Some might call it projection, I call it institutional experience.

What quantity of children is “unneccesary”? Two? One? And who gets to be the arbiter of who gets to have a kid and who doesn’t? Some politician? Is there a minimum income or net worth you need to meet to have a kid?

A simple way to cut pollution from our current era of cheap and plentiful air travel would be to cut cheap and plentiful air travel itself, but that would be too simple.

Toyota brought us the Prius, and Ford is bringing us the F150 EV,

Ford and Toyota are both taking a very measured approach to EVs. We haven’t been talking about there being lithium or other material shortages on the horizon that make the chip shortage look mild, but they’re there. Having ICE units to move without running afoul of optimistic projections is a great insurance policy.

Ugh, these suuuuuuucked. The one tiny saving grace of the ‘78 Century wagon we had was that it was white with tan interior, so the burns you’d get from the chrome seat belt buckles weren’t quite as bad as in some of my folks’ previous cars.

I’ve read that this was done to save about an inch of door card thickness. This allowed three adults to “comfortably” sit in the back seat, and losing ~2" of seat width would make this less likely.

I don’t have any particular feelings about Jaguar one way or another, but why review expensive cars on this site at all if every other sentence is going to be something snarky about how much it costs, or how little the supposedly clueless buyers will care about something?

Back up camera. I’m honestly glad these things are mandated now, because holy shit are they life-changing.

Now, before some of you start your “blah blah blah lazy drivers, my *insert vintage POS here* doesn’t even have mirrors, and I turned out OK” rants, I still use all my mirrors when driving, parking, etc. But…

I do NOT miss the days 20 years ago with the seatbelt locking clip and crazy difficult installation. I shutter at the memories of both knees and all my body weight on the car seat while I tried to fish the seatbelt through the holes in the back of the car seat. all the while the blown plastic seams in the back of the…

Rear cross traffic alert has proven incredibly useful in busy parking lots. 

Time to step into parent corner and talk about LATCH. Back in the day, child seats would simply loop the lower lap restraint through a little slide area, and that’s how you kept a baby safe.

However, it was still more expensive to lease and then buy than to just buy the car outright and collect the $7500 credit. After credits the Spark would have been $10,500 to buy. I paid $3900 in lease payments and the buyout at the end of the lease was $9100. So leasing and then buying would have been $2500 more than…

Exactly the tactic I used when I leased a Leaf in 2015. California also had a $2.5k credit that covered the down payment, so I walked out the door without having to pay anything. 

Everything works except the AC? That’s all you need to know.

As a man who has had periods in his life when the AC was broken, let me tell you exactly what that means: “I am so poor, I cannot maintain this car. I have let every piece of this car wear out, even the parts that separate man from beast. The tires are worn…

I’d jump at the chance to buy a halfway decent 80 series for $7k.  This is not halfway decent. 

Even with some models in short supply, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to make the sale?

It’s stupid but the little “Foot Opera” lights on my 94 Accord give me a chuckle, though they are far less elegant. My personal favorite was the 1980 Datsun 510 with the warning light that was icon of a foot stepping on a brake pedal, to warn the passengers that the driver was in the process of braking. As if they…

“We’d all be on Turo not still booking on Hertz.”

I’m 100% the opposite. I’ll take one ... in two to three years.