How to find a second reservation

emtonsti said:

Not to get too far off topic, @RocketVol I had to look up your VW Phaeton, pretty cool! (go past the first part of the video for the actual review)

The BEST Luxury Car For $6000 | VW Phaeton V8 Review!

How and when did you get one? (not generally available in the U.S.?)

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If I am not careful I can take up the whole forum bandwidth talking about it! I got it at a local dealer back in 2014 with about 73K miles on it. Had followed them for a while and finally found one close in great shape and got it. They imported about 3000 to the US and Canada from 2004-2006 and they were a huge financial failure over here. Part of the reason is some of what we still see today with the ID.4....in the US people see VW as a mid to low mid-tier brand, while in Europe it is an upper mid-tier brand. My car was a base model in 2004 and the sticker was $68K back then. People were not generally going to spend that much for a Volkswagen, and the W12 models usually went for a little over $100k. The badge on the front is more important that the hardware it is on. People didn't realize that it was 80% Bentley Continental....really the Continental was 80% Phaeton but I am biased . The suspension and electronics are all the same, and take a look at interior pictures of a Continental and Phaeton and you will see remarkable similarities.

VW continued selling them in Europe and China until 2016 and I think worldwide over the 13-14 years they only sold about 75,000 units. Look up the VW Transparent Factory in Dresden, it was built specifically for the Phaeton and was converted over to eGolf's I believe. Each Phaeton was assembled by hand by Germans in white lab coats on a Canadian Maple hardwood floor. Why I don't know!

You can still find them and they are a bargain, but you have to know what you are getting into. Mechanically they are over engineered to the extreme, but they were pushing on the electronics and sometimes those can be a pain (3 MILES of wiring in the car!). And OEM parts are pricey.

The Phaeton and the Veryon were personal projects of Dr. Piech. He had 10 rules that the Phaeton had to meet and only 2 have ever been released, and rumor is that when he laid the rules down several engineers quit. One was that the car had to have a very high torsional rigidity, and to this day I believe it is the 3rd most torsionally rigid car ever, and the other was that it should be capable of being driven all day at 300 kilometres per hour (186 mph) with an exterior temperature of 50 °C (122 °F) whilst maintaining the interior temperature at 22 °C (72 °F). and it can (without the speed limiter )

I have put about 50k miles on mine and have had do do a few things to it, but nothing that was a nightmare. It has never left me on the side of the road, and to this day every time I drive it I have a big smile, never had another car like it and probably never will.

Sorry for the long post, and I am holding back too!

Back in 1978, I bought a '74 RR Silver Shadow for a good price thinking that it might be a "forever" car. Cost me an average of $1000/mo to keep it on the road. Some of that is attributable to "Lord Lucas, Prince of Darkness", but bi-monthly replacement of the hydraulic seals to keep the rear suspension off it's bottom bump stops also contributed. Several years ago, a fellow member of the M-B club bought a used Maybach for a good price, but quickly sold it after finding the price of out-of-warranty repairs. The lesson I took from this is you have to be rich to own an ultra-luxo car out of warranty (or very lucky with repair needs). I bought a '74 Ferarri 246GTS Dino for $14K in '78. It was a daily driver for 4 years over back roads to work (only one stop light the whole way at the entrance to my workplace) and the only repair I had to make was replacement of the Marelli ignition module. But that was back when points were king, manual transmissions, and the most sophisticated electronics were in the radio.

ted99 said:

Back in 1978, I bought a '74 RR Silver Shadow for a good price thinking that it might be a "forever" car. Cost me an average of $1000/mo to keep it on the road. Some of that is attributable to "Lord Lucas, Prince of Darkness", but bi-monthly replacement of the hydraulic seals to keep the rear suspension off it's bottom bump stops also contributed. Several years ago, a fellow member of the M-B club bought a used Maybach for a good price, but quickly sold it after finding the price of out-of-warranty repairs. The lesson I took from this is you have to be rich to own an ultra-luxo car out of warranty (or very lucky with repair needs). I bought a '74 Ferarri 246GTS Dino for $14K in '78. It was a daily driver for 4 years over back roads to work (only one stop light the whole way at the entrance to my workplace) and the only repair I had to make was replacement of the Marelli ignition module. But that was back when points were king, manual transmissions, and the most sophisticated electronics were in the radio.

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Very true. And I keep wanting to fall into that trap thinking I will get one like your 246GTS! It is one thing to buy an exotic car, another all together to run it. When I first got the Phaeton I was just under the 10 year cutoff for a VW factory extended warranty. There was a dealer in NJ selling them for $300 over cost so I jumped on it for right at $5K. Paid for itself easily at dealer prices. But Phaetons have been out long enough now that used parts are pretty readily available so the costs have come way down. Air struts that used to be dealer only for over $1500 apiece are now available aftermarket for $400 with a lifetime warranty.

And one thing I found was that there is a big industry in Poland taking big German cars and breaking them down for parts. I have gotten several things from there for very little money. The rear tail lights I switched to the Euro version were about $1300 a piece new, I got a set that looked brand new from Poland for $60 for both, shipped.

Check out https://allegro.pl/ It is a Polish ebay-type site if you need used parts from Europe. But like ebay you have to do some research

How was the hydraulic suspension in the Rolls?

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How was the hydraulic suspension in the Rolls?
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Very smooth, but it was a VERY high pressure system VERY prone to blowing seals on the actuators. Their own design and not nearly as good as those from the German makes when it came to maintenance. And, there were about 10 Lucas Electric stepping motors controlling all the HVAC flaps whose exposed contacts would corrode and the flap would stop in some random position. Instead of the usual vacuum actuators with binary off/on positions, RR wanted to have each flap able to take up several different degrees of open to closed. RR charged $500 for a replacement motor and $500 for labor. Very shortly, I learned to remove the motors myself and burnish the brass contacts and wiper to keep things going another few months, until the next one failed. Monthly exercise. I never got the rear window water leak fixed and the dealer would not remove the rear window to replace the seal because he judged the risk of breaking the rear window too high to risk on his own nickel--multi-thousands. I could afford to buy it, but not keep it. Things may be better now that RR is owned by BMW and uses a lot of BMW parts in the "hidden" places.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming....