The Germans are Coming! The Germans are Coming!

If anyone invented the automobile, the Germans did. True enough that Homer thought of it; so did Erasmus and Roger Bacon and Darwin; Leonardo da Vinci sketched it, Ferdinand Verbiest made a self-propelled steam toy in 1668 and the list of later pioneers is long: Christian Huygens, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, Nikolaus August Otto, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, Etienne Lenoir and Siegfried Marcus. But the automobiles made by Carl Benz in 1885 and Gottlieb Daimler in 1886 were cast essentially in the same form we know today, were technically sound and eminently workable; and, unlike most of their predecessors, Herren Daimler and Benz persisted and went on to improve their originals. The Daimler-Benz company, maker of the Mercedes-Benz, is the oldest motorcar manufactory in the world.

The German automobile industry is flourishing now, in a year that finds U. S. makers cutting back production, the Italians seriously hurt by strikes and the British in deep trouble. Only Japan's (text continued on page 102) prosperity compares with Germany's.

It's a cliché among people professionally concerned that some German cars are better than others but that the Germans simply do not make a really bad car. There are eight major German producers and three of them turn out motorcars that are world-standard setters: BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke), Mercedes-Benz and Porsche. The others, Audi, NSU, Opel, Ford and VW, all have individual points of distinction, too: Audi for a superior small front-wheel-drive sedan, NSU for its pioneering of the Wankel engine, Opel for the sexy miniature GT car, Ford for the strikingly successful Capri and VW for the second Model T, the world-girdling Beetle. Incidentally, Audi, NSU, Porsche and VW are all corporately intertwined, a matter of only academic interest insofar as the present inquiry is concerned.

The root reason for the excellence of the German motorcar probably lies in the fact that the Germans take the automobile, as they take most things, very seriously. The factor of individual pride, the quality that was called craftsmanship when it was more nearly universally available for study, is probably stronger, in a higher percentage of workers, in Germany than anywhere else in the world. In mid- to top-range German cars, everything from bearing tolerances to the fit of doors, bonnets and trunk lids--a precisely even gap all the way around--reflects the worker's determination to do it right, plus the implacability of the final inspectors.

Too, the German, like the Hollander and the Swiss, tends to be a compulsive worker. He appears to like working and, whether or not the impression reflects a valid motivation, he does work a flat-out 60-minute hour. To come to a big German production line direct from a major British, French or Italian factory is to see a fairly startling change. The difference in cleanliness, efficiency both mechanical and human and, most of all, intensity of effort, is striking. When I remarked on the generally sloppy and lackadaisical image being projected by the workers on the final assembly line of a first-rank British car, an official conceded the point and said there was nothing that could be done about it. "We try to make up for it," he said, "by very stiff inspection, and I think we do, but of course that's time-consuming and expensive. If we go on about it too much, we'll have a strike. Remember, we deal with 13 separate unions."

Because German executives know how much of the credit for their high output of quality product belongs to individual native workers, from floor cleaners to test drivers, they prize them and are distressed when the country's labor shortage forces them to use imported workers. They say that while a Yugoslav or Spanish mechanic may be earnest and determined, he does not, even when thoroughly schooled, produce the amount and quality of work that is the German norm.

Intensive research is another weapon in the German armorarium. British, French and Italian research tends to be empirical. If something new works fairly well, try making it thicker, thinner, lighter or slightly differently cast. The German is a science lover. The archetypal German engineer won't believe today is Tuesday unless you show him the calendar; after he has convinced himself that the calendar isn't, perchance, a forgery, he is inclined to check it out to be sure it's Gregorian and not Mayan or whatever. He sleeps with his slide rule. If he is anywhere near the first rank, he speaks another language, perhaps two. Dr. Rudolf Uhlenhaut, a legendary Mercedes-Benz racing- and high-performance-car specialist, speaks an English so flawless in pronunciation that it's hard to duplicate in today's England. Uhlenhaut is empirical as well as theoretical: He is probably the only design engineer in the world who can fully extend any car with which he's concerned, from 200-mph Grand Prix machines downward. Some years ago, trying to discover why a driver was dissatisfied with a car, Uhlenhaut took it flat out over the Nürburgring, the most difficult road course in the world (14 miles to the lap, hills rising as steeply as 1 foot in 5 and full of fast bends and violent corners), at such a rate that he was embarrassed when he saw the clock--he had been under the team driver's best practice time.

