I worked in the US the Summer of ‘84, and my boss had a C4 - it was like a friggin’ spaceship compared to the cars I was used to. Not sure that it has aged particularly well since, though.

Well crap - you’re right. I’ve been applying the pronoun rule across the board (erroneously) all this time. I’m going to go and sit in a darkened room for a few months and reevaluate my life :-(

Technically correct - the apostrophe signifies a contraction - “they’re” vs “they are”, for example - not the possessive. However, its use in the possessive has crept into common use. Pedants like me will continue to hold the line

Enough with these complex notions, ya intellectual elitist!!

Succinctly describing the Trumpist electorate.....

I don’t care how many plans Liz Warren comes up with. The incumbent barely wakes up with a thought, and the few he develops during the day seem more like random neural twitches than coherent ideas. Bring on them plans, Liz!

All they have in common is some cladding, and sure, “they could have done away with the cladding and just focused on being pretty”, but looking rough’n’tough fits right into buyers’ lifestyle aspirations. People want to look as though they like to off-road and climb mountains and wrestle bears, but you know as well as…

I hope it is capable off road for all of that black plastic

“shoo-in”, not “shoe-in”. One means introducing something with ease - likely a metaphor derived from, say, herding chickens into a pen with just a few words and flapping your arms - easy because the chicken are quite willing to go anyway. The other means nothing.

All of these podunk little “universities” - I wouldn’t know Grand Canyon University from a hole in the ground.....

Run, DJ, run......

No frame, but likely longitudinal structural elements running underneath the floor pan - those spots where one might place a jack stand, as I did with my 240SX years ago. I walked away for a minute and returned to find the car had settled on one side, the jack stand having pushed up through said Internally-rusted struc…

Fair enough, but getting back to the original topic - is the current outback a wagon or a CUV - I think we can reasonably dispense with the “the outback is just a lifted legacy wagon” argument, given that the current legacy is a sedan. Nor is sharing a chassis particularly relevant to the wagon/CUV question - for…

Not really though - it’s been quite a while since the outback was simply a lifted legacy, given that recent legacy’s have been 4-door sedans. The legacy wagon counterpart to the Gen 4 outback (the first “blobby” outback) was also pretty blobby - looked more like a “lowered CUV” rather than a traditional wagon. At some…

Speakers are ok - I’m running my iPhone through a cassette adapter, so I’ll have to  update that once all the mechanical stuff is done

IMO the last real outback wagon was the Gen 3 (2005-2009) - since then it has morphed into a sort of blobby wagon/CUV hybrid - not quite full-on CUV, but not a wagon in the traditional sense. I love outbacks - and wagons - (currently rehabbing an ‘02 Gen 2), but if I ever buy another outback it’ll almost certainly be…

Agreed - when I lived in DC in the ‘90s, my first car was a ‘80 Toyota Corona that cost me $300 (all the cash I could muster at the time). I replaced it with a used VW Fox - We street parked both, which frequently required “parking by feel” to wedge into available spaces. Unless you have a private space, the key to…

It’s a Beetle underneath. How hard can it possibly be to maintain?

Much as I like old cars, but depending on something as old, sparse and fragile as a Karmann Ghia for daily transport in DC is nuts, for a number of reasons:

(finds nothing but lint in his pockets, shakes head sadly, and shuffles back to the bus stop)