There is nothing wrong with investing in repairs in excess of a car’s value. If your car is an appliance that gets you from point A to point B, then the relevant metric is amortized cost. The amortized cost of repair should be compared to the amortized cost of replacement.

Go rent a scooter for a few days before you buy one. They’re fun for an afternoon, but they get old pretty quickly. There are so many great, inexpensive bikes out there right now, it’s hard to recommend a scooter unless you really don’t want to shift your own gears.

Same situation here. Rode back in the days before MSF was required, and now getting back into it, so I took an MSF course earlier this year. I was horrified by what I saw in the course. I’d be amazed if half the people there could ride a damned bicycle.

Agree, but please don’t take my comments out of context. I didn’t mean to minimize the importance of smoothness. I used “only” to the exclusion of the other benefits asserted.

Not all of them, and namely not the Audi SQ5's main competition, the X3 M40i. You can see in the photo below that these are actual exhaust tips, not part of the rear bumper/valance.

There is no such thing as “an equivalent”. Every engine is different, but there is nothing about the I6 architecture that contributes to torque at a specific RPM. Intake design and cam profile are the primary determinants of how/when torque is delivered.

Two comments:

So, who is going to tell this guy that there is no such thing as a “show car” Samurai.

CP because it’s an auto and I’d be amazed if the body were free of rust, given the current state.

Sure, but what does that have to do with these hypothetical daily driver downsides? If there was a downside to that car as a DD, it was the firm suspension. It wasn’t what I’d call harsh, but you knew it when you drove over uneven edges of pavement/sidewalks/driveways.

I daily drove the shit out of my E92. Trust me, the whole “S65 lacks low end grunt” thing is just something people say when they’ve never owned a car with the S65. For “daily driving” type driving, you’d never know the S65 is high strung. In fact, I found it far more tractable than the N55 in my 135i.

It doesn’t really matter how you or I would classify them; it matters how the law classifies them. Labor laws vary by state, and California’s labor laws have some conditions that may prove to be an issue in this situation. For example, the qualifications in the link CalBearsFan99 provided say:

Downside is that you have to rev it to make it work.

So basically, just so they can put “Hellephant - 1,000 HP” on the sign sitting right next to their time out dolls.

Yeah, racing officials generally frown upon leaving the track surface for just about any reason, much less what looks like an intentional pass.

I’d love to hear from someone in motorsport whether the Hellephant is a good deal or not. I know from drag racing circles that you can get 1,000 hp builds for less. So at $30k, I have to wonder if people are buying this motor just because of its name, or if there is something special about it.

It wasn’t a matter of lowering costs...

Is this supposed to be a real argument?

That’s a tough one.

They did something similar with N&W 611 back in 2016 (IIRC). You’re right. They sold out every trip.