Not the first. I pretty much taught myself to drive a stick by playing the sitdown version of Hard Drivin’ back in the day. It had a clutch and a shifter. It takes a while to get the feel, but it’s the repetition and getting familiar with knowing what your hands and feet should be doing that’s the biggest thing IMO.

Ignorance and overconfidence is a dangerous combination. Most heavy trucks, race cars, and motorcycles have non-synchronized transmissions, and the only thing necessary for a gear change is that the input shaft speed matches the output shaft speed for the gear combination that is being selected. Most other manual…

The only time you really need the clutch is when starting from a dead stop. You can actually shift just fine in most cars without the clutch so long as you match the transmissions shaft speeds to the gear you're attempting to go into.

The Fiat abarth is a manic little car! And the torque on those TDi’s comes in around 1000 rpm, so it effectively feels like a V8 until you get past 40 mph. You get to enjoy that effortless shove, and you also get great fuel economy, and have a nicer looking and more solid feeling interior than the vast majority of…

I have the last of pre-cheating 1.9L TDI Jettas and I love it. And although my plans for getting SportWagen TDI have been derailed I’m still open to getting a VW.

But the hundreds of older diesel trucks and ass-hats rolling coal every day is perfectly fine? Those don’t contribute anything right? Because they all have Direct Freedom Injection. I highly doubt there are numerous cases of substantial health defects caused by diesel Jetta’s that cheated on the emissions tests. I’ve…

A safer bet, assuming you can buy a TDI, is to lease one for 3 years. Lock in the depreciation rate calculated pre-scandal and the incentive programs sure to drop shortly and win-win. It’s a shame the GTD never came to the states, I would be at the dealership right now if one of those was looking forlorn on a…

The TDI fan in me is saying “FUCK YES.” right now with this whole scandal.

Clever - but not as clever as when it was done the first time. Heavy Duty diesel makers got caught doing this 15 years ago and suffered the same consequences - http://www.justice.gov/enrd/diesel-en…

Id like to add to this discussion. I’m a diesel engine performance engineer.

Wikipedia has a decent run down of the states that require emissions testing. Some of them don’t require anything other than OBD II scan, and aside from densely populated northern states the restrictions apply to urban areas and suburbs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_i…

Why did they cheat? Because the rules are ridiculous. We need small diesels here in the US, but we have effectively regulated them into being an impossibility. Want a fuel efficient small diesel with decent performance? Have to move to Europe for that. Hope you guys are writing an article about how absurd the diesel…

Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of awesome on VW’s part?

$99k!? CP all day, every day.

I would honestly pay extra for a dumb TV. Just give me 3 HDMI ports, audio output jacks that don’t add line noise, amazing picture quality, and low input lag. Smart TVs have turned into another way for manufacturers to force feed crapware. That attitude did not work on Windows PCs or Android devices so it would be…

Flagships cost $600+. “Most people” consider the relative shelf life and pay somewhat-to-significantly less.

Interesting, but the job categories are pretty broad. I couldn’t find my particular engineering discipline in the list. . .

The reason their sauce is too sweet now is because they switched canned fully prepped sauce. Before ‘03/’04, don’t quite remember the year, all sauce came in cans of just tomato sauce and premeasured seasoning packets were mixed in when it was prepped the day it would be used.

1st: My partner drives a 2013 Taurus SEL with the 3.5 non-EcoBoost. Even in that form, the car is faster in a straight line than is my Fiesta ST. It handles surprisingly well for a 4,000+ pound beast. It rides damned near as nice as the ‘97 Town Car he had. It’s great for long drives, gets 29 mpg on the freeway at 75…

BlackStone Labs is cheap and easy too, for oil analysis.