gjw@floyd.UUCP (Greg Wroclawski) (10/13/83)
From my experience as a member of a couple of sports car clubs is that fiats take the cake for the fastests rusters. British cars seem to be about average. As far as german cars go several members have 914's and a couple of 911's and these are second to fiats in rustability. 914's seem to be worse than 911's though. The reason for this is as claimed by Porsche afficianados is that in the interest of lightness the sheet metal used is thinner than other cars. BMW 320's don't seem to be bad although there are only a couple of people I've known who own them but the 2002's were notorious rust buckets. There were even a couple of suppliers who made fiberglass replacement front fenders for them. I' ve owned three Saabs and found them to be better than average as far as rust was concerned. Of the several American cars I've owned none of them rusted badly. The last one I owned for several years was a 1979 Capri and it was much better than most cars. After four years of neglect and 95000 miles there was no signs of rust on it. However there are a few American cars which are very prone to rust such as Chevy Vegas. My Mazda RX-7 is a 1980 and is already showing some signs of rust. As far as German cars being cheaper to own in the long run thats impossible unless you do the work on them yourself since the price of parts and labor is much higher than Japanese or American cars and there reliability is not that much better. Greg Wroclawski BTL, Whippany