fade.. I stopped having that dream nearly as often when I bought my '05 Subaru Legacy GT wagon. What's even stranger is that my current Kia Stinger (a fun car!) becomes an exotic Maserati or Aston Martin or Jaguar in my dreams..
- bluGill 1y ago
  The only time my brakes went out on my I happened to be towing a 10,000lbs trailer. I was able to use the trailer brakes only for 10 miles of stop and go traffic (rural freeway under construction, the backup started just past the previous exit, and of course the brakes were working until then). I never want that to happen again.
- gdevenyi 1y ago
  Fun fact, the VW microbus has the same engine as this Porsche.
- wildzzz 1y ago
  A teenager slammed a beat up Chrysler 200 into the back of my rental car. Once he managed to get the door open, he said something along the lines of "yeah the brakes don't work so well". Of course this was in Florida so there was never any expectation for his car to ever have working brakes. Luckily I paid for the LDW on the rental so it was not my problem.
- kerblang 1y ago
  My driving nightmares, in order: - I am utterly fucking shitfaced drunk and having great difficulty with reality in general - I am completely blind, albeit sober - I am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) - I am going uphill, but the hill keeps getting steeper, until finally I am completely vertical, and to my surprise, traffic is passing me - Don't ask me how I know, but I have entered a no-oxygen zone and have to get out of there before I pass out
  - throwaway173738 1y ago
    Are you sure you’re not having flying dreams?
  - throwaway422432 1y ago
    - I am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) Yeah, this one with the added bonus of having the whole family in the car - and for some reason I'm not steering at all for a lot of the time. Weird dream.
  - RandomBacon 1y ago
    > am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) That's the only driving dream I have ever had.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  Had a 84' Chrysler LeBaron. Brakes went out on the way home from work. Managed to get it to the closet auto body shop. They had it for three days, charged me $1,200 for a new master cylinder and a bunch of other stuff I didn't know I needed. I paid $500 for the car and tried to tell them to do the absolute minimum to get it going. Apparently that was the minimum. Drove it home, brakes worked like a dream. Got up next morning, third stop light, brake goes all the way to the floor, I'm drifting into the intersection. I panic, look both ways and gun it through safely. Drove that thing with brakes barely working back to the shop. Calmly told them whatever they did? Didn't work. Same thing. Another $800 bill, this time the brakes worked for a few more days, then it happened again. I took it to another shop. The mechanic asked what they told me they did and what they charged me for. I showed them both invoices. He pulled me aside with my car still on the lift and whispered to me, "Look man, they didn't do anything. They just filled the brake fluid up. When it all leaked back out is why your brakes kept going out. Imma fix this for a super discounted rate, but you need to get a lawyer, you got lucky not getting into an accident or killed." I sued the shop, got all my money back and then some. About six months after they settled my suit, I got a call from the local paper asking why I sued them because they were doing a story on the shop scamming hundreds of people out of tens of thousands of dollars.
- red369 1y ago
  I've had that recurring nightmare too - I forgot about that! I've only had a little real world experience with it. I'm curious if anyone has had the nightmare without having experienced it in real life. I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster. Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.
nlawalker 1y ago
It's like developer onboarding, but documented.
- stavros 1y ago
  What an absolutely fantastic comment, bravo.
wingspar 1y ago
“ Since there is not a clutch safety switch on the starting circuit, make sure to press the clutch down before you try to crank the engine.” Growing up, a friends dad would use this as a ‘feature’ on his Datsun to move the car out of traffic when it wouldn’t restart. Put it in first, release the clutch, crank the starter, and move the car out of the way.
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Isn’t this why you cannot push start cars anymore?
  - cafard 1y ago
    No. The clutch must be in when you start to roll the car--the car won't budge otherwise. You get it rolling, turn the ignition to on, then let out the clutch. I suppose that a 1980s Corolla was the last car I drift-started, though.
  - toast0 1y ago
    You should still be able to push start a newer manual transmission car. Put in the clutch, put the key to run, put it in 1st (or so), get it up to speed, let the clutch out, and now the engine is turning, which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine. If your electrical system is really bad, maybe the alternator can't get the voltage high enough to run everything; if your car is very modern maybe the engine control computer won't start up and control the engine before the engine stalls out because of lack of fuel and spark (or the fuel pump doesn't develop enough pressure in time); or maybe the computer just won't do it. In a traditional automatic with a hydraulic torque converter between the engine and the gearing, you've got a problem: most transmissions use hydraulic pressure to actuate the gear selection, and hydraulic pressure is typically developed by turning of the input shaft. Some older automatics had a secondary pump to develop hydraulic pressure from turning of the output shaft. In those cars, you could select first gear, turn the ignition to run, and if you got it moving fast enough, it would develop pressure, actuate first gear, and then the transmission could turn the engine and off you were. Some references suggest pushing in neutral and selecting first when ready to start. References say you need to get up to about 15-25 mph for that; my VW Vanagon which shares the same engine type as the 914 (and is therefore a rear-engine sports car) can start the engine from a much slower roll; the speedometer rests at 10 mph, so who knows how fast I'm going, but probably walking speed.
Zhenya 1y ago
The author was my undergrad professor for Internal Combustion Engines class. He was equally entertaining and knowledgeable in class.
_whiteCaps_ 1y ago
The author was the Concept Engineer on the Miata, so it seems like he took all of the lessons and applied them well. DYK Miata is a recursive acronym? It stands for: Miata Is Always The Answer.
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
  Neat! I had no idea about his role w/ the Miata. Found another charming article by him on the same site while searching: https://www.hagerty.com/media/driving/i-helped-make-the-first-miata-and-now-i-love-its-ancestor/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/driving/i-helped-make-the-firs...
