In fairness, fuel economy standards don’t help here either. For most standardized tests, fuel economy tests allow “whenever the automatic shifts” for autos, where as they prescribe the shift points for manuals. This is why the 991.2 GT3 was more fuel efficient in PDK form, even though the PDK has shorter gears (by…

Chris Harris has a pretty good video on it.

That’s what the MR GT2 is as well. You’re ordering it through the dealer, the dealer isn’t installing the parts, as far as I understand it.

They do, 51%, though that came after the MR GT2 development I believe.

It’s not an official Porsche trim level. Instead, it’s a tuning package provided by an external 3rd party shop that happens to be sold as dealer-installed equipment in Europe. It’s kind of similar to the Callaway Corvettes and Saleen Mustangs in the US, or the FQ series of Lan Evos that were sold in the UK. For…

Huh? It hammered at $80k and didn’t sell because that was below reserve.

Something like half of the 991.2's were selected with the manual option. The take rate is actually quite high. But that’s mostly because flippers think the manual will hold value better long term.

Even in the automatic it doesn’t do anything specifically. It’s there purely as a point of mechanical feedback to the driver of where kickdown would happen. The throttle is throttle by wire, the computer already knows what your throttle angle is, and has shift mapping based on that.

I’m pretty sure for the 992 they all have them.

Called it. A similar regulatory difference between manual and automatics is why the PDK equipped 991 GT3 was more fuel efficient than the manual car, despite the manual car being lighter and them having the same engine and approximately the same gearing. For fuel economy testing in manual cars the shift points are…

Remember that when this regulation was written (1984), many cars only had 4 speeds, with the 4th being an overdrive (I.E. you were drag limited in 3rd, 4th was for fuel economy). So a WOT pull in 3rd covered pretty much the entire speed range the car could do. It probably seemed like a pretty reasonable approximation…

I mean, they built the same number of the JDM S2000 in the same time period, and I’m pretty sure you’d call that a “mass produced car.” And the S2000 didn’t have a base car it was the hot version of.

Sort of. The 250 GTO is a hand built thing form the 60's. Even if the performance as an actual car is lacking by modern standards, it still offers an experience of driving fundamentally different than driving a modern car.

On the other hand, I’ve had a pretzel guy in New York City attempt to convince me that because today he had “king size” pretzels, they were an extra $2 over the listed price, pointing at the boxes of pretzels with “king size” printed on them. Despite “king size” being printed on his stall itself as the standard…

From my understanding, the problem isn’t that they don’t have a production ready truck. It’s that they don’t have the capital left to actually order supplies or pay labor to build it in sufficient quantity for it to be worth starting up the production line. Without firm order commitments, they have no collateral to…

Didn’t Paris drive it drunk into a building at one point? Or was that a different car?

In fairness, the Enzo and the CGT would probably do the same thing, if not more so. Which was always the SLR’s problem. People expected Merc to put out a successor to the CLK GT-R, which was the most hard-core of the F1, GT1 and CLK triumvirate, and instead they did pretty much the opposite of that.

Right, I’m saying that’s my point. Today if you want to buy a thing that does the job the SLR did new, you buy a AMG-GT (and before that the SLS). I think the SLS and GT diluting the image of the SLR is really what tanked the SLR’s value. If you look at halo-GTs that came later like the TdF, those still trade for many…

I think the SLR was extremely good at the thing it was trying to do at the time, which was be a supercar GT, which at the time there simply weren’t that many of (basically just the 550). The problem was that that class of cars got really popular shortly thereafter, and so it was almost immediately succeeded by (kind…

As your own editor pointed out, there are actually quite a few “humble beginnings” that would involve interacting with many facets of high end life. You think the dishwasher in a michelin starred restaurant is making significantly more money than the one at your local taco joint? I mean, I doubt that’s what happened…