As the author of the post points out, 9% sure does look like a garbage score. But, it’s an inherently arbitrary scale— would a score of 100% mean “perfectly safe”? Presumably not, since there is no such thing as perfectly safe. Would a score of 0% be the equivalent of just running the test dummy through the crash test…

The 34% adult protection, 9% child protection, etc scores are difficult to interpret without having scores from other comparably sized cars to compare it to.  How’d the VW Polo do in this test?  Or Toyota Yaris/iQ, or Honda Fit, etc?

Dang, how’d you end up on this comment chain from 2+ years ago?  Either way, 25W vs 21W doesn’t really change my overall point, when Jason alleged that turn signals use 0.08W.

In south/central PA: Not planning on it this year. Doesn’t snow regularly here, maybe 3-5 times/year that there’s enough for winter tires to make a meaningful difference. On the few days/year that it does matter, I can commute in my wife’s car (wearing all-seasons with Mud+Snow tread).

In my mother's '96 Taurus with this feature, there was both a permanent factory-set code and an owner-settable code.

Through a series of odd happenstances and mild bamboozles at a car rental agency in Ireland, I ended up spending a week in a Toyota Yaris with a 1.0L 3 cylinder making 70 horsepower. I was pleasantly surprised by its adequacy.  Didn’t struggle to merge onto highways, cruised along at 130 kph (~80 mph) happily enough,…

I enjoyed this video, posted within that ad:

Initial reaction: Hell yeah!

Not a bad car.  Price seems high for a 16 year old Mercedes.  E320 owned by someone who wishes it was an AMG seems like a red flag to me.

Dude doesn’t need a truck. He’s moving to the Anchorage suburbs. The roads are about as well-maintained as in any other major city. They get about a foot of snow per month in the winter, on average.  It’ll be a bit of a shock for someone coming from Texas, but it’s not out of line with other American cities near the…

32 year old car, apparently no maintenance history for the past 12 years, and seller made no mention of the broken windshield. What other, less obvious issues are lurking?

0mph- 15mph- 0mph, over and over, for hours at a time, six days/week, for the past 25 years. That’s a far harder life than any “consumer” vehicle is meant to take.

I’m a big advocate for driving vehicles that are appropriate for how they’re used. I judge people who daily drive sports cars, but never do anything in them that they couldn’t have done in a Ford Focus. I judge people who buy 3-row SUVs when they’ve only got one child and don’t plan on having any subsequent kids. I…

Thanks-- no problem with the charging system.  I had to do it twice on my old car (once when the anti-theft system got tripped up and refused to run the starter, and once when the battery was dead after a week of subzero temperatures.  Only did it once on the new car, to see if it would work.

This governing.com article (not the same one Raph linked to) has an interactive map of towns that get 10+% of their revenue from policing:

Question: Is this in any way bad for the car? / if I have a new-ish car with a warranty, am I risking causing some expensive issue or premature wear by bump-starting it?

For whatever it’s worth, in the past decade, I’ve purchased both a turbocharged hatchback and an all-wheel-drive hatchback, both with manuals, both new.

I thought the FM transmitters are legal below a certain power? The idea is for them to be just barely powerful enough to cover your car (or, Mr. Tracy’s backyard), without interfering with other radio consumers.

I don’t know the technical details of how it all works, but it’s standard practice for these runs to fill the trunk with auxiliary fuel tanks.