It looks like a chinese knockoff of a 1st gen Audi TT.

Vehicles weight, corner weights, and balance would actually be cool AND useful information.

This a million times over. Also modifying the car for it’s intended purpose. Street cars don’t make good track cars, and track cars make awful street cars.

Recycling isn’t cheap is the exact reason why.

Raw materials cost just went up between 14% and 28%. I’d say that’s the major driver here.

I’d venture to say that an 11% drop in volume isn’t going to change the cost to make a battery much. In a high volume, low margin production environment your biggest variable is materials cost.

K10:

There’s a big difference between market cap (which is shown on your graph) and a company’s worth. Market cap can evaporate overnight, fixed assets and an actual revenue stream do not.

How about the V5? It makes the V4 look absolutely popular in comparison. Both Honda (RC211V motorcycle) and VW (VR5) have made them.

Liquid Film is where it’s at for winter corrosion protection. Do it yourself or take it somewhere before the snow falls each year.

That’s a little bit like saying I can’t find a DOT race slick for my F-150. You’ve got +2 size rims on your SUV. If you were worried about offroad prowess why did you start with that vehicle and those rims?

It also comes with 1,000lbs more weight than a ratty Fox body.

You must not have looked to hard. Tire rack shows that you can get General Grabber and Yokohama Geolander (both are all terrain tires) in 215/70/16 and the Geolander in 235/60/16 which are the two sizes that came on the 2012 RAV4‘s. Either tire would be more than aggressive enough for any offroad activity you could…

Point taken, but there are plenty of late model (2008+) cars out their with a full compliment of safety features (airbags, stability control, abs, side impact, rollover, etc) for $5k.

I’m with Torch on this one. $10k is way to much to spend on a car that has a very good chance of getting wadded up in a ditch or at the very leastsome of the sheetmetal getting wrinkled.

3.0

I’ve logged enough seat time in a ‘13 SHO (with performance pack) to offer the following insight:

The Mazda 5 is no longer for sale in the US. I wouldn’t count the Metris and other vans like it among the key competition. Those are working vans for contractors that you just so happen to be able to order with seats.

Issues that keep SOME people away include:

It’s predecessor, the MK-whatever, did. The new one is based on the CD platform, essentially a stretched Fusion.