I did, but they didn’t have much room to move on the price. The car had only been on the lot a couple days and they weren’t concerned about selling it, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was gone by the end of the week at MSRP. This was in Santa Clara, CA just as things were picking back up in the tech…

I went to a subie dealer a few years ago, on July 4th weekend. The sales dude talked up the big sale they were having that weekend. I took an STI on the weakest test drive imaginable. We sit down to talk numbers... $200 off MSRP.

Weekend plans:

Cali, at least in the parks...

So you’re the other one ;) I use mine all the time. It took a while to get used to the stalk returning to center thing, and the half-press for 3 blinks thing.

I used a surplus TEC element sandwiched between a Celeron 366 and a water block my Dad helped me solder together in the garage. I had to make sure to keep the system under full load at all times or else it would start to form condensation. That worked great until the machine blue-screened at some point during the…

Sure, the driver is responsible for paying attention to the road. Evidence suggests that humans aren’t very good at doing this at the best of times. If you put them in a box that almost always does the right thing on it’s own, they don’t have a very strong incentive to stay focused and engaged which makes the…

I work with people who do image classification; I understand that it’s a hard problem. Since it’s almost entirely neural network based it’s also effectively impossible to prove that you’ve got a classifier that’s not going to mess up. I mean, what happens the first time the car sees the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile or a…

To be fair to the media in this case, the Tesla system failed to classify a fire truck (i.e. a not-exactly-inconspicuous vehicle) as something that it should avoid hitting. That sounds like a pretty big failure to me; certainly it’s worth pointing out that the system perhaps isn’t ready for prime-time in that state.

That thing needs a shark mouth like an old school fighter. Then the rest of the graphics make sense...

I didn’t even look at the bottom line, but I planned on having the loan for about 3 months when my next batch of stock options vested so it wasn’t likely to matter that much. My point was that I’d probably fall in the “72 month” loan statistics even though I had the loan for about 3 months. We did something similar…

I’ve stopped trying to understand the credit industry, none of it makes sense. They throw a bunch of numbers into a computer and it spits out another number which determines whether you get a loan and how much it’ll cost you.

FWIW, the last time I bought a car the best APR was on the 72-month loan; shorter loans had higher rates. I was only planning on having the loan for a few months so I went with it. If the rate was even better on an even longer loan I would have gone that direction.

I started in Joules but electricity generation is easier to think about in KWh which was kinda where I was going with the discussion. At least I didn’t use BTU ;)

The worst I got was my Dad telling me to disengage the clutch when braking for a light and his preference for holding the clutch when stopped rather than popping into neutral and letting the clutch out. On the whole, not the worst thing in the world. At worst, you’ll end up wit slightly more wear on the throwout…

Certainly, you also don’t have to worry about the weight of the scrubbers and such because they don’t move at a power plant. There’s cycle efficiencies to consider for charging, discharging and inverting electricity too. Comparing electrics disfavorably to a truck may have been unfair ;). I would imagine that the…

That doesn’t mean they couldn’t shift production and import Fiestas and Focuses back into the country if need be.

I think the electrification thing is important but probably isn’t going to be the silver bullet that it’s made out to be. Various raw resource inputs there are already being pretty much tapped to capacity for the current production level. Cobalt is being mined by 5 year olds. China has a stranglehold on the rare…

You missed this stunning example. Only 3500, some assembly required: https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1969-datsun-2000-roadster-8/

I considered a Focus RS but basically every dealer in California was tacking 5-10K on top of the MSRP price and then letting them sit on the show room for months.