But I did own one. I put about 120,000 miles on a ‘93 Ranger extended cab with the V6 and 5 speed. Every time I wanted to haul something more than a couple of bags of mulch; the bed was too small. Every morning and afternoon commute was an uncomfortable jounce down the road. Every long road trip was a punishing…

Generally, the compact pickup trucks of the late 20th century, specifically, he 1983-1992 version of the Ford Ranger.

Not only would I buy this for $2500, I would spend money to restore it and take it to all the car shows. I tire of seeing endless rows of mid-60s GTOs and Bel-Airs, a mid-90s Chevy would be just the thing to make shows interesting.

Also, calling this a ‘test track’ is a bit of an oversell. It’s a barely more than a tarted-up parking surface:

“Two elementary school students were seriously injured while on a field trip to Ford’s test track in Auburn Hills, Michigan”

When I first enrolled my child in driver’s ed; they specifically mentioned not to put Student Driver stickers on the car. Their reasoning was that people wouldn’t drive normally around them and they wouldn’t develop any “drive in traffic” skills.

The Bayesian sinks, killing one defendant; and the other is killed by a car collision. What are the odds of that?

Allow me to defend stop/start:

I think the first should read:

Some changes to the buiding codes. New construction should include wiring for 220V home chargers; and maybe a minimum number of chargers for multi-family buildings. I’d also amend the commercial zoning code to reduce the number parking spaces per floor area.

It’s a bit of a hedge on Musk’s part. The walls are closing in on Tesla’s FSD/Autopilot, from the DoJ, SEC, and NHTSA. The existing hardware on Teslas will never achieve SAE level5, and everybody knows it.[1] A second Trump term, implementing Project 2025, would stop these investigations.

The bumpers may be missing; but that’s a functional hood scoop.  You can see the air intake in the engine compartment shot.

I agree that the castings have changed the body-in-white; but moving to the gigacasting hasn’t changed the exterior styling. Tesla’s design language, excepting the CT, is stale. That was also my point of brining up the long leads between unveiling and production for the CT. Normal OEMs get criticized for this, and so…

The Tesla line-up is very old.

It’s all about range per charge. Every electron you use in the 12V is an electron you can’t use to power the drive motors. Every extra Ah you specify in the 12V battery is weight that cuts into range.  Optimally charging the low voltage battery in an electric vehicle is a hard problem.

The Ford Flex. They sold 300k of these full-size family haulers; and if you ever had one and used it for it’s intended purpose, you knew how great they were. The problem was actually getting families into them. If you didn’t drive one, you’d never know.

Tesla’s biggest technologies are the supercharger network, their vehicle’s fast charging, and their long headstart on the NACS.

CR’s reliability data comes from surveys:

1st: Other OEMs learned this lesson the hard way. Selling large blocks of vehicles to the rental car companies, or owning a rental car company outright, is a neat way to move excess inventory; but it kills the residual value for your retail customers. This makes retail leasing more expensive, but it also impacts what…

“Is there any such redundancy in steer by wire?”