The “I’m a dad who just made his last court-ordered child support payment” car.

I wanted to like the RS, but the ergonomics were terrible (I couldn’t heel-toe to save my life) and everything about it felt cheap. On top of that, they don’t really do well on track from a cooling standpoint. I’d much rather spend a bit more and get a new GR Corolla if I wanted an AWD turbo hot hatch. 

I’d take the Civic instead; I don’t know how to drive stick so a Focus RS would be an expensive paperweight for me.

I am a massive Honda Fit proponent for a city car, so bear with my biased opinion.

Cause there ain’t enough cheap cars to drive the price down, and a bunch of people really need a cheap car driving up demand?

I think the problem came to be that the larger car (civic) started to surpass the fuel economy of the Fit while being better in every way.  Once superior fuel economy is out people tend to go for the bigger model.

I really like the new GX (Really liked the GX460 before), but my wife’s car is the next to be replaced and she’s pretty set on going PHEV. So we will probably end up with a polar opposite of the GX in the Mazda CX-90. But if Toyota could roll out a PHEV GX before then, it will absolutely be in my garage.

I work for a very large company, and the bonus structure for anyone VP or above is partially based on DEI for your organization. My understanding is that this is pretty common, and honestly is probably way more impactful and cost-effective than employing a DEI officer telling people what to do.

The good news is my “86" is not a “86", so I took some liberties with mine. This is what I use to haul shifter karts and drive daily. Having friends, beer & vinyl on hand make for a good time. And yes, there was an attempt to be somewhat accurate. =)

When any pleb with near a hundred grand worth of buying power can get an EV that will do 0-60 in under 4 seconds, of course that metric loses the panache it used to have to super and hypercar makers.

I agree! It is more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. We need more cars with fun driving dynamics within legal speed limits. Hot hatches had a point. They were fun. Minis have never been about 0-60 or top speed fun. 0-60 was a thing for big motored behemoths that could not handle cornering or stopping…

The funny thing is that lifestyle changes with respect to driving (work from home specifically) are probably way more impactful than almost any vehicle choice you could make. To the extent we can, as a culture, we should try to reduce the amount of miles we drive.

I would be in line at the dealer for a PHEV GX. In the meantime, I’m really hoping the Ramcharger is solid. It checks the boxes for my personal needs.

seconded

As someone who understands the gist of what you’re going for here, but who has never seen the series, it would have been useful to have images of each “stage” to show the differences between them and the tribute up top.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I’ve read the post title 3 times and have no idea what it’s supposed to say.

1st gear feels like you are attacking the wrong thing instead of focusing on the positives we still have.

You use words like “deserve” as if there’s some kind of simple seniority requirement that needs to be paid off by simply doing time in the lower echelons.

328d’s both sedans and wagons were auto only, no choice on that.

That paint and interior are well received among the BMW fans.