German research tends to isolate specific problems and then concentrate, applying maximum weight of manpower and matériel until a solution appears. Mercedes-Benz's research and development on the Wankel engine, which has culminated in the fantastic C-III sports car, is a case in point. The C-III is almost certain to be the sensation of at least the first half of the Seventies. It runs on the rotary internal-combustion Wankel engine, a power plant many engineers believed had a most limited future, or none at all, when it first appeared. Problems involving internal wear, lubrication and combustion-chamber sealing seemed almost insurmountable. One respected authority predicted flatly, and in print, that the Wankel would never be heard of again. But at the moment, the Mercedes-Benz 4-rotor version produces 400 horsepower for a total weight of 397 pounds, just about one half the weight of a comparable standard engine. One serious problem, exhaust emission, which was not a problem when Mercedes-Benz research began over ten years ago, remains; it is presently the sole concern of a battalion of engineers and will probably be cracked within the year.

Specialization is another ingredient in the unique German mix. It's enough for a man to be able to do one thing only, if he does that one thing superbly and knows everything there is to be known about it. Just before World War Two, one of a team of Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix cars practicing for a race in England developed a radiator leak. Alfred Neubauer, the team manager--he originated and perfected that function--had a specialist flown from Germany. The man soldered the leak in ten minutes' working time and was flown straight back to Stuttgart.

Research in essentials--Germans spend little time in merely cosmetic bodywork, for example, which is why their coachwork tends to be rather staid, more practical than striking--plus obsessive attention to detail and quality control by everyone from top to bottom of the work force: That is the basic German formula. There are other things, too. Continuity is one of them. The Germans have a big book: Their industry is an old one and they remember everything that has been tried in the past. If an engineer thinks he needs to know the tire pressures used on the rear wheels of the race cars that won the French Grand Prix in 1914, it's only a matter of a few minutes to find out. And the market: There are no speed limits on German autobahns and the Germans are ferocious drivers. They expect a good car to run all day at 100 miles an hour and they expect it to last under that treatment. If it doesn't, they won't buy another one like it for a long time, perhaps never.

Expert opinion all over the world inclines to the view that the best automobile purchasable today--not the sexiest-looking, not the fastest, not the most economical but the all-round best, judged by every applicable standard--is either the BMW 2800 or the Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3.

The BMW 2800 CS is the top of a line that includes four other models, ranging upward in engine size and price--the 1600, 2002, 2500 and 2800 at bases of $2899, $3159, $5637 and $6663. The CS with automatic transmission tops the list at $8337. If you want to go for the full list of options, you can boost it to over $9000. For this you're getting a six-cylinder, four-passenger, two-door coupe on a 103-inch wheelbase. If it seems a lot, looking at the car on the showroom floor, you had best take it out and run it 50 miles or so, preferably over the most varied roadways you can find, from straight and level parkway to a really atrocious, frost-heaved, winding, up-and-down-hill country lane. You may never be the same.

First off, the BMW 2800 CS will run 0-60 mph in 8.3 seconds, which means you will not be hopelessly humiliated at the stop lights. It will show a top speed of (continued on page 224)Germans are Coming!(continued from page 102) 128-130 mph. But this is the bare beginning, significant only in letting you know you aren't riding in any mouse-powered economy wagon merely because it weighs only 3000 pounds. (It will deliver 20 miles to the gallon, though.)

