It’s a neat trick if you can use it. My Mazda 3 has the oil filter right next to the drain plug.

Every car I’m aware of with keyless ignition (which I’m assuming is what your daughter’s car uses for this to be an issue) has a way to unlock and start the car with a dead key. Most of the time, including the Toyota system, there’s an RFID chip for backup. Even if the keyfob has a dead battery, you can hold it near…

If I owned a car brand, I’d have these sort of “unintentional” leaks all the time, to see what theories fans came up with to explain them.

That would be fair if all the high-performance cars were taking full advantage of their brake clearance. But they’re not. Even sports cars often have room to spare around the brakes, and most lower-performance cars have an enormous gap.

Diesel still has a place in vehicles that routinely tow heavy loads, because of the fuel economy. But a lot of fleet trucks are HD models for their load-carrying capacity, not for towing; the gas engines are much cheaper for those uses.

Neither my office chair nor my toilet requires me to access it from the side or to duck under a roof lower than my head in order to sit down. The entry/exit benefit of an SUV is that you can stay more upright as you twist and bend into the seat, even if you do gain a small amount of elevation in the process.

The problem with your chart as it stands is that it doesn’t make allowances for the vehicle. A 4.6 liter engine in a half-ton truck is sort of expected or even a bit small, while in a lightweight coupe it’s quite large and in a motorcycle it’s completely unreasonable.

The nice thing about this 10-speed is that it has a huge ratio spread. It’s not just shifting more often, it’s also covering more at the top and bottom. Looking at the Mustang because I can find the numbers easily, the current 10-speed with its standard 3.55 final drive has almost as much first-gear multiplication as…

I’m hoping for gradual, incremental improvement in both charging standards and charging speed. However, I know those are both complex (for different reasons).

Yep. 660 ft-lbs of torque in the manual, vs 800 in the automatic. And the automatic has a gear selector button for anticipating hills or whatever the manual4lyfe guys have been rambling about (although from their anecdotes I’m guessing most haven’t driven a modern automatic). I’m not seeing much reason to buy a stick…

You might try calling/emailing some of the car wash operators in your area to see if they actually recycle water. Not all washes do (to the horror of our water-starved friends in California), and even if they do recycle there may be portions of the wash, like the spot-free final rinse, which either use fresh water or…

In 2015, Consumer Reports tested and found the Ford Fiesta, Chevrolet Sonic, Hyundai Accent and Mazda 3 to all be more efficient if you were willing to row through the gears yourself.

Additional benefits: Available with 6-speed manual.

Have you driven the car? The dyno charts don’t show you everything; the thing is an absolute dog below 2,000 or maybe 2,500 RPM and doesn’t really wake up until you’ve been in the throttle for a while. The engine can be at full boost by 1,300 RPM, but it doesn’t necessarily happen in normal driving because no matter…

Yeah, I’ve run this setup before as well. As long as the rear tires are decent all-seasons and not summer hockey pucks, it’s fairly predictable. You get better braking and acceleration, while still being able to corner exactly as fast as all the people around you driving on 4 all-seasons.

Cool story, bro. How is that relevant to a different car with a completely different engine?

Sigh.

Well, a good automatic might have. The problem with the stick was especially noticeable when setting off. They claim peak torque starting at 1400 RPM, but it must be a bit slow to spool at those really low speed; to me it felt like the engine didn’t really wake up until 2,000 RPM or so. Either way, when you’re pulling…

It takes a lot of extra gears to make up for the extra hydraulic pumps and more complicated mechanisms, but in my experience that’s only on the test cycles (i.e., when they’re shifted perfectly). In the real world the gap closes up quite a bit, because real drivers will usually hold a gear if it’s “good enough” for…

I’m going to assume the weight is a typo and it actually comes to 3089.