Bail isn’t punishment. (How could it be? It applies before there’s even been a trial, much less a conviction.) It’s assurance, based on such factors as the seriousness of the charges and an assessment of flight risk, that the accused will show up for subsequent stages of the process.

Counterpoint: A short van is just a fat car with a big door. A full-length version can go vanning a lot harder when all your visiting relatives need to get to the airport or the thrift store has the perfect sofa at a super low price on the condition that you take it now. It won’t be as nimble and able to take…

At a realistic $65k, it might sell to well-heeled moms, but mostly I guess at a bifurcated market of your better-off Boomers nostalgic for the original and tech bros with money to burn.

Cute, and potentially a bit useful, but two twenties get in the way: the twenty-grand ask, and the twenty-year-old New Beetle. Even as a low miler, and if never exposed to the substance that gives the Rust Belt its name, that’s a lot of money.

Most anything of this age is an enthusiast car, and we can’t judge the value proposition by the same standards as daily transportation for a mainstream market.

From a bit of not-for-navigation-purposes poking around on the Internet, I’d guess that the Explorer has about a 3500 pound tow rating within a 7000 pound gross combination weight rating, depending on equipment details. Doesn’t exactly put well-equipped contemporary half-tons to shame, let alone today’s, but it’s…

Towing is a major difference between the two. For sure, though I’m defending the general idea of   SUV shape and construction with 2WD (which might have been 20-25% of some models back in the day), not the value proposition of today’s NPoND offering.

In RWD form I cannot imagine a use case for buying this.

Price is firm or it is going on a collector car auction site

So what is the incidence of this with other rental companies, and with the lower-tier brands with in the Hertz empire (Thrifty, Dollar, and Firefly)?

It sounds to me as though they are fumbling some pretty basic office-management things that happen to be on car-specific subject matter.  They should find that downright embarrassing.  

I figure that if the car dies close enough to home to push the rest of the way, but not close enough for any fire to spread to the house, you’re livin’ the dream, British Leyland style.

Maybe they just take the same approach as with boat shoes — instead of trying in vain to keep water from getting in the top, you make it easy for it run out the bottom afterward?

Not without a fair bit more information on the extent of the necromancy and how it was performed, on a scale from “changed fluids and oiled the cylinder bores through the spark plug holes and all that” to “threw in a can of gas treatment and put the battery charger on “crank.”

Takes insider knowledge, I reckon, or a really good eye, so you can cherry pick one that was a mobility appliance for a detective or better yet a perquisite of rank for someone on command staff. Patrol units have a hard life. I guess that in this day and age, you might hope to find an OBD-II clue about the engine…

They do offer a hope of getting their “fuel” from a less polluting source (nothing is nonpolluting).  And there’s something to be said for making the pollution in the boondocks rather than in a dense city—possibly a dense city in a geographical smog trap, under an inversion layer, etc.

The fact that it’s been on the market for an entire month—in one of our biggest metro areas during a used-car price and availability crisis—confirms my immediate Nice Car at a (rampantly) No Dice Price reflex.

Well... you have to take a close look to discern who presently owns and operates the bus, although this is supposed to be made manifest. From ten or twenty feet away o you see the previous owner’s very conspicuous logotype and color scheme.

Sounds about right. Pretty much any consumer transaction these days has a sidebar about data they can either use outright or sell.

I was told years ago that Hertz and other companies get rid of cars at or approaching 50,000 miles.