Almost anything that has wheels and something to steer them with looks good in straight-line level running. Roads that are crooked, and preferably rough and crooked, are the great winnowers. At 110 mph on a parkway, an engineer who had always owned domestic automobiles and had never ridden in a BMW guessed we were doing 80. He is a relaxed and stouthearted type who enjoys riding number two or number three in four-man Olympic-class bobsledding, which certainly classifies him as a rugged passenger; but he had both feet well into the rug when he saw I intended taking a hard bend at 95 and petitioned for a lesser rate of speed by saying, "OK, OK, I'll buy it!" The car went through without so much as a whisper of tire squeal.

The braking power of the BMW will come as a stunning revelation to anyone used to even the best Detroit all-drum or disk-and-drum systems. The 2800 will stop well inside any American car, and in a dead-straight line, and ten times in a row. The Mercedes-Benz 600SEL 6.3 has the best brakes on any passenger car I know, and the BMW's are within a hair of being as good. In addition to stopping the car as if it had run into a wall of sponge rubber, they are so exquisitely balanced that neither the front wheels nor the rear wheels alone will lock up; in a hard stop, the car will normally shut down all four simultaneously.

The hand-wrought image the BMW projects on every surface and edge is evident in everything from the rubber bumpers, which ought to be Federally mandated, to the dashboard--hand-polished cabinet-grade veneer bonded to rock-hard multilayer plywood that simply cannot warp, crack or shift a millimeter in any direction ever. This is a luxury motorcar by absolute definition: incredibly comfortable, fast, stable, quiet and with every foreseeable contingency anticipated and provided for. Owners of lesser vehicles, much more likely to need tools, have to content themselves with a jack and a wheel brace; the trunk lid of the BMW carries a drop-down tray with nesting fuses, bulbs, sparkplugs and a set of tools including everything but gear pullers.

The BMW engine, to get to the heart of the matter last, pulls 192 horsepower and makes one wonder what point there can be in more. It produces the spinning sensation--the sensation that it is friction-free and connected to nothing at all--that is the hallmark of the true high-performance engine. It reminded me of the supercharged engine in a Grand Prix Bugatti I used to own, hand assembled, roller-bearinged and running in hot thinned castor oil.

I think manual shifting is pointless, but if you prefer it to automatic, the BMW's is as good as any in the world, smooth, precise, short-throw.

Dropping down the line, the smaller models diminish in performance (118 mph for the 2500, 102 for the 2002) as well as price, but the impression of absolute engineering efficiency--and honesty--remains a constant.

The long history of Daimler-Benz shows an expertise in public relations unique in the industry. For 50 years, at least, the Stuttgart firm has masterfully exploited the product, inducing newspapers and magazines to allot acres more of free white space to Mercedes-Benz cars in a month than their competitors could command in a year. The system is simple, foolproof and expensive. The basic premise under which it operates is that no major exploitation will be attempted on anything but a genuinely newsworthy accomplishment (winning an important race or rally, for example) or a strikingly new vehicle (the gull-wing 300SL coupe). Exploitation that is mere noise-making is strictly verboten. Second, the technicians in charge of exploitation shall not be of a level of expertise lower than the standard prevailing in every other department.

As this is written, Mercedes-Benz is performing its classic publicity blitz, making an experimental prototype two-seater coupe the most photographed, most written about automobile of the year, despite the grim handicap of a model designation of minus-zero exploitation value: the C-111. No one is being conned in this operation; the C-III is a breakthrough vehicle of notable significance, indeed--an ultrahigh-performance automobile powered by the revolutionary Wankel engine. Even the announcement of its existence was instantly recognized all over the world as a bench mark in automobile history.

The Wankel is the fruition of a very old idea, the concept that the ideal engine for doing rotary work, such as driving round wheels, would be rotary itself and not reciprocating, up and down or in and out, like the standard steam or gasoline engine. James Watt tried to make a rotary engine but was defeated by the halting technology of the 1700s. Many brilliant minds attempted it down the decades and, in the 1950s (it took him most of the decade), the German inventor Felix Wankel succeeded in solving what seems a simple problem but was difficult in the extreme: how to make a piston go round and round instead of up and down.

