Thank you for that image. Whenever I see “Moke” or “Mini Moke” my first thought is of The Prisoner.

If the manufacturer won’t continue to stock replacement, the aftermarket of replacement batteries is like the wild West, and not in a good way.

Speaking of batteries, I’ve been disappointed about aftermarket options. Apparently, Samsung stopped making their genuine OEM replacement S5 batteries some years ago. An S5 owner today has to pick from a variety of much lesser aftermarket batteries. I bought a shitty replacement battery from my local Batteries Plus…

I thought I read that 3G was going away as of January 1, 2020. My wife was still happily using her 2007 3G Motorola flip phone. I had already bought my first and still only smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S5, in 2014. In late 2019 we went to our local Verizon store, and they gave my wife a new Apple iPhone6 for free,…

Did things like the starter or water pump keep getting used on different models for decades afterwards

A winter beater is pretty common for Car People in the Great Lakes Snow Belt. Within a year after college graduation I owned a hot rod/project car, and a winter beater. Much later, I had a ‘79 Camaro DD/beater from about 1996-2004. Today we have two new-ish (2013 and 2016) hatchback DDs driven all year, but they…

A winter beater needs two things IMHO — 1. Heated Seats. 2. Remote Start.

When I met my then-girlfriend, now-wife of 34 years back in 1981, she was happy to have me to maintain her car along with the rest of my fleet. Now in 2021, she is OK with driving our Odyssey van as support vehicle for my once-a-year drag strip or sports car track ventures, but she’s not really into it. I take…

I do most of the work on my cars and have replaced clutches, swapped transmissions, replaced wheel bearings, etc...you get the picture...I’m not a novice. But I’ve never rebuilt an engine and had to look up what those terms meant.

I’m currently using (checks product) Gojo Natural Orange Smooth hand cleaner (no abrasive). For 40+ years I just assumed that getting your hands dirty was part of the job and I, uh, did it bareback. A couple years ago I tried some nitrile gloves but I’m used to the tactile feel of tools and parts in hand. The…

Also you fill them with ATF (Automatic Transmission Fluid) which is very unusual for a stick shift in my experience.

the cacophony of the small gasoline engine is not something I’m going to miss

Dazed and Confused has been a long time favorite for me... including it’s ‘68 GTO (or maybe ‘69, I don’t clearly recall the tail lights), and Woodersons’s 1970 SS454 Chevelle...I’m going to have to look again at Repo Man for the ‘70 Firebird, et al...The classic 1960s muscle car era happened when I was too young to…

...would rather spend in the mid tens of thousands of dollars to get 13 non-running/barely running vehicles rather than two good ones.

I’ve seen more than one documentary movie from the late 1930’s that showed German workers and family participating in KdF cruise ship vacations. These were heavily orchestrated and had extensive efforts to indoctrinate the vacationers in Nazi ideology along with their cruise.

From 1973-1998 I/we owned very used MY 1964-1980 cars, all but one GM (Dodge Van). The fleet soon became 3 to 5 vehicles or more at a time. At least one and often more than one needed something fixed at any given time. By your definition they were all Durable.

I’ve found you are correct. While they are both referred to as “U-platform”, the 1990-96 vehicles were built on the GMT199 platform and the ‘97-up were on the GMT200 platform.

Ah, rust. In 2000 we bought an off-lease 1997 “Pontiac TranSport with Montana package”, the first year of the second-generation GM minivan which I believe to be the same platform as the Dustbusters, but with steel instead of plastic body panels. By the time we sold this near-lemon around 2007, along with all the…

Capitol building, not White House, but point taken.

In my opinion, GM would have had better PR saying they would be replacing all Bolt batteries with Ultium and showcasing how much safer Ultium is/was compared to older NMC Bolt battery technology.