This was just a weird nostalgia project that didn’t really need to happen

There are already big electric marine propulsion systems. For instance:

I salute your perseverance, good taste, and bloody-mindedness. :-)

With the benefit of hindsight... perhaps the way he phrased it, the passive wording, the tragedy that appeared out of nowhere, isn’t accurate; he was a young man hooning his dream car on an unfamiliar road (on the wrong side of the road) so, yeah, whatever happened I think some of the blame could be his, not the other…

Many years ago, I worked with a chap - in the UK - who was a huge BMW fan. He made a point of leaving his BMW keys on the desk in the office. He planned to order his perfect new BMW (I can’t remember, it was probably something like an E31) and collect it from the factory; the epic drive from Bavaria to northern…

Please, no, I beg you. It’s fine to admire British engineering from a distance, but you should never meet your heroes; you will only be disappointed.

True fact: The 1940s and 1950s cars had real wood, but by the era of the Roadmaster, landyachts were getting so long that it was no longer possible to get a single plank of real wood that would run the whole length of the car; so they switched to long strips of vinyl instead.

I think the sweet spot for hybrids is short start-stop journeys, which is how we use much more common vehicles like cars and delivery vans and buses, so manufacturers are busy with those first.

BBB:DI is wise. Things that look soft and squishy often aren’t very comfortable; your weight sinks into it and often you have less chance of putting the load on the most appropriate parts of your body.

The most comfortable bike saddle I’ve ever owned is granite-hard but it’s the right shape to fit my sit-bones. Making…

What amazes me about the American healthcare system isn’t the cost of the care, per se - there are talented medical professionals who earn salaries similar to other developed countries - but the bureaucracy. Somehow the desire to avoid the hypothetical bureaucratic waste of a system where the Ministry Of Health pays…

Worse than that...

I think that HD’s strong brand is actually a problem here.

In much of the world it’s known as “Automatic Numberplate Recognition”, or something similar.

Is that a Massey Ferguson? #tractorlopnik

You’re lucky. When you were at a transformative age, when you were at the brink of adulthood and building a new identity for yourself, you had The Fast And The Furious; you identified with it; it shaped you.

In what way do you feel that ANPR means you’re automatically guilty? Walk me through it.

That’s.. Kinda bullshit. I can see your license plate number. I cannot see your name, your address, your driving record, your criminal record, your birth date, or your physical description, and that’s just what pops up on the initial screen when a plate number gets entered into a cop’s computer.

Aside from the USA-specific constitutional arguments, ANPR is really just reading information that’s already visible to everybody on the street - it’s not connecting into your car and getting special secret data.

Just for context: This is only a few metres higher than the previous record set by a Mercedes Zetros (a slightly more conventional truck), in a very similar publicity stunt a few years ago.

Suzuki have a mild hybrid system, SHVS, which they use in other models. A few months ago I asked Suzuki’s UK distributor if there was any possibility of selling SHVS Jimnies, and they said no. Maybe the integration costs are too high for something that’s only made in small numbers? Maybe they thought wasn’t worth…