The Wankel engine is small and has few moving parts. Essentially, it is a combustion chamber of an epitrochoidal shape (a circle slightly mashed top and bottom), in which a triangular piston (with slightly convex sides) spins on a shaft, the other end of which delivers the power wherever it's wanted. As the piston spins, with nothing but its points, or apexes, touching the combustion-chamber wall, it forms constantly changing sealed-off spaces. It takes these spaces through the classic Otto cycle of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine. Gasoline vapor is drawn or injected into one space, compressed as it's carried around to a sparkplug, burned, pushing against the side of the triangular piston to make power, carried to an exhaust port and ejected. Simple. Rotary motion in an internal-combustion engine. They said he couldn't do it. They laughed as he sat down with his slide rule.

The secret is in the mating shapes of triangle and squashed circle. In a cutaway view of a Wankel engine, it seems quite clear that the triangle cannot revolve while keeping all three apexes in airtight contact with the chamber wall all the way around, which, of course, it must do if it's to function; and which it does do. Wankel worked out the configurations mathematically and the first time he cut metal and made one, it worked. He conveyed the rights to NSU of Neckarsulm, a small but progressive motorbike and car maker; and by 1964, a Wankel-engined automobile, the NSU prinz, was on the road. I remember going to Germany to drive it and being amazed at the size of the engine, about as big as a teakettle.

More than a dozen firms bought Wankel licenses from NSU: Citroën, Alfa Romeo, Curtiss-Wright, Mercedes-Benz, Toyo Kogyo, Perkins and others. One of the reasons for this wide licensing was the realization that the engine still needed a lot of work. Oil consumption was heavy. The tip seals at the triangle points, which functioned as piston rings do in a reciprocating engine, wore excessively at high speeds. There were ignition difficulties. Everyone was impressed with the small size, light weight, appetite for almost any fuel, vibration-free highspeed capability of the Wankel, but optimism about its commercial future was not general.

NSU stuck with it--the first Wankelengined import, NSU's RO-80, has been certified for U. S. sale--and so did Toyo Kogyo of Japan, now turning out 1000 Mazda R 100s and R 130s a month. But while they were obviously successful automobiles--the R 100 also meets U. S. emission standards--the maximum horsepower figure, 126, was not impressive.

Then, late last summer, Mercedes-Benz ran out the C-111, billed as a Versuchs-wagen only, a research and experimental vehicle not for production or sale. It would get to 60 mph from a standing start in 4.9 seconds, or half what most people think is quick, and would do 160-plus mph at a modest 7000 engine revolutions per minute. I drove it at the end of July for The Playboy Cars--1970 (November 1969 issue) and was tempted to think of it as The Ultimate Automobile: blindingly fast, comfortable, even comparatively quiet, and sure-footed past what seemed reasonable for something running on wheels.

Since that time, the C-III has been refined and the new "Geneva" model is probably the final design. Busily returning blank checks drawn on banks from Addis Ababa to Zwickau, Mercedes officials still deny that the C-III will be put into production for sale. I believe that it will be, although perhaps on a basis as limited as 50 cars for the entire world market.

Easier to come by are the 16 other models of Mercedes-Benz available in this country at figures from $4961 to $28,343, which is to say from the basic 220 sedan delivered on the East Coast to the West Coast price of the monster 600 Pullman seven-passenger limousine, the most deluxe fast car or the fastest deluxe car available off a showroom floor today.

The newest Mercedes is the 3.5 V8, just now becoming available. Until it went to a V8 for the big 600-series cars, Mercedes-Benz had been stuck on in-line engines, four-, six- and eight-cylinder.

The 600 series is powered by a 6.3-liter V8 and it is an almost half-size version of that engine that runs the new 300SEL 3.5, the chassis/body similar to the 280SEL sedan. This is a fuel-injected 230-hp engine, light (less than 500 pounds) and characteristically quieter than the six-cylinder it replaces. It's not blindingly quick (0-60 mph in 11-plus seconds), but it's smooth and forceful and will take the car to 127 mph (100 in 28 seconds), good enough for most U. S. motoring, even in Nevada. The engine is also used in the 280SE coupe and convertible. The 280SEL sedan remains in production, of course, and at $7657 is a most attractive and useful possession.

