[Vwdiesel] Oil dip stick degrade

[William J Toensing]

I believe the Pres. lives in the UK or Europe where the government doesn't tell you what cars you can & can't buy like the USA does. This is a real sore spot with me. I love Citroens & have 3. A 1970 ID-19 with a DS-21 engine in it, a 1972 DJX-21 station wagon (break or Safari in Europe), & a "gray marker" CX 2500 diesel Pallas. The two older Citroens are USA spec cars & the CX was imported by someone else who went thru the hassle of "federalizing" it to comply with USA regulations. 1972 was the last year Citroen imported the DS/ID series cars to the USA. They only imported the SM for 1973 & then left the USA market as they were unwilling to downgrade the crash safety survivability in a head-on crash to comply with the 5 MPH no damage requirement then in effect. 
In the early '80s, our auto import laws & regulations were modifies to state that no automobile could be imported into the USA unless the manufacturer stated that that model met then currant USA safety & smog regulations, effectively giving manufacturers control offer what car models could & could not be imported into the USA & Canada. In the USA, we have "the best government money can buy". In the early '80s, BMW, Mercedes Benz, & Porsche became upset because the then weak Mark enabled Americans to buy an equivalent M Benz model in Germany for $13,000 that had a USA MSRP of $30,000, ship the car over here for $1,000, spend $3,000 to bring the vehicle into legal compliance with our regulations, & then sell the car at a nice profit for less than the wholesale price of what the manufacturers were selling their cars in the USA for.
Although Europe, as I understand, has safety & smog regulations that frequently exceed those of the USA, small technical differences enable manufacturers to control what models can be imported & sold in the USA. This is why we cant buy VW Polos & Lupos here, or Citroens, or other models frequently seen in Europe.
I have owned Citroens since 1960, the first being a 1958 ID-19 that was then sold to me as a "new" 1960. I didn't find out for years after I sold that car, that it was actually a 1958, because it has aluminum bumpers. In respect to the Citroens factory imported to the USA, the rubber weather-stripping on the bottom on the side windows degraded rapidly. However, after Citroen pulled out of the USA market, they started selling replacement rubber window seals that wouldn't break  down.