Originally Posted by
MiamiTVR
Thanks for posting this.
It brought back memories of my Audi days. Both one of my most hated and one of my most loved cars were Audis. I always felt they were German cars built with an English soul.
My Lotus Elite had a plastic ball attaching the shifter to the transmission. It gave out just as I pulled out in front of the a crowd attending a small town's high school graduation.
My car looked like it could do 200 mph but was stuck in first doing about 25 mph while the shifter hung loosely in my hand (as were all who had attended the ceremony until I pulled off and let them by) .
The ends of the shifter cables on my Lotus Elan M100 had
plastic couplings. With my girlfriend in my car I was racing some other dude and was speed-shifting, which put too much stress on the plastic couplings and one broke. I no longer remember if it was on the shift-lever side or the side where it connected to the transmission, as it happened in the late 1990's. But I could no longer shift. Luckily it left the transmission in 3rd gear, and I was able to drive around 8 or 10 miles to a friend's house and get a ride. I had the car towed the 30-miles or so back to my house and ended up buying an aftermarket set of cables that some company in Indonesia made that had
STEEL fittings on the ends instead of plastic!!!
One day, after I'm long dead, I'd like to think that in a moment of divine thought an engineer will design a car where the bean-counters allow him not to "cheap out" and save five-cents on every component!!!
P.S. I remember now it broke where the bottom of the metal shift-lever connected to the plastic-bit on the end of the shift-cable, about one foot below where my hand was gripping the gear-shift-****. So when I moved the gear-lever really fast it just yanked the plastic-bit right off the end of the cable!