It’s also possible (I don’t know him, personally) that he just isn’t a good driver. And/or that he was new to the vehicle and not yet familiar with its controls.

A possible confound, of course, is that being in a car wreck is a much bigger deal, physically, when you’re quite old.  

When I worked at a place well up a steep hillside, I noticed that one of the shuttle-bus drivers (the buses were turbodiesels with automatic transmissions) used the left foot to hold the vehicle if he caught a red light. When the light turned green, he’d feed in a little accelerator and simultaneously ease off the…

Aging is one of the most individual things we do. In appearance, he has the gift of looking a lot younger than he really is (math math math... Ferris Buehler’s Day Off came out when he was 30, a few to several years older than co-stars who played characters ostensibly in his age group), but for some people, 67 is…

The mags are period-appropriate in their own way, like what the young second or third owner of the car might have put on it quite some years ago. I respect this nod to the history of the car even though hubcaps on steelies would be more correct (and agree that they look good).

I have some reservations, such as reason to think it’s for sale by one of the actual or de facto dealers who work the by-owner side of Craigslist (https://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/lgb/cta?purveyor=owner&query=%22562%20eight%22#search=1~gallery~0~0), and the penalty of the automatic transmission. But it holds…

I am guessing that it was still pretty nice and on its first or second owner during the brief, 15-years-ago heyday of Cash for Clunkers, and its gorilla days came a couple of trips through the used-car ads and a lot of miles later.  

It has fleas.

You have to disclose them.  If you put them on the policy for a particular car, or in some cases any of your cars, the premiums go up.  If you save money by excluding them but they but crack up that car anyway, then the insurance company has a reason to deny the claim.  Heads, we win; tails, you lose.

Their decision to enforce that clause even though it was irrelevant to the crash was pretty chickens., but might well be technically defensible—Mr. Preciado may want to drop a two figure amount of his remaining assets to consult an attorney, but I’ll place a beer bet on the outcome.

Nice Price: I would call it “Barney.”

Here’s what it look like to me.

Excellent financial reasons* to keep your situational awareness up and err on the side of caution.

Well... yes and no. This was a lot worse than the cumulative total of an urban area’s fender-benders, and the worst of the worst appeared to have Final Destination stuff like semi-truck overruns and multi-vehicle fires, which are pretty common when fast heavy traffic encounters sudden near-zero-visibility…

I gather that it might be more accurately described as a long string of crashes with at least three significantly multi-vehicle clusters of severe ones. See for instance

I rather suspect that it racked up that kind of mileage in a freeway commute. I’m imagining him chugging a few miles on the 20-25-mph surface streets of Alameda, then getting on the Nimitz Freeway and maybe, maybe, knocking the rust off third gear.  

Maybe if it were in show-car condition and had a paper trail of the expert repairs that kept it that way. With all due respect to how long it has soldiered on, at this price and in this condition it is a case study in how “rare” does not necessarily mean “valuable.”

Indeed; a gun owner who travels much and has thought these matters through will make sure that “bags that have anything to do with guns or ammo” and “bags you might take on the plane” are disjoint sets.

Most of these will be polluting shit boxes that aren’t fit to be on the road.

Without comment on whether these are the ones, pending their trial and conviction: I am not betting against the general shape of your proposition or Big Block I-4's. One malignantly charismatic personality with an instinctive gift for manipulation, attracting followers with insufficiently developed personality in…