Does Anyone Own a '95-'97 VW Passat?

[hydralique]

rp2813 is right . . .

Lexus started the fad of chrome-plating the inner plastic of a taillight housing around some round lamps and then covering the whole thing with a clear lens. Most of the other companies to use them are Japanese as well, including Nissan and Mazda. They are really Japanese rather than European in style.

One funny observation I've made is that clear taillight housings don't seem to yellow nearly as quickly as headlight lenses, which leads me to believe that the light from the headlights themselves is part of the problem. VWs usually have daytime headlights here in the US, which may make it worse. Funny thing, in Europe most VWs have a conventional headlight switch which allows the lights to fully turn off, but here we get the daytime headlight switch without that facility.

 

[sudsmaster]

Speaking of horrible places to work...

My last IT job was for a company that coordinates the building of cell phone towers. It was a mad house. The day I arrived, despite being assured in the interview that all the systems were secure, the Blaster and related viruses staged a major breakout and brought all the company locations down for days. Better yet, my new boss was nowhere to be found, he had decided to take a vacation in Aruba!

The employment door there revolved very fast. I believe they would fire or let go 10% of the workforce every month. This placed a big strain on IT, which had to keep up with the account additions, deletions, and setting up/reformatting computers and/or notebooks for the employees to use. After six months, I was quite happy to be "laid off". I'd had enough, and haven't done any IT work since (after a 15 year career in it).

No scream fests that I could hear, but I believe one employee murdered another one at one of the locations. It was very hushed up. And lawsuits against the company by discharged workers were probably well above the average rate. The HR staff had quite the bunker mentality.

 

[rp2813]

Interesting theory on the daytime running lights. I've seen some American and Japanese made cars that also have this problem, really even worse, but am not sure they have/use the headlights as running lights.

I haven't taken a good look to see how much of the grille needs to be removed in order to remove/install the headlight assemblies but am hoping it's not a huge job.