U-Haul’s MO seems to be to use trucks for cross-country moves until they’re afraid they’ll break down somewhere in the wilderness, then they switch them to the local fleet where they’re at least easy to retrieve. I’ve gotten some real heaps for in-town moves, but the cross country moves I did all involved relatively…

MkI VW Rabbit, and the corresponding MkI Cabriolet. The shift linkage was designed by Rube Goldberg. When they added a 5th gear it got worse because more gates had to be fit into the same area. With a carefully-adjusted aftermarket linkage it can be OK, but really never better than that. A fully overhauled MkI Rabbit…

San Francisco Rush had a manual shift lever AND a clutch pedal, but to my disappointment the clutch didn’t do anything.

One of the ironies of this was it made the airspace in that part of Chicago *less* controlled, because it also eliminated the Meigs Tower. This somewhat undermined the safety argument for demolishing it, to say the least.

Did he come up with the idea independently, or was it based on the paseos I see in places with Spanish-influenced city plans?

there was wind sheer and the crew shot our Airbus A300 back into the sky like a rocket.

Are they serving booze in coach again?

I both get and don’t get the Geo Metro.
On the one hand, once you have a small convertible in your fleet, you always want to have one. And there aren’t that many to choose from; convertibles have not been a popular category with manufacturers in many years.

On the other hand, there *are* choices, and this is one of the…

They let Winnie the Pooh fall into public domain. The era of endless extensions may be over.

It’s a cruel place full of cruel people, and his cruelty is exactly what gets him elected there.

Tanking the economy is a feature, not a bug. When people go to the grocery store and there’s no lettuce in the cooler they’ll blame Biden, not Abbott.

Yeah, from pretty much every standpoint — labor, body stiffness, fit and finish, corrosion resistance — you really want as few individual panels as possible.

I’m sure that’s a factor. I once saw a photo of a school bus accident where a hydraulic drum brake had gotten so worn, the piston exited the cylinder bore and resulted in loss of all fluid on that circuit.

They once threatened to stop delivering to my mailbox because a car was parked too close to it for too many days in a row.

Apparently school buses can come with air brakes, hydraulic brakes, air-over-hydraulic, or combined systems with hydraulic service brakes and an air parking brake. It seems to come down to the preference of the district issuing the bid. I know in some states you need a special license endorsement to drive a vehicle…

They’re similar issues in some ways. Any industry that requires extensive infrastructure over a large geographical area is going to tend towards monopoly.

If stamping were more expensive car manufacturers wouldn’t use it. In fact companies use stamping wherever they possibly can. (Even soda cans are primarily made with a stamping operation, a very deep draw from a flat disc.)

My guess is making it thick is an example of the weird design dictating the engineering — these panels are flat, they have no curve to stiffen them, so they have to be thick or they’ll immediately oil can.

I always thought they should have just made them a contrasting color, maybe black. But you have to remember this was the early 80s and silver plastic was still considered high tech.

Roof racks can also be surprisingly noisy, and vary with the apparent wind direction. Round rack bars are especially bad aerodynamically; a cylinder’s Cd becomes worse the longer it gets, approaching a theoretical max of 1.2.