- zamadatix 1y ago
  In case anyone takes that literally: "Miata Is Always The Answer" is tongue in cheek backronym by gearheads.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I've always loved that site. I have a friend that had a 914, and sent it to him. Made his day.
geoffeg 1y ago
I used to own an MG B GT, which was always in a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. One day I drove it to a nicer restaurant where I learned they only allowed valet parking. I urged the attendant to make an exception for me, but he refused. I shrugged, got out and it immediately stalled. I explained a few things to him, like not being shy about using the choke even after it was warmed up and running and a quick shot of throttle before putting it in gear to keep it from stalling, etc. Then I stood back and watched the poor guy lurch it past the rows of cars to the edge of the lot. When I came back out, the attendant that had parked it was nowhere to be seen. I handed him the tag, he retrieved the key and a few minutes later off in the distance I heard him trying to start it. He managed to get it out of the parking spot before he gave up and motioned for me to walk down to him. After some discussion, he gave up and let me drive it out of the lot.
- technothrasher 1y ago
  That must have been a while ago. The last time I encountered a "valet only" parking lot, I told the 20-something valet it was a manual, and his face turned white, he paused for a few seconds, and then he said, "go ahead, you can park it yourself." > a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. Figures. You MG owners! Did you have a hammer with you for when the points in the fuel pump needed smacking? ;) I drove a '65 Triumph Spitfire for about five years back in the early 00's and it was reliable as a top (after I repaired all the hack work that previous owners had done to it).
- chris_st 1y ago
  Had a friend with an MG Mini with a bumper sticker that read, "All the parts falling off of this car are of the finest British manufacturer."
HardwareLust 1y ago
Porsche engineers definitely have a sense of humor, and like most Germans are big fans of schadenfreude.
psadri 1y ago
I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …) Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try. So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day. So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again. If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers. … someone else please take over… :-)
- hinkley 1y ago
  This would be perfect if you replaced “Joe” as the bottom with John to illustrate that this document has been edited five times and not brought back to consistency. And also that only one articulate person ever understood it and he got scared off. > 3 years ago (about the time John quit) > ask John (if he is still around)
  - psadri 1y ago
    That’s funny. Yeah. I wrote this on the fly. It can use multiple passes to add layers of self reference / depth.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      Some people think I’m just the right amount of cynical. Some people… do not agree.
- 1y ago
drewg123 1y ago
By now you’ve certainly noticed the smell. That is the aroma of Mobil 1 oil being boiled off That sounds so familiar! My first car was a barn-find 22 year old (at the time) 1964 Triumph TR4. It had a moderately bad oil leak, and the oil would land on the exhaust manifold and be blown along the transmission tunnel. Smoke would fill the interior around the shift lever. It would smoke more heavily the harder you pushed it.
bloomingeek 1y ago
<Manipulating the gear shift lever will deliver vague suggestions to this rod...> Great read. Several years ago I owned and drove a '67 Olds Cutlass for sixteen years. (Two door, auto-trans, AC, standard brakes.) I purchased the car in 1990 and everything was in working order. When the carburetor finally warped beyond repair, I cobbled together some other Olds carb body parts and, since the automatic choke parts were bad, I rigged up a manual choke line through the firewall. This made the car undriveable for the other drivers in my family! The sequence of gas pedal pumps and knowing when to disengage the choke was too much to surpass. :)
avhception 1y ago
My dad hat a 914, sold it around 2014 or something. It was in decidedly better condition. But I definitely know that gear lever rod, shifting wasn't exactly smooth. And you'd have to apply a little gas in between shifts, otherwise you'd starve the engine. But it was an absolutely beautiful car.
hinkley 1y ago
This has come up before and was amusing. But I am surprised this is (2022) I would have taken bets that it was more like 2016 if not earlier and was a repost the first time I saw it.
arjie 1y ago
I could have written this for my Ducati, but they nonetheless stole it, put it on a flatbed, tried to drill the ignition and fuel cap to start it and failed because Ducatis have had immobilizers for decades now. One dreams of a better class of thief but if they had the IQ would they be thieves of a multi-decade-old motorcycle? The tax that morons levy on the rest of us cannot be understated. Look at what these lead-lickers did https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CBgoi28hXoI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CBgoi28hXoI Obviously, I recovered the bike and repaired it only to nearly be killed by an Uber driver at which point I called it a day.
- roflchoppa 1y ago
  do you still ride?
  - arjie 1y ago
    Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn. "When the kids go off to college" she says knowing full well that I know that 20 years without and getting on in my sixties will kill me instantly.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      If they still let us ride motorcycles hopefully all the cars on the road will have driver assists and all of our incidents will be our own fault.
      - cindyllm 1y ago
        [dead]
    - RajT88 1y ago
      > Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn. This seems to be how it goes. My own father used to ride a motorcycle back in the day - until it almost fell on me and my sister when we were screwing around on it. Off that motorcycle went, never to be seen again after that.
doodaddy 1y ago
I love this car already. It has character, a personality. It’s the friend who’s kind of a pain in the ass but someone you usually have a good time with. Reminds me of the car I learned to drive manual on. It would only start when the drivers side door was open. So if you stalled the car the process was: open door, clutch in, start engine, clutch out and go, close door. You learned not to stall…
deleted 1y ago
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LightBug1 1y ago
Wonderful ... all of this is why I love classic cars. Much more work, but much more worthwhile ... that and the joy of having a choice of entering one of the last places left not hooked up to the web.
locao 1y ago