If I were to expose myself to its massive charms, I think the 600 Pullman would be my favorite in the Mercedes line, but I have forbidden myself the experience, lest the temporary lack of the 28,000-odd dollars required to engineer its purchase drop me into trauma. But the simple little 300SEL 6.3 sedan at $15,122 I have sampled, and extensively; and if I am ever so blessed by fortune as to save the squire's daughter from a runaway stallion and he asks me how possibly he can reward me, I shall quote Clarence Darrow's timeless epigram: "Ever since the Phoenicians invented it, money has been the most nearly perfect expression of gratitude," and, clutching his $16,000 (a round sum is most easily managed) in my hot little hand, I shall run, not walk, to the nearest Mercedes-Benz store.

The 6.3 of choice is black with black-leather upholstery, because in that costume, it looks like nothing much, just a smallish sedan--112-inch wheelbase--of no startling profile, wholly lacking in sheet-metal overhang fore and aft, stolid and four-footed on the pavement. The chairs (one cannot call them mere seats) are clad in thick hide cunningly stretched over forms designed not by stylists but by orthopedic surgeons, and they hold one--grasp one, really--lightly but firmly, belted or not.

Short of the far-ranging 6.3 sedan, the Mercedes-Benz 280SEL is the instrument of choice; again, a perfectly balanced motorcar (oddly, because it looks smaller, the 280SEL has more usable room than a Cadillac), capable of extension far past its class. A candid-camera overview of a shopper in a Mercedes-Benz showroom will inevitably show him running a questing finger over the genuine tree-wood dashboard, trying to discover a microscopic flaw in the finish. Most unlikely: The iron-hard varnish has been burnished with a felt pad sodden in water and pumice or rottenstone. A quick rubdown now and then with a paste carnauba wax will keep it glistening for a decade. Which raises a point: A run-through of the classified ads in an automobile buff book (Road & Track, for example) will turn up listings of Mercedes-Benz automobiles of vintage 1955 et seq. at prices that may alarm you. A brand-new Mercedes is an instant classic, due to the company's policy of changing body style slowly, slightly, sensitively; a decade-old Mercedes looks almost new and, if it has been decently driven, feels so.

Porsche, too. Oddly, because this is a new motorcar. The first automobile to wear the name came off the production line--to use the term most loosely, because there really wasn't a line at all--Easter Monday, 1950. It took the factory four years to make 5000 cars; and even now, 20 years later, each day of production sees only 86 Porsches produced in a plant employing 3700 people.

Factories making refrigerators, stoves, lawn mowers and electric fans, never mind automobiles, are noisy past belief. Automobile factories are high on the double-decibel list; most automobile factories, that is. But Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Porsche--no. In 1960, when I first entered the Porsche factory in Stuttgart, I was bemused by the comparative velvet silence of the place. The usual brang-brang, choing-choing of a motorcar manufactory was missing. Dead silence there was not: after all, things were being made; but the light clink of hammer on steel was the loudest sound to be heard. The reason was plain: Rank on rank, mechanics were assembling engines, cradled in viselike holders, but they were filing, pushing, trying, trying again, filing once more. There were days, at the beginning, when each Porsche engine was die-stamped with the initials of the man who had assembled it. The practice was abandoned, finally, when the painters and the upholsterers argued that they, too, had equal right to sign their work--but where?

Porsche owners are cultists: Passing on the road, they almost invariably flick their lights, trying to time it, trying not to do it first nor last but in unison. It was a common salute between foreigncar owners in the old days--1948, 1949--when a TC MG Midget stood for absolute sophistication; but time and uncounted freighters full of VWs, Jaguars, Austins and Hillmans diluted and destroyed it for all but the Porsches.

