Yup.

The price differential is going to be a lot bigger in places like China & Singapore where the tax adds 50-200% of the price of the car, and in places like Belgium or Hong Kong where tax rises with engine displacement.

Mercedes will still do paint-to-sample on any car built at the Sindelfingen plant (E-Class, S-Class, CLS, AMG GT). Lead time 4-6 months, cost about $10k. Annoyingly, not all dealers seem to know this, but I got it straight from the M-B product managers a few weeks ago.

The DB11's V-12 is a twin-turbo motor also. But yeah, it’ll still sound like a 12-cylinder, and that’s special.

There’s a part of me that wants a yellow one with the red interior. Not enough to actually do it. But I want to.

It’s cheaper than a Dodge Charger with the Hemi, which would seem to me to be the real competition.

I know. This thing should be fucking Jalopnik Car of The Year. If I were more liquid I’d have one of these things on order, preferably in a paint-to-sample 70s 911 color.

To be fair, this drive is kind of the German equivalent of New York to Boston on I-95. Other parts of the Autobahn are a lot less congested, as is this route during different times of day/week. Drive from, say, Munich to the border on the way to Milan, and you’ll experience the Autobahn we’ve all read about.

I’d like to think that the car racing world - well, except for the rolling vaudeville act that is NASCAR - takes the “toxic” out of masculinity: Your lap times say everything that needs to be said. No macho bullshit or posturing matters when the green flag drops.

Wow. I’d never seen that race before, and now I don’t think I’ll forget it.

Sure. Come to Sears Point for the next Lemons race. If you set a faster lap time than me, I’ll take you to Mitchell Bros and buy you your first blowjob.

Agreed, at least at the high end of the power range. I know what to do with a 500+ horsepower car, I just can’t do it on the street.

505s (and the even more cushy 604s) come up for sale very seldom here in the states. They seem to be $3-4k cars, except for the end-of-run 505STis, which I see people asking $7-8k for. There’s a Lemons team that runs one and they know a lot more than I duo - I think at least one member of that team is a Jalop…

I’m imagining the call to Hypercoil: “Yes, we’re looking for some custom-wound springs for an E30. What rate? Yeah, well, about 1488 lb/in should do it.”

He and I both drank a lot of Long Island Iced Teas in those days. Didn’t seem to matter either way.

Of course you can reasonably argue with their rationale to regulate your use of your land. That’s kind of the point of property rights. It’s in the Takings Clause of the Bill of Rights, and there’s a fair bit of case law (admittedly very government-favorable in recent years) as to what that means.

Hm... I’ll slap a Sanskrit Om on the 944 and see what happens.

A guy who worked for me in the early 2000s drove one of those Accents, also Mardi Gras Green, with a vanity plate referring to his Buddhist proclivities. He - and I’m not kidding here - got laid with a larger and more varied procession of women than just about anyone I have ever known or even heard of. He talked so…

Oh indeed. BMW will be milking the ///M badge long after consumers have forgotten the cars that first made it famous. There will eventually be a M-something that is as sacrilegious as the 2000 Monte Carlo SS was for Super Sports. I’ll just put a bet down now and say it will be on an FWD mini-minivan.

I’m more hopeful - I’m seeing the cost come down rapidly in some areas (hands, knees). Once you’ve got a systematic model for how load is transferred, you can measure the patient w/ 3-D camera, scale the piece in a somewhat automated fashion in AutoCAD/DesignWorks, and then 3-D print. It’s not crazy to think of this…