Ebay is a wonderful place. It’s a place where you could find an old iPhone 4 still sealed in box, parts for an illegally-imported car, and lovely diesel motorcycles. You can also find a fax machine for your Audi. Wait, what?
Yep, as Jason wrote yesterday, on eBay is a fax machine meant for a third-generation Audi A8 (D3), a car that ran from the 2003 to 2010 model years. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact years the fax machine was available, but the thought of just needing to send a fax on the road is amusing enough. Just what kind of faxes are you going to send and receive from within an Audi? Maybe that memo just can’t wait!
Iain Delaney offers a reason why you might want a car-based fax machine in the modern day:
Fax machines are still a big deal in Japan, partly because of their alphabets. They have three, and one of those has over three thousand characters. So it’s quicker to hand write a note and fax it than it is to find the right keyboard combination to make a character, especially for older folks.
Faxes are also guaranteed secure, because it’s point-to-point between two known phone numbers. Email makes no promises about security or delivery; it’s not part of the spec.
Of course, our readers are serial jokesters and this article was no different. From mber:
Since it’s an Audi fax machine, it will need a timing chain replacement which requires the engine to be removed at a cost of $17,000.
And from dogisbadob, who wrote a line that I can’t stop laughing about:
show me the car fax ????
Sure, what’s your phone number? I’ll send you the CarFax through my car fax. Have a great day, everyone!
(Top Image: CarFax/eBay Seller)
Yay my first COTD on Autopian 😀
I’m in the medical billing and coding biz here in the states and we still use faxes a not insignificant amount of the time. As mentioned in the article, it’s a decently secure and easy way to send paper you don’t want shared online, like patient info. Granted, I wouldn’t work out of an Audi, can only imagine what the ink cartridges would cost.
I took Japanese in college, and typing in Japanese is weird. You type phonetically then get suggestions for which characters you mean. I suppose if I grew up with it, it could be intuitive, but it was very difficult for me.
I’ve seen modern cell-phone and Microsoft auto-correct…
Oh the fun that can ensue when the software chooses an inappropriate word and you don’t catch it before pressing send.
My wife messes that up so often, her phone has learned to automatically suggest “Damn autocorrect” as a quick response.
Mine would say “Ducking autocorrect,” necessitating yet another “Ducking autocorrect comment,” necessitating yet another …
My highschool offered Japanese for a few years. At one point, I could write in Hiragana and Katakana and recognize a few simple Kanji but it was a huge pain in the ass. Never had to type anything as we didn’t have software to do it.
Katakana is fun (for those who don’t know, this is the more angular of the three writing systems, it represents phonetic sounds, and is used to write foreign words and phrases, so you can sound out English, German, or French words in Japanese writing). I still try to keep up on that, but Kanji is one of those things I forget if I don’t use it constantly.