“Smarmy little dipshit” is now my favorite term for that guy

Yup. I daily a ‘13 Fit Sport and it comfortably seat four 6 foot tall guys and some cargo, with no knees hitting seat backs or heads touching the headliner. Excellent shifter, steering feel, and has a tiny footprint. But it’s slow and loud and frenetic enough on the highway to be tiring on road trips. 40 more hp,…

Then maybe be more specific next time? Because that’s *exactly* how what you wrote came off.

Cheap electronics and vast economies of scale mean that stuff isn’t very expensive anymore. Once you have ABS, traction control, stability control etc are mostly adding more lines of programming, not a significant amount of hardware.

“Nobody buys a used Ram, they buy a used Cummins” 

Yup, the hard chroming on the rocker arms flakes off. If you catch it soon enough it won’t eat the cams. There are 4 cams @ ~$500/ea to replace with new and 16 rocker arms @~$130/ea to replate. Many owners with this issue only replate or replace rockers showing damage, rather than all of them at once.

Good write up. I would add, be sure to check the belt tensioner/idler pulley bearings while the belts are off. Hand spin them and feel for notchiness while looking for grease leaking from the bearing seals - they’re sealed from the factory, and can seize in action, often at high RPM once they’ve been leaking for a…

The poor sales of the Cummins Titan disagree with your opinion.

I drove an ex-NJSP Caprice for 8 years, from 1998 -2006. Can confirm. Got zero parking tickets (even when I deserved them and cars around me were ticketed), and only pulled over and ticketed once in that time in spite of driving rather.... efficiently in that car. As noted above, the biggest problem was other drivers…

If you’ve ever shopped for a used Ram 2500 turbodiesel, you’d see most of them for sale are approaching or past 200k and selling for big bucks , even ones that are less than ten years old.

The starter being in the V is a big reason why they last 20 years and 200,000 miles - they’re protected from road salt corrosion, water and dirt, all the things that kill starters. For the vast majority of Lexus owners who bought the car new this is a lifetime part that will never need replacement while they own the…

Consumer Reports may test cars like they test refrigerators, but they’re great for telling it like it is when it comes to real world day to day driving - which is the way most people spend time in their cars.

I’ve been a licensed PA and NY safety inspection mechanic for two dealers and two independent shops. Now I spend a lot of time in California and Nevada, and I’ve never seen so many cars out west that had completely bald tires. Like, slicks or corded down to the steel belts showing. Zero tread. And cars with a…

Nah. I’ve had tens of thousands of dollars in out of pocket damages caused by avoiding at-fault asshole drivers cutting me off in my truck while towing expensive equipment. If they’re going to cause a serious accident anyway through their intentional negligence, they’re going to have enough damage on their vehicle to…

There’s a Google Maps photo in the article. You know, the one that shows the original driveway in line with the road.

It was most likely a speed camera. The U.K. is overrun with them to an extent that is hard for most US drivers to comprehend if you’ve never driven there. I’m willing to bet that some of her other tickets were also speed camera generated.

Having a driveway at a T intersection is a terrible design choice, specifically because this kind of thing happens. There are no reflective signs there, either. That said, now that the driveway is permanently capped off the city should put a guardrail across it and some big reflective “T” signs.

Yup. 2005-2010, on these and Frontiers with the automatic.

Beware of the early XTerra (2005-2010) radiator internally failing and taking out the automatic transmission. There was a class action case about this that provided some relief, but the deadline for that has long passed by now, IIRC. https://www.ncconsumer.org/news-articles/settlement-reached-in-lawsuit-against-nissan-…

No, states other than California shouldn’t be allowed to have their own standards. California can set their own because they had them before the Feds did, and other a states may adopt the California standards (as about seven have) but may not set their own. This allows manufacturers to have predictability when…