I own a 1997 VW Golf that, other than the front wheel vibration, is identical. It seems 20 years later VW was doing the same mistakes.
DoctorOetker 1y ago
It seems that it would be easy to automatically filter out these emails despite the small variability in the presented messages (basically selecting which issues are of concern to the citizen visiting and copying the message). It would seem more effective if an LLM were used to paraphrase the concerns so it would be less amenable to automated filtering.
potato3732842 1y ago
If this were a 20yo Subaru (chosen simply because it has a shifter that can wear out in a way that roughly replicates these issues) rather than some "high brow" vehicle everyone would screech about how it's unfit for the road.
- mauvehaus 1y ago
  I owned an '86 BRAT. There was a bushing in the shifter that wore out, and you just about had to open the passenger door to pull the shifter far enough to the right to get it into reverse. A shim from a beer can will fix it temporarily until the shim wears through. Funnily enough, I did not impress a date by roll-starting it when the starter was intermittently flaky.
RhysU 1y ago
This reminds me of Peter Egan's columns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Egan_(columnist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Egan_(columnist) For example: https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/2016/11/1/the-very-long-term-buell https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/2016/11/1/the-very-l...
justinator 1y ago
Sizes up 914 Seems a lot less bother just to pick it up.
tombert 1y ago
It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now. For example, I mentioned that my speakers on my laptop sound like shit under Linux to a friend. I mentioned a few of the fixes I had tried, none of which really improved anything, and eventually the friend recommended I buy some headphones or an external speaker. Yes, that would "work" in the sense that I would have higher quality audio, but it doesn't really "fix" my problem, just makes it easier to ignore it. This article shows the logical extreme of that thinking, I love it.
- quotemstr 1y ago
  > It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now. My favorite is this pattern that occurs in every big backend job-running script in every place I've worked: the success paths spams the log with expected errors. Something tries to connect to something else on start? FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT debug: retrying... (1/3) FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT debug: retrying... (2/3) Service connected! Startup succeeded "Just learn to ignore the expected errors, bro" is the most infuriating "workaround" for this lack of basic log hygiene
  - tombert 1y ago
    I used to work at a very large fruit company. I won't say the name because I don't want you to Think Different about them (and because I don't want as much correlation data about me on this account). On the first day, one of the first things they had me do was set up email filters with an elaborate home-built email filtering system. The reason for this was because I would get thousands upon thousands of emails per day (not hyperbole), most of which were irrelevant to me, and if you didn't have fairly fine-grained and elaborate filtering your important emails would certainly be lost, often within minutes. The solution to this problem, of course, would be to stop sending so many emails, or have better control over who was getting the emails, but instead the onus was put on everyone downstream to figure out which emails were spam (and to get yelled at if we didn't respond to an email because an important one got caught in the mix). I complained about this a few times, and people's responses would always respond about how filters could solve this problem, and it always annoyed me. If someone is dumping a metric ton of trash in my backyard every day on top of my Amazon packages, the solution is not to figure out an optimal way to categorize and sort the trash to best differentiate it from my packages, the solution is to get that person to stop dumping garbage on me. They were unimpressed by this reasoning.
ziofill 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489
gregorvand 1y ago
Very fun. I have a similar check list for thieves for my '75 land rover series 3. I tried to have a friend 'steal' it out of my garage once - it didn't go very well.
ForOldHack 1y ago
The paarts ( long a ), folling of this car, are of the finest German Worksmanship.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
Cool read and and as an owner of Porsche 911 Carrera from 1988, I can both relate and not relate. I bought my 911 at 26 y/o in 1999: the car was 11 years old and had 135 000 km / 85 000 miles. I then used it as my daily for five years straight. The year is 2025. I still have it (never had the heart to sell it) and still use it so now I own it since 26 years. This thing is rock solid reliable. It's certainly a bit manly to drive (no assisted steering and no ABS) but every time I use for something mundane (like going to the pharmacy or to pick my kid at school) I keep thinking "it's insane that this thing is so reliable I could still use it as my daily if I wanted to". Now of course a Porsche 911 from the 80s ain't a Porsche 914 from the seventies but still: quite a different experience over 26 years (and my car is now 37 years old) from the experience in TFA.
abstractspoon 1y ago
Most amusing
jacquesm 1y ago
This was here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092
timonofathens 1y ago
[dead]
j1elo 1y ago
Don't these cars pass the mandatory yearly review? In my country I passed mine recently (yearly, because the car is older than 10 years) and the first thing they said was "ok let me in the vehicle". If there is anything so utterly broken like in the article or the comments here, you got an insta-failed checkup, which means the vehicle's license to drive in public roads is removed, with the sole exception of going to/from a mechanic shop.
ubermonkey 1y ago
I'm a lifelong Porsche fan, and even owned an air-cooled 911 for a long time, but that part of my life is in the rearview now. Even so, I was happy to attend the Porsche festival Luftgekuhlt here in Durham last weekend. I was astonished, upon turning a corner and seeing one, to realize I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that the 914 existed. It's one of those cars that was a dime a dozen in my 70s and 80s youth (along with MGs and proper, original VW Bugs) that slowly in inexorably vanished from the casual landscape. Back then, I kind of hated them (the shared heritage with VW made them "not a real Porsche" in my eyes, which then as now preferred the lines of the 911s anyway), but now I find them charming little oddballs. We may take it as read that the examples at the show were in rather better running order than the one in the article. ;) https://luftgekuhlt.com/ https://luftgekuhlt.com/
danesparza 1y ago
This article made me miss the original UK Top Gear trio. What great writing. Thank you for this.

