The Chargers came out after I quit that part of the industry, so I couldn’t say. But I was told at the time (circa 2005) by law enforcement upfitters working with various DC/Northern Virginia three letter agencies that the Chrysler takeover by Mercedes/Daimler really fucked things up for a while for upfitters and…

It’s a good thing gas pumps don’t freeze in frigid Illinois winters!

Oh, wait...

Now all Elmo has to do is reinvent the bus, but electric and smaller.

come for the open bar, stay for the norovirus and covid outbreaks

Ex cop car mechanic here. Reliability is one aspect considered by police fleet buyers, but it’s far from the only one, or the most important one.

Low upfront cost per fleet unit is very important - the NJ State Police paid about $14k for each new LT1 9C1 Caprice back in 1995, with power locks and windows, A/C, cruise,…

Jeezus.
Thank you for the detailed comment, it is appreciated.

Side note - the Encore GX is a bit longer and wider than the discontinued Encore, not the other way around.

2022 Encore: 168" L x 70" W x 65" H
2022 Encore GX: 171" L x 71" W x 64" H

Yep, that.
When I owned my shop (late 90s to mid oughts), I would get customers who wanted race-level performance out of full weight street cars that had to pass yearly emissions testing. I did a lot of GM LT-1 B Body cars at the time .

This being well before cheap LS swaps and affordable add on turbos were a thing, I…

To be fair, that looks like Philly - and the Philly potholes are legendary and brutal. If you’re not diving into a pothole or clawing your way out of one, you’re in the wrong town.

We had several generations of GTI, all stick shift, and they all had poor shift feel and action compared to the three generations of Civic Si hatch that I had. I test drove a then-new ‘18 GTI back when new car shopping, and that shifter was still noticeably worse than the Civic, enough so that I didn’t want to put up…

Can confirm, and also, Ram customers in Orange County, California.

Yup. And to be fair to them, at the time (2008-ish) the AMEX Black cards were super exclusive and required (IIRC) some ridiculous annual spend level. I think $600K/year? So this one transaction went a ways towards satisfying that month’s minimum, or they were so wealthy they didn’t care about the extra $800, or both.…

Fiat CEO:

“clearly, our plan for the US is market suicide. See how well it’s been working already?”

Some years back, we let a customer charge two brand new Triumph Bonnevilles and a bunch of accessories to her AMEX Black card, and she paid a 3% or 3.5% surcharge to do that. No way were we going to eat like $800 in card fees out of our margin.

I saw this in the main page today and I was all like,

Whaaaa? A new Torch article on here?

And then I saw the date - Jalop recycles a 4 and a half year old article. Womp womp.

The CR article is “best hybrid cars under $35k”, I. E. specifically not trucks.

Interesting, there’s a few roads on there I hadn’t heard about yet!

You could get yourself a very nice, low mile CPO TourX Essence wagon for that money with some left over. Skip the sunroof, get everything else. A fun, comfortable AWD family hauler that has a ton of space, drives like the german car it is, looks pretty great in a sea of me-too SUVs, especially when you get the…

Considering the 2023 Frontier King Cab with the standard 310 hp V6 starts around $29k USD and the Mexican market single cab 2.5 4 cylinder gas NP300 (with a truck bed and A/C) starts at around $27k USD there’s not much reason for Nissan to sell the smaller truck here.

For real. One of my clients has 119 cars (that I know of), and I have spent literally an entire 10 hour day pumping up tires with a large shop compressor and charging batteries using multiple chargers at once, and not gotten to all of them. Another client only has 22 cars, and doing 10 oil changes in a day involves…