The Porsche that is Porsche to most of us is the Model 356, which ran, in designations 356, 345A, 356A, 356C and 356SC, from 1950 to 1964. Rounded off, short-wheelbased, high-waisted, it is certainly the best-loved small motorcar of our time, fast, agile and--especially--reliable. The Achilles' heel of the high-performance car is reliability. The woods are full of cars that will do 125 mph faultlessly--for a few thousand miles. Then, straight down the two-lane into Disastersville, and your friendly local foreign-car mechanic, six weeks from first phone call to the final bill, 180 hours at $9.50 an hour. One of the endearing qualities of the Porsche is its persistent effort to tell you that there is a message in those all-lined-up-together screw slots: This thing will stick together. It does.

Early Porsches oversteered. That is to say, going into a bend, the rear end, heavily freighted with engine and each wheel riding on its own short shaft, independent of its mate, tended to move beyond the classic ellipse. All rearengined cars try to do this. In the first 30 minutes of my Porsche ownership, I lost the thing completely twice, once in a hard descending right-hand bend, once in avoiding a towed outboard-engined cruiser.

Long past, with Porsche, is all that--oversteer, understeer und so weiter. The 1970 Porsche is a neutral-steer car; which is to say, go into the corner and drive the thing around, flat out.

The going range of Porsches is extensive, although there are only three basic models, the 914, the 914/6 and the 911, priced from $3595 to $9450. The 914 is Porsche's answer to galloping inflation, the first Porsche ever offered at a bargain-basement price, possible because it carries the Volkswagen engine, driving through a five-speed manual or Porsche's semiautomatic system. It will do a respectable 110 mph. As for carriagework, the body can be described as a demiconvertible, in that the roof is detachable--easily and quickly, too--and can be neatly tucked away in the rear luggage area. A built-in roll bar lives under what would be, in a longer car, a blind rear quarter--a device Porsche introduced some time ago in the Targa model. The 914 is mid-engined, stashed just behind the seats (no, it isn't particularly noisy), which allows luggage compartments in both nose and tail. One can stuff an extraordinary amount of gear into a 914, probably more than anything else its size can accept.

The 914/6 is the same body with the standard 125-hp Porsche engine. It's faster, quicker and costs a basic $6000 with the five-speed manual. There's a little more chrome and wider wheels wearing fatter tires; otherwise, it's not easy to tell the two apart.

Standard, in a body style pretty much unchanged since 1966, is the Porsche 911, available at $6430 to $9450 in three models designated T, E and S. The differences are primarily in the degree of tuning of the flat-six engine, the cars variously turning out 142, 175 and 200 hp. Since the car weighs only 2250 pounds, all three models can be said to be more than adequately powered and they have top-speed capabilities of 128, 137 and 144 mph. Reasonably driven, they will deliver 23 to 26 miles to the gallon--extraordinary figures for genuine high-performance motorcars. The S, the competition version, has been almost unbeatable in its class in SCCA racing and Porsche is the present holder of the World Manufacturers' Championship.

I have owned Porsches since the early Fifties, and I'm convinced that the Stuttgart company--one of the last family-owned manufactories, by the way--makes the best small car. They are superbly comfortable, fabulous performers and really well made. A Porsche never appears to be trying hard. A few years ago, I drove one from Calais to Monte Carlo about as fast as it would go, much of the time at night and in rain, and I never felt for an instant that I was pushing it.

Porsche no longer markets its own cars in this country, a new and larger dealer network having been set up by Porsche Audi; all to the good, because a machine as good as the Porsche deserves care by mechanics trained on it. The car will soak up an appalling amount of neglect and abuse, but it shouldn't have to.

The Audi marketed through the same dealerships is a medium-priced--$2995 to $3895--front-wheel-drive sedan. Audi is an old firm, founded in 1909 by August Horch, who also produced a massive luxury motorcar under his own name. Horch's was one of the four firms that combined to make the Auto Union, a 16-cylinder, rear-engined Grand Prix car, one of two makes--Mercedes-Benz, the other--that completely dominated international racing in the 1930s.

