There was a guy in my neighborhood who has a very loud motorbike. He would leave for work at about 5:30 AM every day, and spend several minutes warming his bike up in the ground floor garage of his apartment building. The garage acted like a giant resonator and I could hear it in my house a block away loudly enough to…

Nobody wants the kind of law enforcement presence that would actually deter things like left lane camping and cell phone use. The number of cops would dwarf the size of current police forces. The amount of knock-on awfulness from having so many cops would be a disaster. The only way to reduce the problems is to have…

Well funded social services that try to help people with drug problems gives the moral scolds a big chance to clutch pearls over “coddling addicts” or “encouraging drug abuse” . Harm reduction is the only sane standard because we don’t have good ways to  stop addictions or truly help people turn their lives around. …

In California the buyer pays the sales tax, and they have to pay it when they register the car.  A common dodge is to write a much lower price on the bill of sale than was actually received so the buyer pays a lower tax.

Teslas should be banned from the road? What, do they have a dangerously high accident rate? Because idiots in cars happens with all cars, Teslas just allow a few new kinds while in many cases preventing at least some accidents with automation. The main thing determining vehicle safety is still the human not the…

I’ve had a cycliq forward facing camera for a few years. It captured the weirdest behavior I’ve ever seen from a car toward a cyclist. There was a van parked in the middle of a lane on a reasonably busy two lane commercial street. Because he was close to the center line I decided to pass between him and the parked…

I understand that you don’t don’t care about the costs since you don’t have to spend the money. Getting everybody needed to run the race to the site on some day other than yesterday is pretty much impossible. The cost of rescheduling the entire logistics system is not possible. You have to have all of these…

In case you hadn’t noticed, most teams are based in the UK.  Since Brexit their movement around Europe is more constrained.

A good comparison is the 1998 Belgian GP,23 years ago. It was not as wet at the start as yesterday. more comparable to Saturday’s qualification laps.

I used to live in the Berkeley Hills and would ride my bike down to the train station in the mornings to go to San Francisco. I liked to ride down Marin Avenue, a 24% grade, just because it was fun. I had a bike with some big touring tires that were a little loose on the rims. One morning I pumped the tiers up to a…

With only a few minutes searching I was able to find a picture from 2017 on Flickr that clearly shows the crack. The crack is just to the right of the cable attachment point for the cable closest to the Arkansas sign, the second cable from the left of the pier. It is about 80% across the metal beam in the 2017…

A lens made entirely of Jeeps.  Now that is a great idea.  Jeep Lensing!

Modern cars make driving so much easier than a 1966 Mustang. Even a late 70s Jeep is probably better designed for driveability than anything from 1966. Fewer driver inputs are needed, the car responds to those inputs better, ergonomics are better even on a car only 15 years newer. And that doesn’t include all the…

For an article about a Mustang, it sure spent a lot of words talking about Jeeps. Not that I’m complaining!

The MKIV R32 handled MUCH better than the MKIV GTI. I had a GTI I sold when I bought my 04 R32 new and the handling difference was night and day. The R32 has a fully independent suspension - no beam axle in the rear. This means that in addition to the rear pushing with the AWD, it handles corners much more…

The 08s just never looked right to me.  Too much trim, not enough stealth.

I sold my 04 in 2013 with 130K on it after I had two $900 repairs in the space of two months. One was replacing the driver’s door lock sensors, where the part was about $50 and the shop time (at a discount) to get at something buried in the door was the rest. I could definitely see the writing on the wall at that…

Just wondering - when you say “robust” are you saying that the two liter four in the current R is more reliable than the 3.2 VR6 in the 2008 R32, or are you saying that it has more power? I will give you the more power, getting a VR6 to current Golf R horsepower is expensive and likely unreliable. The design simply…

It is a set of tradeoffs, but to me the MKIV body looks much nicer than the MKV, the 04 is only 6MT, the 08 is only DSG. The downsides are pretty clear, our years older, that much more beat up and less driver tech in the car matters. If you want decent phone support you’ll have to have an aftermarket head unit. The…

Getting thrown out of the new one is still probably the better alternative to whatever happens to you when it rolls over. At least you die flying rather than being decapitated.