Making a steady profit building and selling cars from scratch (especially electric ones) is a lot harder than retailing toothpaste and other consumer goods in high volume.

I installed purolators at my shop for years, never had a problem. Can’t get those easily where I live now so I use Wix from rockauto or NAPA gold locally (which is made by Wix)

Nope. Management doesn’t design parts. There’s always an engineer signing off on a final part design - usually more than one - regardless of price point.

According to who, exactly? You?

What’s your proof of that?

No. You’re confusing them with another outfit. They prohibit commercial use of their ratings in ads:

Uh, all those hundreds of lawsuits and hundreds of people who died / thousands who were injured in Samurai rollovers - and Suzuki’s own internal memos discussing the Samurai’s tendency to roll over - aren’t “smears”.

Former dealer service manager here (Manhattan, SF area, L.A. - handling seven manufacturers total) -

When your one year old Subie is burning a quart of oil every 270 miles, that reasoning doesn’t work, nor does it when the same faulty cheapout $200 power window regulator design (VW) is used for years without improving the 2cent plastic part that fails over and over. Nor Takata switching to unstable ammonium nitrate…

Maybe that’s a NY thing, but it’s never gone like that for me in 20+ years in Philly, NJ, Los Angeles or the SF Bay. Ever.

Those tacky chrome fender emblems replace the foreign market fender mounted turn signals so that Mitsubishi only needs to have a single fender stamping per side worldwide.

Uh, what? I rent in the SF East Bay. Looked at literally dozens of apartments last year, in one of the hottest rental markets in the nation. All got rented in less than a week and none of them worked like that. The first person to sign a lease, pass the credit check and put down the required first, last and security…

Where do you live that security deposits on apartments aren’t refundable? Even in the red-hot East Bay market, I got my full $4,200 deposit back, including pet deposit.

Is that really the best you can do? The same reply three times ?

Bulletproof? Hahahahaha

It’s not the engine you have to worry about, it’s everything attached to it. Particularly the VP44 injector pump. A FASS setup and a fuel pressure gauge are good ideas, and an EGT gauge (if the truck doesn’t have one already) will help when you’re pulling heavy loads. On the upside, you can run an exhaust brake with…

I will sell a kidney to own that car

For pricing perspective: in 1996, $25,000 MSRP bought you a new RWD LT-1 Impala SS, with leather, power everything, automatic, ABS, the works. I was a tech at a Honda and Chevrolet dealership for several years, and we sold every SS we could get for MSRP and zillions of Civics, but almost no Preludes.

Give it a rest, dude. It was the cheap pads. I did three brake jobs on that customer’s car over the years and if his driving technique was at fault he would have had the same problem with other brands of pads. He didn’t - all the other brands of pads lasted about as long for him as they did for every other customer I…

I disagree about brake rotors. Modern brake systems are highly engineered and using good quality parts is critical to maintaining OEM levels of performance and durability. Compare a cheap Chinese replacent rotor to a stock one side by side and weigh them both - the cheapo rotor will usually weigh less because the…