Source: My first car was a 1966 VW MicroBus with a 1500 cc, air cooled engine and 6 V battery. Sad to say, the engine overheated when I was over seas and I got to rebuild it in a week. Nothing like taking a broken engine apart, fixing it, and putting it back together again to make you appreciate VW when they do the job right. That is what Munro found with the VW motor. This VW motor is optimized for power in a small package with strong torque and low noise. It has a very efficient drive train and other than a few 'opps' (my MicroBus also had some,) clearly superior design where it counts. I don't know if they make them in Chattanooga but if not, I won't have to worry about getting one . . . unless some arrived before we taxed ourselves out of the VW market. My recent 1,140 mi trip in a 2017 BMW i3-REx has demonstrated that absence of Full Self Driving is not a hard requirement. The cost mile of the 2017 BMW i3-REx compares equal to my 2019 Tesla Model 3. But now I may have an alternate to consider. Bob Wilson
Gread video. All of the motor guts sourced in Europe except the chip manufacturing which they, like the usa, have given away to the far east. As Sandy said, you can take it all apart & reverse engineer, but that won't help much with tooling nuances to make it competitively/quality wise. Some doofus in purchasing is going to be able to climb the ladder because he saved a few bucks by outsourcing. Also glad to see they're still using the high-end Timken taper bearings (& SKF ball) rather than getting the knockoffs. With all the issues VW has had with their electronics (software in particular) in the id4 - it would have been nice if they could have kept all those components in house.
