If you think the AMG-GT is not much of a looker, you have obviously never been close to an SLS. One of those is often parked near my apartment, and whenever I walk past it, I try to find the angle from which it looks good. So far, I haven’t found it.

in practice the two sounds are fairly distinct.

A Golf is a very different animal from a 500, by virtue of being significantly larger. We kept our Mk III until the little one was 6 (at which point the Golf died). We were able to put the pram in the trunk and still fit a bit of luggage in it. Good luck trying that in a 500.

How are the other three doors still locked when you have just gotten in? My car is an 11-year-old Mazda, and I think there is no way you can intentionally unlock just the driver’s door from the outside. Either all four are locked or unlocked. It’s called “central locking”, I believe.

+1

Most disturbing roadkill situation: Driving through Australia’s red center. As you can probably imagine, large dead kangaroos abound, because when you get in the way of a road train, that is usually your last mistake. So far, so clear. Now consider the Wedge-tailed Eagle. It used to prey on small marsupials. Those…

How about an AWD Volkswagen Sharan with a few amenities for EUR 55.000,-?

Hm. Sure looks quirky. But people who try to use a Unimog as their private means of transport usually find out it’s not as much fun as they thought. Travelling in a vehicle that gets 9 mpg (Diesel) and maxes out at around 50 mph gets old really fast. Okay for “extreme vehicle-dependent situations” maybe, but not for…

Used to be an annual contest when I was a kid (not on snowboards then, just skis), called ski-kjoring. Scandinavian origin, I guess.

Was about to post that. Here in Austria, it’s illegal to drive with any loose-heel type footwear. High-heels would be okay as long as they sit firmly on the foot and don’t flop.

Looking at this thing, a scene unrolled before my mind’s eye:

Are those really rare in America? Because from where I am sitting it looks like you can get a 400i that actually runs, with actual windows and paint and stuff, for that kind of money.

Once I heard someone tell the story of how they went to a meeting with a leading Opel engineer. They entered the corporate parking lot, went past rows and rows of Astras and Rekords and Corsas, until they came to a Jaguar E-Type. That was where the chief engineer’s office was.

As a matter of fact, it’s not rare to see a US license plate as decoration behind the rear window of a car here in Austria. Never on the plate holder, though. That would get you pulled over very soon.

Love the King of the Hill reference. Happy Thanksgiving!

Are you sure about “Hottentotten”? The word was used (mostly by Germans and Boers) for a number of Southern African peoples, against some of which the Germans led a rather bloody war.

A colleague recently explained to me that men who have reached a certain age (to wit, ours) start finding bimbos not so repulsive anymore. This is because life has taught them there are basically two kinds of women: a) dumb and b) taxing.

I always felt that the change of the movie as opposed to the novel - stealing the gold instead of contaminating it - was not an improvement but quite the opposite. It turns a realistic threat into something that, as Bond points out in the movie, someone hasn’t quite thought through all the way.

In many European countries headlight level adjustment has been mandatory for quite some time now, to compensate for different loads.

Without a carrier, but with a signal? I don’t quite understand. I was of the impression that emergency calls had a better chance of going out because they were not restricted to the carrier with which you have a service contract. In Europe, you can call 112 as long as you have a signal from some carrier - it doesn’t…