350 points by visviva 1y ago

haunter 1y ago

https://archive.li/yl7z2 https://archive.li/yl7z2

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Some previous discussions: 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489

dang 1y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 - July 2023 (303 comments) A few things to know before stealing my 914 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 - April 2022 (417 comments)

fallinditch 1y ago

This story reminds me that I have a recurring nightmare: I am driving a car and the brakes hardly work at all, so I am in constant fear that something will go terribly wrong. This nightmare was born from a real experience with my first vehicle, a VW micro bus that had horribly squishy brakes.

RHSeeger 1y ago
Many years ago, I was driving down the highway on my way to work and, when I pressed the breaks to slow down, the pedal just... went straight to the floor. I had to use the emergency break to slow down, get off the highway, and pull over. Luckily that still worked (I've owned many a car where that was the first thing to go). So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it inspected the previous day... and they didn't mention anything was wrong. I did not go back to that inspection place again.
- fallinditch 1y ago
  Wow you were lucky. There was a driver in the UK whose accelerator got stuck, then his brakes burnt out and he was on a notoriously busy road traveling at 135mph - he survived! See https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-m-doing-135mph-and-can-t-stop-6106928.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/this-britain/help-i-...
  - wat10000 1y ago
    This is what happened to quite a few people with the Toyota unintended acceleration issue. There was speculation that it was caused by bugs in the engine control unit. Officially the cause was found to be floor mats coming loose and holding the accelerator down. (I bought a new Toyota shortly after this and the dealer was very careful to show me how the floor mats worked and how to make sure they were properly attached.) The brakes of a car in good working order should be able to overcome the engine and stop the car even if the engine is stuck at full power. But you have to do it decisively. Push the brake pedal to the floor and keep it there until you've stopped. What often happens is people are (very naturally) confused and not sure what to do, they'll brake but not hard enough, stop braking when it doesn't seem to work, try again, etc. This can heat up the brakes to the point where they're no longer effective enough to stop the car, and then you're really in for it.
    - red369 1y ago
      I agree with what you said about brakes overcoming the engine. I've seen tests which show it works on even monstrously over-powered cars, but it can feel like it's not working and if the driver reacts wrongly to that, then it may no longer work. I think stopping the power from going to the wheels needs to be an easy option. I wish there was more importance given to being able to easily do this. I think the two options are shifting to neutral, or turning off the engine. I tested in a late-00s automatic BMW, and you had to hold the start/stop button for what felt like a very long time to turn the engine off if the car was in Drive. In an emergency, I think most people would give up long before it turned off. In that car, it was easy to change to neutral though, so I don't have a criticism about that design. What concerns me is cars with the same approach for the start/stop button, but where it is hard to get to neutral. I think in the Toyotas which had unintended acceleration issues, it wasn't easy/intuitive. Edit: Another comment reminded me of something I forgot to mention above. You don't want turning off the engine to be the first resort because you lose power steering, and eventually, power assisted brakes.
CitrusFruits 1y ago
I have that exact same nightmare! The harder I press on the brake, the less it does, as if the brake power is following a logarithmic curve. Although I don't really know why I have that dream, no specific experience comes to mind.
thr0w 1y ago
Yeah I have the squishy/very soft/not really working brake nightmare.
- fallinditch 1y ago
  Perhaps symbolizes a feeling of being out of control in some aspect of one's life? By all accounts quite common: https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamInterpretation/comments/nnndju/car_brakes_barely_work_everytime_i_drive_in_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamInterpretation/comments/nnndju...
  - thr0w 1y ago
    Less interested in interpretation, more interested in the fact that lots of people have the same nightmares (squishy brakes, class test and you haven't been to school in decades, etc.). Here's one - I desperately need to make a phone call or send a text or enter an address into Maps, but I just make typos over and over. Anyone else?
Stratoscope 1y ago
My first girlfriend, Kate, bought an old VW Bug for $200 from someone on Page Mill Road up the hill from Palo Alto. I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling. Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too. With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke." Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop. The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on. Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother. Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it. I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor. Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job." We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name. Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop. Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way. Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
