The iPhone with the cracked screen a friend traded me for dinner. It lives in the car and provides podcasts, music and navigation on the center screen. 

I paid extra to have a spare in my current car. Reason: I had flat tires on my three previous cars. And in each case the hole in the tire was so big that trying “fix-a-flat” spray would have been plain ridiculous. 

Depends, if you ask me. The “skeet shooting with cars” episode is still one of the finest half-hours of entertainment TV has ever produced, and it probably cost more than 5,000 (although the cars themselves certainly cost way less).

“Totaled” is a matter of addition and subtraction. A friend’s mother always drove small cars, and she always got comprehensive coverage (because you don’t want to worry about every little thing). Her last one was a Peugeot, a 205 or 106 or something in that weight class. It got totaled in a supermarket parking lot…

Didn’t happened to me, but allegedly to a guy a friend knows: Drove home one evening in the twilight, roebuck hops onto the road. He swerves, avoids the roebuck, comes to a stop touching a tree. Damage to the car is largely cosmetical, but expensive. Insurance bails out, because there is no indication there actually…

I seem to recall that one iteration of the BMW 5 series launched with something like three available colors, which were grey, gray and a different color which was either grey-ish or gray-ish, memory serves not.

Ah yes, the balance joystick! By far the coolest feature of my uncle’s Sierra, not least because in our VW family it was not just unheard-of, it was absolutely unimaginable.

Or, in the immortal words of Walter Röhrl: If you see the tree first, it’s understeer. If you only hear it, it’s oversteer.

Is that Trachtenberg or Trachtenburg?

I have never owned a BMW, so I have to ask: How do they do they turn signal thing?

What a lovely little car. A silver RX-7 was the sole saving grace of my shitty first holiday job, around 1987. Another worker had one, and it was nice just to see it sitting there in the parking lot every morning.

Is the headline supposed to mean that non-AR HUDs are not useful? I would beg to differ, because I do love my HUD which allows me to keep my eyes on the road for far longer stretches at a time without having to switch between gauge cluster and road, which means refocusing every time, which makes you tireder faster.

As someone who occasionally rides a bicycle on snow-covered roads, I shudder to think what riding a motorcycle on those roads might be like, and that is BEFORE we have considered the possibility that drivers in cars might be present, drivers who, regrettably but invariably, will be surprised that snow does still occur…

Same here. Although I learned in a Golf 2 Diesel, which was impossible to stall and nearly impossible to get moving. 

I have always admired (from afar) the U.S. democracy for its resilience. I am keeping my fingers crossed now …

To nitpick: I think that Fiat in the first picture is a 131, not a 141. I know this because years ago I gave my wife a model of a Fiat 131, because she still has fond memories of that car (not the rally variant, although that seems to be the only one of which you can find model cars).

Always liked the look of those. And the turbo was the most horsepower you could get per buck. 13k seems a bit rich, though.

Where I am writing this you do not get licence plates if you do not have insurance. This is achieved by having the insurance companies hand out the plates. To me that seems like a pretty sensible setup.

I live in a country that features winter among its seasons.

I did follow the link, but I could not find out if the REAL classics of the car chase genre (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Vanishing Point) were even included. Disappointed but not surprised.