Nothing of that is required by European authorities when US cars are put on European registers.
Right. I have just imported a NYPD cop car (Ford P71) and it passed the technical inspection in 20 minutes. No change necessary, except they wanted me to install yellow bulbs for the rear directional signals. and they didn’t like it that there was four different tires on the car :-) But those were so bad that I threw them away anyway …
My motorcycle is over 20 years old and my car 18.
The Type Approval limitations depend on the age of the vehicle. I used to have a 1995 (Japanese import) Toyota Soarer. Not only could it be imported into the EU in the first place, c, 2004, but you could do just about anything on it. I had a towbar attachment welded to the back of the chassis. I had various mods done; all no problem. In 2012 I bought a new VW Scirocco and it was quite impossible to do anything to that. Definitely no way to attach a towbar because one was not type approved. It would fail the annual MOT. Well there was a way (illegal) but you would need a second rear bumper and remove the towbar and put the 2nd bumper on to cover up the mod when you take it in for the MOT. This is why old vehicles are really good… but you don’t get a 60mpg diesel! AFAIK the Jap import business is now dead due to this.
So far the “VW fraud” mod is not compulsory for the MOT, which is just as well since Justine had hers done and reports a noticeable loss of power. It’s somewhat funny that a gold plated European company was behind that, and who paid the biggest bribes in Greece?
I have eight motorcycles, three cars and two airplanes. All of them have been modified by me, none have ever been inspected by any government official, and the airplanes are inspected by one of my closest friends. That’s the way it’s going to stay.
@AnthonyQ, my experience in the US is that people are extrordinarliy helpful to each other.
Silvaire wrote:
I have eight motorcycles,…
When did you get the two additional ones? I remember last time it were only six…
Silvaire wrote:
…none have ever been inspected by any govenrment official,…
Then you have been lucky because occasionally there are traffic controls (in the US as much as in Europe!) where police officers will check that your tyres have enough profile depth and your lights work and similar stuff. Especially Italian policemen are notorious for harassing foreign bikers.
MedEwok wrote:
What I wonder is how is my freedom being restricted by our state and government?
Well, in order to miss something, you’ve had to have it first.
MedEwok wrote:
I can decide whom to trust with representing my wishes politically.
Very good. What if you don’t trust anyone? I’ve not trusted a politician for a few decades now. None of the ones in our parliament would get my trust to work in my interests, nor do I think the majority works in the interest of the people. 99% of politicians work in one interest only: their own.
The fact that we do have the people’s rights of referendum and initiative makes them irrelevant. What they can do mostly is propose legislation, the important stuff gets voted by referendum. There are quite a few politicians who wish to abolish or curtail this and at the moment there is a huge fight about approved initiatives which parliament refuses to implement. Guess what is likely to happen at the next election as a consequence: radicals will gain. Not the outcome one wants.
MedEwok wrote:
Brexit demonstrated how referenda usually don’t work well because most political questions are much too complicated for a simple yes or no question.
Bravo! You’ve exactly quoted the justification any politician and any dictator will use to justify why the people can’t be trusted. The moment a society reaches this point, government is no longer for the people.
That is exactly the difference in thought between Americans and Europeans. Europeans take it for granted that they are too stupid to think for themselfs, that they need the government to tell them how to live, what to do and what is safe for them and what not. Americans don’t think that way, most of them are totally opposed to what they call a nanny state, but insist on their own responsibility. Freedom does not come with the pretext that you can do what you want and have no responsibility for your actions, on the opposite, responsibility grows with freedom. People who shy away from that and who wish that everything they do is sanctioned and insured by someone else usually are very receptive to anti-freedom agendas.
As an example, lots of people in the old soviet block, which I think most of us can agree on was not quite free, are nostalgic about it, because with it’s fall and the fall of the structures which gave them a poor but secure life of sorts, they had to fend for themselfs, and quite a few found not to be capable of it. And as for many this meant a fall into poverty, they long to be suppressed again. Freedom and democracy is something that needs to be learned.
If you quote Brexit and other “unfortunate” decisions taken by people who were given their first chance to exercise real political power in decades, it just proves the point. People who have had nothing to say about their political fate all their life tend to react in a different way than people who do this 4 times a year and know what it means. that is even something some politicians had to find out when elected to power without previous experience: this is not a job or a duty to be taken lightly. Democracy, and particularly direct democracy, requires a mature and educated people who can understand the consequence of their actions. If you look at a certain “apprentice” in the WH right now, you can see what happens if someone gets this kind of power and doesn’t know how to exercise it.
what_next wrote:
Who found out about it? The authorities in the land of the free. They make a big fuss out of it now. The allegedly so nitpicking European authorities couldn’t care less.
They did indeed and did the right thing to bring it up to people’s attention. This is and was fraud on a quite unprecedented scale. That nobody in Europe found out about it, I will never believe but I rather assume that it was kept under the carpet.
Freedom does not mean anarchy. Maybe the main difference is that in societies where freedom is the highest ideal, the law forbids what is necessary, whereas in unfree societies everything not explicitly allowed has to be considered forbidden.
“Europe is domesticated. The US is large and wild.”
Case in point:
http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/florida-zoo-employee-killed-while-attempting-to-rape-alligator/
Alexis wrote:
Social Democracy IS NOT socialism.
That is one classical example how political terminology differs between Europe and the US. I had major problems understanding that. In the US, “Liberal” is a synonym for left wing thought. The opposite is conservativism. AF will correct me if I still have not gotten it right, but that is the gist of it as I understand it.
“Socialism”, the way this word is used in Europe and especially in Germany is a synonym for “Communism”. Although “Socialism” and “Social Democracy” share their origins, Social Democracy in modern Europe has nothing to do with communism anymore.
Yes. That is something difficult to explain to our US friends but it is absolutely correct. Social democracy the way it was understood and brought up is indeed a very different animal than communism. It is interesting to see for instance how West Germany for decades was ruled with social democracy while the DDR had the real mccoy in the form of the most stringent socialism and communism in the whole east block. It was a true joke in the old USSR that the East Germans were the better communists than every Soviet ever was, which annoyed them to no ends.
Alexis wrote:
Also “Nationalsozialismus” is only the German version of Fascism, and was never Socialism. The Nazis USED the word “Sozialismus” to make their program more attractive to people, but actually socialists and social democrats were among the FIRST of their victims.
It is difficult to define that… the NS regime did have quite a bit of socialist ideas behind them, which was, as you rightly say, one reason they became attractive to a then very disgruntled and poor people. They were very careful to create work in a country weak with unimployment, they created dozens of organisations which cared for the people and had the people join them in order to give them the idea that they were all on the team. It was skillfully done and the reason why some people keep thinking that “not all was bad” that was done. The huge problem with that is, that it was done for a different purpose. But all in all, the idea of the HJ, BDM, e.t.c. was not that different from similar structured states, some of which were the biggest communist ever. And interestingly, the same structures emerged very quickly yet again in the DDR after the end of the war, only with a different political pretext. And were kept as thorough and fanatically as Nazism was during the dark years.
Social democracy was a threat to them because it proved that social thought could be entertained without suppression of thought. But the real reason the Nazis were so much against them was different, it came out of their anti-semitism.
If you look at today’s populist parties all over, including AfD and the sorts, they all have socialist thought in their program but would rather die than admit it. Fascism is almost impossible without socialist structures behind them.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
It is difficult to define that… the NS regime did have quite a bit of socialist ideas behind them, which was, as you rightly say, one reason they became attractive to a then very disgruntled and poor people.Didn’t the party have that name before Hitler joined it and turned it into the “nazi” party?
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