hn_acc1 1y ago
Same here.. I'm usually driving some conglomerate of my first 3 cars (all VWs) - MK1 Jetta GLI, MK2 Golf GTi 16v or VR6 Corrado (or sometimes a Scirocco which is related to the Corrado). And gear shifts are like 30-50cm long, and then the brakes start to fade.. I stopped having that dream nearly as often when I bought my '05 Subaru Legacy GT wagon. What's even stranger is that my current Kia Stinger (a fun car!) becomes an exotic Maserati or Aston Martin or Jaguar in my dreams..
bluGill 1y ago
The only time my brakes went out on my I happened to be towing a 10,000lbs trailer. I was able to use the trailer brakes only for 10 miles of stop and go traffic (rural freeway under construction, the backup started just past the previous exit, and of course the brakes were working until then). I never want that to happen again.
gdevenyi 1y ago
Fun fact, the VW microbus has the same engine as this Porsche.
wildzzz 1y ago
A teenager slammed a beat up Chrysler 200 into the back of my rental car. Once he managed to get the door open, he said something along the lines of "yeah the brakes don't work so well". Of course this was in Florida so there was never any expectation for his car to ever have working brakes. Luckily I paid for the LDW on the rental so it was not my problem.
kerblang 1y ago
My driving nightmares, in order: - I am utterly fucking shitfaced drunk and having great difficulty with reality in general - I am completely blind, albeit sober - I am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) - I am going uphill, but the hill keeps getting steeper, until finally I am completely vertical, and to my surprise, traffic is passing me - Don't ask me how I know, but I have entered a no-oxygen zone and have to get out of there before I pass out
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  Are you sure you’re not having flying dreams?
- throwaway422432 1y ago
  - I am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) Yeah, this one with the added bonus of having the whole family in the car - and for some reason I'm not steering at all for a lot of the time. Weird dream.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  > am driving from the back seat, for some reason (trying, at least) That's the only driving dream I have ever had.
at-fates-hands 1y ago
Had a 84' Chrysler LeBaron. Brakes went out on the way home from work. Managed to get it to the closet auto body shop. They had it for three days, charged me $1,200 for a new master cylinder and a bunch of other stuff I didn't know I needed. I paid $500 for the car and tried to tell them to do the absolute minimum to get it going. Apparently that was the minimum. Drove it home, brakes worked like a dream. Got up next morning, third stop light, brake goes all the way to the floor, I'm drifting into the intersection. I panic, look both ways and gun it through safely. Drove that thing with brakes barely working back to the shop. Calmly told them whatever they did? Didn't work. Same thing. Another $800 bill, this time the brakes worked for a few more days, then it happened again. I took it to another shop. The mechanic asked what they told me they did and what they charged me for. I showed them both invoices. He pulled me aside with my car still on the lift and whispered to me, "Look man, they didn't do anything. They just filled the brake fluid up. When it all leaked back out is why your brakes kept going out. Imma fix this for a super discounted rate, but you need to get a lawyer, you got lucky not getting into an accident or killed." I sued the shop, got all my money back and then some. About six months after they settled my suit, I got a call from the local paper asking why I sued them because they were doing a story on the shop scamming hundreds of people out of tens of thousands of dollars.
red369 1y ago
I've had that recurring nightmare too - I forgot about that! I've only had a little real world experience with it. I'm curious if anyone has had the nightmare without having experienced it in real life. I owned a late 80s Corolla which had drum brakes on the rear, and they would fade by the bottom of a particularly long, windy, descent from a mountain range to a beach we used to go to. That was even with using lower gears to control speed. Everyone else on that road seemed to be in a modern pickup, following as close as possible to encourage me to drive faster. Oh! And one traumatic towing experience. I'd forgotten what a real-life nightmare that was. I was helping a friend tow an early 90s Honda City with his pride and joy, Mitsubishi GTO. I was driving the tiny Honda. The rope we were using wasn't designed for the job. I think the ropes specifically designed for it have a little give. When this particular rope got slack, it snapped when tension was reapplied. And then it was retied, even shorter. It wasn't as long as I would have liked to begin with. I had to ride the brakes lightly to keep tension in it. And then of course, when it came time to stop at the traffic lights, the brakes were hot and faded. I would repeatedly, barely stop in time, coming slowly to a halt inches from the bumper of the GTO. Obviously, complaining to the kind of person who would think this was a good idea, wasn't particularly fruitful.

