It all depends where you live, really. In a dense city, of course the space and insurance required is not attainable for most. But in the country or even small cities with adequate lot sizes and streetside parking, it is not too hard to own 5 cheap cars. Emphasis on cheap...

Yeah, I think most people want/need at least one pickup in an ultimate cheap fleet, if nothing else because you need something to put parts in the back of!

I’ve got a strange version of the ultimate collection, though it goes deeper into the separate use cases, and there might be something wrong with me :

Plus one for facts...Though really all ICE cars cause smog, cancer, and contribute to climate change. It is all just varying degrees.

Though this guy is insane, it is far from the smallest craft to cross the Atlantic, and he had a lot more gear than many have used.

So I’m going to ask a stupid question that likely has a simple answer:

I think there has to be some matrix (the equivalent of the grossly overused, misogynistic hot/crazy scale) that explains this phenomenon and likelihood of surviving .

Yes, the old relays under the dash had an extra “click amplifier” part, for lack of a better word, that was part of the relay. With the change to solid state components, they have to synthesize the click.

If tax accounting were a competition, they would give race engineers a run for their money in terms of “a sport where rules are molested with as much glee and abandon”

I think that is a decent criteria - you need at least one vehicle that can serve as a reliable parts runner for the rest of the fleet. In my case, for a while that vehicle was a motorcycle, but a year ago we got a used Nissan Leaf. My particular disease is rescuing neglected European diesel vehicles from the decade…

I’m just going to use this opportunity to tell my story of the only time I drove a Suzuki X-90.

The fact that you had knockoff Cross Colours gear is the real highlight here.

There is a very good reason that German car companies use a baffling mix of numbers and Anglified names for most all their vehicles. To use your best/worst example for Ferrari names, imagine the German translation:

Here’s to hoping that they just jump a few decades ahead with the Ambassador brand, and reproduce the Pug 205 & 405 series vehicles there in India. I just saw a 405 Mi16 the other day and was smitten.

This is really a great set, and looks like my kind of vacation! Excellent work and field reporting David. I am curious about a couple things though. Is it expensive to get work done? And is there any certification system, or do people just work on whatever they have the tools/ customers for?

It serves as a foil to make the slightly-less-terrible funding proposal they really want to pass appear to be more reasonable.

This bill is not “real” with any chance of passage, but rather a terrible “what-if” highway funding proposal put together by the revenue committee.

Very true all around regarding the availability and location of resources. There is another element often unsaid : when the coal mines were operating, they often received lucrative local and state tax credits per ton mined.

Wait a sec - just trying to get the plot sequence right. Was it the Crazy or the Nice Lady that hit the emergency stop button? Because if it was the Nice Lady (as I think it is), that is seriously a pretty epic twist for everyone to go along with it in order to get Crazy off the train.

Wow, this story has a little of everything, both wonderful and terrifying.