I’ve lived in that zone within a two-hour radius of New York City. It should be noted than on the worst days, two hours from Manhattan might still leave you just some place in the Bronx or Queens. Now, two hours at 60 miles per, and you can damn near be in the Adirondacks. 

And one less house.

Okay, then. 

What really stinks is that BMW significantly dumbs down their product mix for the U.S., which was long their largest market until they convinced hundreds of thousands of Chinese each year to buy long-wheelbase 3ers and 5ers, along with some good, old, U.S.-made X5s.

M5 Touring? Not for you, biggest M-car market in the…

That’s an entirely different question.

Should he have gotten stoned before he got into a race car? Should he have stepped out of his race car while he was on the track to face Stewart?

Your comment posits that an armed police officer could have stopped Tony Stewart from having the accident he did. (Whatever you think…

Should Tony Stewart have been shot? Is that what you’re saying? 

Since the EPA requires compliance testing (all at the automaker’s expense, and more closely scrutinized since everyone was seemingly trying to game the system with their diesels in recent years), here is probably how the math works out.

BMW makes about an eight percent profit overall, which includes X5s and X3s (big…

Yeah, Paul Newman was the real deal. I met him a few times at races when I was covering them, but he always pleasant but deferred to the team principals for interviews even though he was at many races. I had a friend that worked in his theater (his wife’s?) in Connecticut in his later years, including on a play…

I’ll fight you on my hatred for the sun, Epic Asian, and I just moved from Vermont to North Carolina. I’d gladly trade the pavement and mild winters here for the mud and long, cold, gray winters up north. Kidding...but only on the fighting part.

I have an ‘02 BMW M coupe, the on with the glass sunroof that just tilts...…

Funny how his wife (?) appears to be deliberately not looking at any of the Steves.

I started just a couple of weeks shy of my 30s and have been at it pretty consistently the past 19 years with occasional time off for pending injury (my knees and shoulders occasionally tell me to piss off and dial it back).

Growing up as a skinny kid (think: cross country team), I never thought I’d enjoy lifting, but…

As a pale man of northwestern European stock, I can tell you that all sunroofs are stupid.

Now, as a former resident of a state that bordered Canada and is known for long, cold, icy, snowy winters which peter out with several sessions of thawing known collectively as mud season, and where pavement is merely a future…

You must have been reading my mind. Some guy in the gym yesterday was already in the squat rack, using it for deadlifts, but he also had an adjustable bench halfway wedged in there, so, in between deadlifts, he could do rows while laying chest down in the elevated bench. And he took plenty of rest time.

He spent 30…

That’s a tremendous amount of rational thought for an internet comments section. 

Since when is a 2009 Camry from the “malaise era?” Given that all Camrys are beige by default, I get that part.

We’ve also had a couple of Hondas and a couple of Toyotas in the past 20 years, and the Toyotas have been significantly quieter and more or less held up that way over time.

Maybe, but now you’re talking a smaller chassis in the compact Golf/Jetta line, not the midsize Passat/Camry size. I just don’t find the Passats since 1998 or so all that interesting to drive. Admittedly, the Camry has had very few bright spots, though I do remember hammering a 1993/94 or so Camry SE coupe with a…

I owned several A2 VWs (Mark II’s to you yung’uns) and never had any major issues beyond the failed, occasionally exploding heat exchangers. Loved those cars. Might get another one as a toy.

I have also had Euro wagons personally, and, well, the smug factor is hard to tell from the inside. Certainly, they were…

The difference is that a comparably priced and equipped Camry will do the same mileage--or more--with only basic maintenance. And, no, the Passat is not that exciting of a driver, not since the last of the five-speed/VR6 cars went away in the Nineties, anyway, to have to endure with such headaches. 

Amazingly, not really. Some of the problems were self-inflicted, like my nephew tearing a chunk off the oil pan when he drove over a rock, somehow, the Passat’s 1.8T not grenading at the immediate loss of oil.

Sure, there was a bunch of work, and that car was DOA several times. There were ignition gremlins galore and…

On the, ahem <cough, cough>, advice of one her children, my mom bought new a 2001.5 Passat wagon, only the second new car my parents ever owned. That car had so many problems—coil packs recalled various times, oil issues galore, and so on and so forth. Combined with VW’s shitbag dealer network, it was a nightmare.

Amazi…