nlawalker 1y ago

It's like developer onboarding, but documented.

stavros 1y ago
What an absolutely fantastic comment, bravo.

wingspar 1y ago

“ Since there is not a clutch safety switch on the starting circuit, make sure to press the clutch down before you try to crank the engine.” Growing up, a friends dad would use this as a ‘feature’ on his Datsun to move the car out of traffic when it wouldn’t restart. Put it in first, release the clutch, crank the starter, and move the car out of the way.

selimthegrim 1y ago
Isn’t this why you cannot push start cars anymore?
- cafard 1y ago
  No. The clutch must be in when you start to roll the car--the car won't budge otherwise. You get it rolling, turn the ignition to on, then let out the clutch. I suppose that a 1980s Corolla was the last car I drift-started, though.
- toast0 1y ago
  You should still be able to push start a newer manual transmission car. Put in the clutch, put the key to run, put it in 1st (or so), get it up to speed, let the clutch out, and now the engine is turning, which should turn the alternator/generator which should now be able to run the engine. If your electrical system is really bad, maybe the alternator can't get the voltage high enough to run everything; if your car is very modern maybe the engine control computer won't start up and control the engine before the engine stalls out because of lack of fuel and spark (or the fuel pump doesn't develop enough pressure in time); or maybe the computer just won't do it. In a traditional automatic with a hydraulic torque converter between the engine and the gearing, you've got a problem: most transmissions use hydraulic pressure to actuate the gear selection, and hydraulic pressure is typically developed by turning of the input shaft. Some older automatics had a secondary pump to develop hydraulic pressure from turning of the output shaft. In those cars, you could select first gear, turn the ignition to run, and if you got it moving fast enough, it would develop pressure, actuate first gear, and then the transmission could turn the engine and off you were. Some references suggest pushing in neutral and selecting first when ready to start. References say you need to get up to about 15-25 mph for that; my VW Vanagon which shares the same engine type as the 914 (and is therefore a rear-engine sports car) can start the engine from a much slower roll; the speedometer rests at 10 mph, so who knows how fast I'm going, but probably walking speed.

Zhenya 1y ago

The author was my undergrad professor for Internal Combustion Engines class. He was equally entertaining and knowledgeable in class.

_whiteCaps_ 1y ago

The author was the Concept Engineer on the Miata, so it seems like he took all of the lessons and applied them well. DYK Miata is a recursive acronym? It stands for: Miata Is Always The Answer.

EvanAnderson 1y ago
Neat! I had no idea about his role w/ the Miata. Found another charming article by him on the same site while searching: https://www.hagerty.com/media/driving/i-helped-make-the-first-miata-and-now-i-love-its-ancestor/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/driving/i-helped-make-the-firs...
zamadatix 1y ago
In case anyone takes that literally: "Miata Is Always The Answer" is tongue in cheek backronym by gearheads.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I've always loved that site. I have a friend that had a 914, and sent it to him. Made his day.

geoffeg 1y ago

I used to own an MG B GT, which was always in a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. One day I drove it to a nicer restaurant where I learned they only allowed valet parking. I urged the attendant to make an exception for me, but he refused. I shrugged, got out and it immediately stalled. I explained a few things to him, like not being shy about using the choke even after it was warmed up and running and a quick shot of throttle before putting it in gear to keep it from stalling, etc. Then I stood back and watched the poor guy lurch it past the rows of cars to the edge of the lot. When I came back out, the attendant that had parked it was nowhere to be seen. I handed him the tag, he retrieved the key and a few minutes later off in the distance I heard him trying to start it. He managed to get it out of the parking spot before he gave up and motioned for me to walk down to him. After some discussion, he gave up and let me drive it out of the lot.

technothrasher 1y ago
That must have been a while ago. The last time I encountered a "valet only" parking lot, I told the 20-something valet it was a manual, and his face turned white, he paused for a few seconds, and then he said, "go ahead, you can park it yourself." > a state of disrepair I have become accustomed to with older British vehicles. Figures. You MG owners! Did you have a hammer with you for when the points in the fuel pump needed smacking? ;) I drove a '65 Triumph Spitfire for about five years back in the early 00's and it was reliable as a top (after I repaired all the hack work that previous owners had done to it).
chris_st 1y ago
Had a friend with an MG Mini with a bumper sticker that read, "All the parts falling off of this car are of the finest British manufacturer."

