Last Call: Reversed Engineering Edition

By Peter Tanshanomi Sep 20, 2018


The 1980–84 Brazilian VW Gol was notable for combining Volkswagen’s Type 1 Beetle motor with a modified version of the Audi 80/Fox chassis. To the uninitiated gearhead, opening the hood on a front-engined car to find the venerable VW air-cooled boxer staring back at him or her might be enough to induce vertigo.
Last Call indicates the end of the Hooniverse broadcast day. It’s meant to be an open forum for anyone and anything. Thread jacking is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.

By Peter Tanshanomi

Tanshanomi is Japanese [単車のみ] for "motorcycle(s) only." Though primarily tasked with creating two-wheel oriented content for Hooniverse, Pete is a lover of all sorts of motorized vehicles.

20 thoughts on “Last Call: Reversed Engineering Edition”
      1. I meant to the Beetle engine. For some reason, placing air-cooled engines anywhere but the rear seems wrong to me.

        1. Don’t look at a Citroen GS or GSA then, they also have longitudinally mounted air cooled flat fours at the front, driving the front wheels.They made 2.4 million of them.

    1. In almost 15 years of designing engine-related stuff in rear-engined off-highway construction equipment I’ve found it most efficient (at least when talking to an engine supplier) to call the end of the engine that has the water pump & alternator / closest to cylinder #1 the “front” & the end with the flywheel nearest cylinder #n for an n-cylinder engine the “rear”, even if the engine’s in the machine sideways or mounted so the flywheel end is actually forward.

      1. I have been working in a “mixed signals” electronics company, where the user id is using “channel 1 and 2”, whereas the underlying digital system is using “channel 0 and 1”.
        My suggestion to move over to “channel 0 and 2” exclusively didn’t ring with the engineers…

      2. I think it started when I had my B-Motor SAAB 900. They have all the belts & hoses up against the firewall, and the flywheel up by the front bumper (not sure how the cylinders are numbered). And the hood is hinged above the flywheel.

    2. I usually think of the front as the location of the crankshaft pulley and auxiliary belt, regardless how the engine is mounted, be it “backwards” as in a Beetle, or “sideways” as in a transverse FWD.

  1. Wow, that’s mad. My first thought was that’s an Audi 50/Polo platform surely? But no, it is indeed a mashup of Audi 80 B1/B2/Fox.
    This is the sort of stuff very specifically punitive/social engineering tax regimes creates – sometimes it’s terrible, like big cars with tiny engines for the Irish/Spanish/Italian market. Sometimes it’s awesome, like Japanese Kei cars, sometimes it’s just..weird, like this thing.

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