A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022)

Brake failures & driving nightmares

• Many commenters share real brake-failure incidents: pedals going to the floor due to rusted lines, failed master cylinders, or bad shops that only topped up leaking systems.
• Several recount relying on handbrakes or trailer brakes to stop in traffic or at lights, often barely avoiding crashes.
• A recurring “soft/squishy brakes” nightmare is widely reported; some connect it to loss-of-control anxiety, others are just struck by how common and specific the dream is.

Emergency control & unintended acceleration

• Discussion of high-speed runaway-car cases leads to advice: functioning brakes can usually overpower a full-throttle engine if applied hard and continuously before they overheat.
• Shifting to neutral is favored as the safest first move; turning off the engine is a last resort due to loss of power steering and brake assist.
• Modern start/stop buttons and non-intuitive shifters may make neutral or engine-off harder to access under stress.

Push-starting, starters, and drivetrains

• Many reminisce about push- or roll-starting old manuals and even using the starter motor to “drive” the car a short distance in gear.
• Some newer manuals can still be bump-started if the battery isn’t completely dead; others (including fuel-injected bikes and cars) resist due to alternator excitation and ECU power needs.
• Older automatics with secondary pumps could be bump-started at speed; modern automatics generally cannot.

914, VW lineage, and classic car charm

• Multiple comments note the 914’s VW-based engine and mixed VW/Porsche branding history; some playfully dispute calling it “a Porsche” while acknowledging titles do.
• Owners of 914s and other classics (MGs, Triumphs, old Golfs, 80s Subarus) share similar tales of vague shifters, leaks, overheating brakes, and idiosyncratic starting rituals.
• Despite the hazards and inconvenience, many express deep affection for these flawed machines, valuing character, mechanical involvement, and their disconnection from the networked, modern world.

Onboarding, workarounds, and bad systems

• The article’s “how to steal my 914” tone inspires extended analogies to inheriting gnarly legacy codebases and homegrown frameworks with tribal knowledge and half-broken tooling.
• Several lament cultures that normalize workarounds—noisy logs, spammy internal email, fragile Python environments—instead of actually fixing root problems, seeing the car piece as a humorous extreme of that mindset.