HardwareLust 1y ago

Porsche engineers definitely have a sense of humor, and like most Germans are big fans of schadenfreude.

psadri 1y ago

I feel like this could be adopted for your homegrown "whatever" framework (eg: UI framework, Auth framework, …) Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try. So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day. So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again. If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers. … someone else please take over… :-)

hinkley 1y ago
This would be perfect if you replaced “Joe” as the bottom with John to illustrate that this document has been edited five times and not brought back to consistency. And also that only one articulate person ever understood it and he got scared off. > 3 years ago (about the time John quit) > ask John (if he is still around)
- psadri 1y ago
  That’s funny. Yeah. I wrote this on the fly. It can use multiple passes to add layers of self reference / depth.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    Some people think I’m just the right amount of cynical. Some people… do not agree.
1y ago

drewg123 1y ago

By now you’ve certainly noticed the smell. That is the aroma of Mobil 1 oil being boiled off That sounds so familiar! My first car was a barn-find 22 year old (at the time) 1964 Triumph TR4. It had a moderately bad oil leak, and the oil would land on the exhaust manifold and be blown along the transmission tunnel. Smoke would fill the interior around the shift lever. It would smoke more heavily the harder you pushed it.

bloomingeek 1y ago

<Manipulating the gear shift lever will deliver vague suggestions to this rod...> Great read. Several years ago I owned and drove a '67 Olds Cutlass for sixteen years. (Two door, auto-trans, AC, standard brakes.) I purchased the car in 1990 and everything was in working order. When the carburetor finally warped beyond repair, I cobbled together some other Olds carb body parts and, since the automatic choke parts were bad, I rigged up a manual choke line through the firewall. This made the car undriveable for the other drivers in my family! The sequence of gas pedal pumps and knowing when to disengage the choke was too much to surpass. :)

avhception 1y ago

My dad hat a 914, sold it around 2014 or something. It was in decidedly better condition. But I definitely know that gear lever rod, shifting wasn't exactly smooth. And you'd have to apply a little gas in between shifts, otherwise you'd starve the engine. But it was an absolutely beautiful car.

hinkley 1y ago

This has come up before and was amusing. But I am surprised this is (2022) I would have taken bets that it was more like 2016 if not earlier and was a repost the first time I saw it.

arjie 1y ago

I could have written this for my Ducati, but they nonetheless stole it, put it on a flatbed, tried to drill the ignition and fuel cap to start it and failed because Ducatis have had immobilizers for decades now. One dreams of a better class of thief but if they had the IQ would they be thieves of a multi-decade-old motorcycle? The tax that morons levy on the rest of us cannot be understated. Look at what these lead-lickers did https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CBgoi28hXoI https://www.youtube.com/shorts/CBgoi28hXoI Obviously, I recovered the bike and repaired it only to nearly be killed by an Uber driver at which point I called it a day.

roflchoppa 1y ago
do you still ride?
- arjie 1y ago
  Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn. "When the kids go off to college" she says knowing full well that I know that 20 years without and getting on in my sixties will kill me instantly.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    If they still let us ride motorcycles hopefully all the cars on the road will have driver assists and all of our incidents will be our own fault.
    - cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
  - RajT88 1y ago
    > Only e-bikes in the city, haha! Banned by order of the wife since we have a young newborn. This seems to be how it goes. My own father used to ride a motorcycle back in the day - until it almost fell on me and my sister when we were screwing around on it. Off that motorcycle went, never to be seen again after that.

doodaddy 1y ago

I love this car already. It has character, a personality. It’s the friend who’s kind of a pain in the ass but someone you usually have a good time with. Reminds me of the car I learned to drive manual on. It would only start when the drivers side door was open. So if you stalled the car the process was: open door, clutch in, start engine, clutch out and go, close door. You learned not to stall…

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

LightBug1 1y ago

Wonderful ... all of this is why I love classic cars. Much more work, but much more worthwhile ... that and the joy of having a choice of entering one of the last places left not hooked up to the web.

locao 1y ago

I own a 1997 VW Golf that, other than the front wheel vibration, is identical. It seems 20 years later VW was doing the same mistakes.

DoctorOetker 1y ago

It seems that it would be easy to automatically filter out these emails despite the small variability in the presented messages (basically selecting which issues are of concern to the citizen visiting and copying the message). It would seem more effective if an LLM were used to paraphrase the concerns so it would be less amenable to automated filtering.

potato3732842 1y ago

If this were a 20yo Subaru (chosen simply because it has a shifter that can wear out in a way that roughly replicates these issues) rather than some "high brow" vehicle everyone would screech about how it's unfit for the road.

mauvehaus 1y ago
I owned an '86 BRAT. There was a bushing in the shifter that wore out, and you just about had to open the passenger door to pull the shifter far enough to the right to get it into reverse. A shim from a beer can will fix it temporarily until the shim wears through. Funnily enough, I did not impress a date by roll-starting it when the starter was intermittently flaky.

