Was the North American Focus the same as the European one? I know the body was the same, but did it have less sophisticated suspension? One of the best steering and handling FWD cars I ever drove was a manual 1.6 Focus Hatchback rental, which I remember ripping through Scottish backroads years ago. It was genuinely…

Yep, worst, and also not forgotten for anyone who knows anything about cars, so the headline is idiotic on two fronts. I remember all of these cars, and I specifically remember that they pretty much all sucked when new, and none of them have improved with age. As you pointed out, the Sirocco and ATS might be the…

Car salespeople don’t make this kind of money, with very few exceptions. The survey respondents are almost all owners / dealer principals / sales managers, not guys working the sales floor.

Not really surprising with the XC40, since it’s $10k more than the base ICE version, and dealers likely just find it easier to sell the ICE car.

I think it’s also that the car business is a very difficult, low margin and highly capital intensive industry, hence the reason why the late 20th century was dominated by car companies going out of business and / or consolidating. It was always nonsense that EV startups were really tech companies where the rules of…

Weird headline. The EV stock bubble burst pretty spectacularly a long time ago. Lucid peaked in November of 2021, and had already lost 90% of its value by December of 2022. Tesla is just too unpredictable to call, since time and time again it’s thwarted any attempts at a successful short strategy and defied logic.

Chrome wheels should be an automatic ND. Add in all of the suspect modifications and terrible respray, and it’s hard to see how anyone would want this.

I was referring to the Infiniti lineup, not the Nissan-badged models (although I do also think that there is very little with any appeal in the Nissan lineup).

Luxury.

Yes, crazy that the company that made the EL and CSX ended up being the more successful sport / luxury brand.

Yep, I wonder how many crashes were from people trying to stop the terrible auto wipers from freaking out with a gentle misting of moisture, and having to navigate to a central touchscreen sub-menu to do so.

Meh, four of us got jammed into the back of my dad’s 2-door Saab 99 back in the day.

It’s amazing how Nissan took something with such promise and just destroyed it. It’s probably been a clean 15 years since they had anything remotely interesting in their lineup. Cars like the Q45 weren’t perfect by any means, but they were like the sporty BMW counterpoint to the more Mercedes-like Lexus. Ditto for the…

I get the sarcasm, and that this is a first world problem, but it’s a product of over-complexity, not of the basic simplicity of the physical key for the UHaul van.

The irritating thing about the Tesla key setup is that when you rent one, they give you the card-style key, which you have to physically touch against the door of the car to unlock and lock, and then place in a particular spot inside the car to get it to move.

The V8 TT S6 is a really nice car. A total sleeper, much more subtle than its BMW or Mercedes peers. There is a 2017 for sale near me with only 54k kms / 33k miles, the B&O sound system, asking $45k CAD / $33k US.

I know it’s not the same car, but one of the most fun cars I ever drove was a friend’s 1999 (I think) SiR (they added the “r” in Canada). He still had it a few years ago and it was going strong, but I’ve since lost touch with him.

Yea, I guess unlikely is perhaps not the right word. But it’s easily avoidable, and very different from the implied scenario of the high voltage battery being drained. Your friend’s situation sounds like they were an unlucky victim of poor quality control. I doubt that’s a typical experience.

Over time, the market is rational. The irrationality of people’s knee-jerk reactions gets smoothed out by time. Warren Buffett said it best, by paraphrasing concepts from Graham and Dodd:

I would much prefer it to have a more traditional hatchback profile vs. the silly “four door coupe” form. I can’t imagine it makes much difference to range, but will eat into the practicality of what is already not a very big trunk.