There are two models of the Audi sedan, both four-cylindered--the Super 90 and the 100 LS, 100-115 horsepower. Both will run just past 100 mph and, oddly, they show identical gasoline consumption: 26.4 miles to the gallon. The advantages of front-wheel-drive have become well known in the United States in the past few years--Citroën, Oldsmobile Toronado, SAAB--a flat floor, due to the missing long drive shaft, and good traction, because the engine weight is on the powered wheels. The Audis have been popular in Germany, a good indicator.

Buick dealers handle the Opel GT in this country--a miniature gran turismo vehicle, sexy-looking and striking, one of the few automobiles that look good in bright orange, a color much commoner in Europe than it is here, for a reason that escapes me. The top engine is a 102-hp, four-cylinder, providing 0-60 in ten seconds and 113 mph top speed. The Opel isn't the best-handling car in the world, having an unbridled tendency to understeer; that is, to want to take a wider curve through a corner than the amount of steering lock would seem to dictate. One soon gets used to it, but it's something to keep in mind when the car is being driven fast. Opel is another old-line German firm, famous for competition cars in the years before World War One and remembered by collectors of oddball facts for the first rocketpowered car, which ran in 1928, and quickly, too--125 mph--with Fritz von Opel himself at the wheel.

The NSU company makes a medium sedan, the RO-80, powered by a two-rotor Wankel engine. (To increase Wankel capacity, the method of choice is not to make the rotor bigger but to add another unit, as one does cylinders in a reciprocating engine.) NSU is about to start selling the RO-80 in this country, now that it has satisfied Federal emission standards. NSU currently markets a threemodel range of small sedans, the 1000C, 1200C and 1200TT. They are rearengined, four cylinders, transversely mounted. Modestly priced--at around $2000 to $2500--they are sturdy and attractive motorcars.

Another new face in this market is the four-cylinder Capri by Ford of Europe, being sold by Lincoln-Mercury dealers at around $2300. A hotter version of the Capri available in Europe houses that comparative rarity, a V6, and it's rated at 144hp, which obviously suffices, since the Capri has a 0-60 time of 9.2 seconds. It weighs only 2380 pounds. The engine has a potential well past 145hp, and Europeans who use the car in competition have taken 200 hp from it with special carburetors and cylinder heads. And a German accessory firm sells a turbosupercharger for the Capri. You won't be able to get this useful and entertaining device from your friendly local L. M. dealer, but if you know anyone who's going to Germany this summer....

And in the beginning was The Beetle, the car that nobody, practically, ever believed in. Well, Ferdinand Porsche must have, since he designed it. But there have been some highly placed wrong guessers: the British expert, for example, who advised his government not to bother taking the VW as part of War reparations, because the thing obviously hadn't a shred of future. The elves of Wolfsburg knew something no one else knew.

The 1970 bug--you can tell it from the others by extra cooling slots in the engine lid--has four more horsepower: 57. You can push it along at 81 mph now and no longer in peril of the dreaded final oversteer, which has long since been got rid of. Presumably, everyone knows that the VW now has an optional automatic transmission, as does the luxury version, the Karmann Ghia. The squareback and fastback models are longer and roomier than last year's. The great square-rigged VW bus has a more comfortable suspension system and all of them come with four neat little coupons good for trouble-shooting examinations in the car's first 24,000 miles. The diagnosing, involving 96 tests, is done by a system of electronic wonder gadgets (no more "It sounds to me like you need a valve job, mister") and each of the 1100 VW dealers in the country has one.

The eight major firms that form the German passenger-automobile industry make in all only about 60 models, but the range is the world's widest, running as it does from the Volkswagen, certainly the universal economy automobile, through the most technically advanced highperformance machines to the supreme motorcarriage de grand luxe, the 600 Pullman Mercedes-Benz. If you can't find a German car that meets your needs, you're in the market for a horse.