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Monday, January 22, 2024

Technology Lacking In A 1960s VW Beetle...


 Last week I drove my son to school. He's got his license, but getting a foot of snow overnight is not something he's experienced yet, so we hopped in Donk, the trusty Subaru Forester, and we headed out.

As those who have driven in snow know, when there's snow on the road, it ends up on your windshield, both from falling from the sky and from being thrown up from the road. Thankfully, my car--built in the twenty-first century--has a mechanism to clear the windshield...an ingenious little system that pushes windshield wiper fluid onto the windshield where the windshield wipers come along and push the schmutz away allowing the driver and everyone else inside a clear view ahead.

A very important safety feature.

Unfortunately, my first car lacked this safety feature. Well...that's not entirely true. The brilliant Germans did install a windshield cleaning solution in the 1960s Volkswagen Beetles. You see, they used the pressure in the car's spare tire to give pressure to the fluid. I guess it worked in theory, but in actually, not so much. If there was any leak in the tubing, the spare tire would lose its air, and the same thing happened if it worked and you cleaned off your windshield too much.

Mine never worked, so the only way to get a clean windshield was to drive close to a bigger vehicle (basically, every car on the road...) and have it throw schmutz onto your windshield, then you quickly turned on the wipers. You had to do this over and over to keep the windshield clean.

Last week, I kept having to clean the windshield and as I stopped behind a semi at a traffic light, all those memories of trying to safely drive the '65 bug returned.

I snapped a photo and posted it on social media with the caption, "Reminds me of my '65 VW Beetle days...If you know, You know." I received some comments on the picture. Apparently, my photo conjured other memories for some, namely, drafting behind a semi and using the huge truck to help pull my little car down the road because the 36 horsepower engine lacked any strength whatsoever. I forgot about drafting. I used semis to do that, too.

A powerful engine...yet more technology lacking in my first car.

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