RhysU 1y ago

This reminds me of Peter Egan's columns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Egan_(columnist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Egan_(columnist) For example: https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/2016/11/1/the-very-long-term-buell https://magazine.cycleworld.com/article/2016/11/1/the-very-l...

justinator 1y ago

Sizes up 914 Seems a lot less bother just to pick it up.

tombert 1y ago

It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now. For example, I mentioned that my speakers on my laptop sound like shit under Linux to a friend. I mentioned a few of the fixes I had tried, none of which really improved anything, and eventually the friend recommended I buy some headphones or an external speaker. Yes, that would "work" in the sense that I would have higher quality audio, but it doesn't really "fix" my problem, just makes it easier to ignore it. This article shows the logical extreme of that thinking, I love it.

quotemstr 1y ago
> It has become a big pet peeve of mine when people treat "workarounds" like "solutions" to problems. I have certainly done this in the past, so I'm not excluding myself from it, but I try pretty hard not to do that now. My favorite is this pattern that occurs in every big backend job-running script in every place I've worked: the success paths spams the log with expected errors. Something tries to connect to something else on start? FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT debug: retrying... (1/3) FATAL ERROR: COULD NOT CONNECT debug: retrying... (2/3) Service connected! Startup succeeded "Just learn to ignore the expected errors, bro" is the most infuriating "workaround" for this lack of basic log hygiene
- tombert 1y ago
  I used to work at a very large fruit company. I won't say the name because I don't want you to Think Different about them (and because I don't want as much correlation data about me on this account). On the first day, one of the first things they had me do was set up email filters with an elaborate home-built email filtering system. The reason for this was because I would get thousands upon thousands of emails per day (not hyperbole), most of which were irrelevant to me, and if you didn't have fairly fine-grained and elaborate filtering your important emails would certainly be lost, often within minutes. The solution to this problem, of course, would be to stop sending so many emails, or have better control over who was getting the emails, but instead the onus was put on everyone downstream to figure out which emails were spam (and to get yelled at if we didn't respond to an email because an important one got caught in the mix). I complained about this a few times, and people's responses would always respond about how filters could solve this problem, and it always annoyed me. If someone is dumping a metric ton of trash in my backyard every day on top of my Amazon packages, the solution is not to figure out an optimal way to categorize and sort the trash to best differentiate it from my packages, the solution is to get that person to stop dumping garbage on me. They were unimpressed by this reasoning.

ziofill 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489

gregorvand 1y ago

Very fun. I have a similar check list for thieves for my '75 land rover series 3. I tried to have a friend 'steal' it out of my garage once - it didn't go very well.

ForOldHack 1y ago

The paarts ( long a ), folling of this car, are of the finest German Worksmanship.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

Cool read and and as an owner of Porsche 911 Carrera from 1988, I can both relate and not relate. I bought my 911 at 26 y/o in 1999: the car was 11 years old and had 135 000 km / 85 000 miles. I then used it as my daily for five years straight. The year is 2025. I still have it (never had the heart to sell it) and still use it so now I own it since 26 years. This thing is rock solid reliable. It's certainly a bit manly to drive (no assisted steering and no ABS) but every time I use for something mundane (like going to the pharmacy or to pick my kid at school) I keep thinking "it's insane that this thing is so reliable I could still use it as my daily if I wanted to". Now of course a Porsche 911 from the 80s ain't a Porsche 914 from the seventies but still: quite a different experience over 26 years (and my car is now 37 years old) from the experience in TFA.

abstractspoon 1y ago

Most amusing

jacquesm 1y ago

This was here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092

timonofathens 1y ago

[dead]

j1elo 1y ago

Don't these cars pass the mandatory yearly review? In my country I passed mine recently (yearly, because the car is older than 10 years) and the first thing they said was "ok let me in the vehicle". If there is anything so utterly broken like in the article or the comments here, you got an insta-failed checkup, which means the vehicle's license to drive in public roads is removed, with the sole exception of going to/from a mechanic shop.

ubermonkey 1y ago

I'm a lifelong Porsche fan, and even owned an air-cooled 911 for a long time, but that part of my life is in the rearview now. Even so, I was happy to attend the Porsche festival Luftgekuhlt here in Durham last weekend. I was astonished, upon turning a corner and seeing one, to realize I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN that the 914 existed. It's one of those cars that was a dime a dozen in my 70s and 80s youth (along with MGs and proper, original VW Bugs) that slowly in inexorably vanished from the casual landscape. Back then, I kind of hated them (the shared heritage with VW made them "not a real Porsche" in my eyes, which then as now preferred the lines of the 911s anyway), but now I find them charming little oddballs. We may take it as read that the examples at the show were in rather better running order than the one in the article. ;) https://luftgekuhlt.com/ https://luftgekuhlt.com/

danesparza 1y ago

This article made me miss the original UK Top Gear trio. What great writing. Thank you for this.