Which is why I think manuals are going to become the expensive options. Automatics can do everything for most everybody. If you are one of those people who insist on a manual (like me) it’s going to cost extra.

That is true. If you have a fun car, it can be an automatic and still retain a good deal of its fun. If you have a miserable car, it can be much less miserable with three pedals.

Oh absolutely. Also, the base corvette. I mean, if you are going to pick example to be offended about, you might as well go big, like all the guys talking about their porsches.

Ever driven one of those cars that technically had enough power, but had a completely non responsive throttle? No matter what you did, it just did it’s own thing, ignoring your pedal input entirely? Or the kind that would happily rev up when you press the pedal, but all the happened was a great deal of noise with…

Last year we had over 100 day streak of 100+ weather. This year was a tad better, but not much

Oh if you want to be technical about it. But look, fully half that list describes engines that are put in rather expensive automobiles. They may be base, but they are not cheap. Of course any engine available in a porche or a corvette is going to be at least minimally awesome. Ditto for the rest of the Germans. And…

Of all the jalopnik interface updates, this is the one I hate the least.

Where do you live? Perhaps my opinions about sunroofs are geographically biased. I’m residing pretty far down south, and its almost never the right weather for a sunroof. Most days are sunny, but also very hot. Why anyone bothers with a convertible here is beyond me.

Also, no matter how much you have to pay, and what kind of favors you have to perform, the manual transmission is always worth it.

I’m surprised to have to point this out on jalopnik of all places, but no amount of savings is worth having to put up with the misery of the base engine in virtually every vehicle.

I’ve dropped and picked up my bikes plenty of times (often in the most emberassing ways. Once as my foot got caught in the shifter of a friends harley, I came to a stop, tried to put my foot down, and down I went, right at a red light. Another, when I pulled up to a gas station on a sportbike that was a tad too tall…

That always looks extra fancy. But probably not a good beginners move.

Yep, that was my original approach (pun intended). However, I’m not that good at planning ahead. Too often my only thought was getting to where I was going, with little regard to how I was going to leave.

99% of the time, if you have to move a bike backwards, its because you have to back it out of a parking space (this is especially difficult if its uphill, like if the road slopes toward the curb). I’m ashamed to admit that it took me well over a year to figure out the solution. Push your bike backwards before you get…

There is a joke about an engineer and a physicist going to hell. The devil offers them a very appealing mate, for the rest of eternity, if they are willing to follow one rule. Whenever the devil says go, each must run exactly half the distance to their goal. The physicist just shakes his head, while the engineer takes…

Perhaps it should be <under current conditions> instead of @rpm. current conditions will include throttle position, engine rpm, how clean the air filter is, etc.

Reliability, and repair-ability. Offroading is really tough on a vehicle, things break all the time. Electric motors should be pretty reliable, given their low part count, but power electronics are a different story. They don’t like shock or high temperature, which is exactly what offroading brings.

“horsepower = torque*RPM/5252”

I’m not so sure that the number of possible combinations will always go up with number of nodes in a pattern, given that nodes must be adjecent. For example, if you want to use all nine nodes, there are only a handful of possible ways to do so.

How well does the engine handle ingesting cherios and poptarts?