Counter-counterpoint:

If you can predictably avoid driving in a snowstorm, that will be even better than putting dedicated snows on your car.

That’s pretty much what I face - we get ~3-4' of snow per year, but of that, only 1-2' ever accumulates over the entire winter, typically in 3-4" at a time. When that happens, the…

Don’t be mad at me because its clear to ANYONE with experience that the limit of your experience in a plant is walking quickly through and making rash judgments about employees based on what you’ve read in anti-union diatribes without ever talking to any of them.

Most manufacturers only pay a small portion of the rates that the owner would pay for the same repair. For example, looking up rates for a 2014 Murano, from what I see, a wheel speed sensor would run 0.4 hours labor for warranty work and 0.7 if the owner paid.

Warranty work is a good way to pad out the service…

And yet Ford’s problem here is smaller than Tesla’s quality control problems have been. Ford also reports that they have fixed the issues, are no longer shipping any vehicles for repairs, and production in Chicago is now running smoothly.

Tesla builds a new plant in a year and people think its a miracle because they…

150 billion YEN, not dollars. That’s the same as about 1.37 billion dollars, and a frighteningly small profit margin for a company that size.

And it gets worse. That’s its PROJECTED profit. It’s actual profit for the first three months of their fiscal year? 58 million dollars, only 25% of which actually came from…

How much of that is because they’ve been dumping to fleets, though?  

While you may have heard that Ford has a new Explorer, you may not have seen too many of them,

I don’t know of any.

I just find it humorous when people still draw the Edison/Tesla comparison that its often done in correlation with support for Tesla the company, which utilizes DC so freakin’ much - in battery storage, in solar production - all the industries they play in rely on DC quite a bit - and are all…

You’re more full of shit than a backed-up toilet.

The Mustang ran on a modified DEW98 platform from 05-14. The DEW98 was the platform for the LS, S-Type, and Thunderbird.  Most significant difference is in the suspension setup - most else is carryover.  So its roughly related to the LS, sort of like the Zafira is roughly related to the HHR.

Meh, the HHR was no better at being a Zafira than a Lincoln LS was at being a Mustang.  Loosely related, but not a good comparison.

They’re the same people who slam their seats back to recline regardless of the pain they inflict on others - just clueless slobs going about their day with no regards for anyone else.

If you have a tight connection, and the plane is at the gate, and that bell has rung, by all means, jump up. Everyone else SIT YOUR ASS…

You write for a car blog and don’t realize that this is GM’s MO?  Hell, 14 years ago I had an Opel Zafira as a rental car - arguably a better family vehicle than ANYTHING GM sold in the US at the time.  But of course, never sold here.

Ironically, though, all electric cars use batteries that deliver the power in DC form - ie, the form Edison advocated, and that Tesla was opposed to.

I wouldn’t put it so harshly. I’ve seen natural disasters hit factories at my employer - and we’ve gone so far as to demolish the remains of the old buildings, rebuild, and reopen within a year (or even much faster when a complete rebuild wasn’t required), and I can assure you our safety record was impeccable. To do…

Now, though? It’s a mess and it’s hard to find a better example of just how awful the storied bus company than the regularly scheduled service between Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn.

Oh, good lord. Anybody who thinks you can take a random person off the street and put them in a factory and have them working at reasonable levels of aptitude and productivity without significant amounts of training is a fool. You might as well say that because you can hire in with a plumbing firm as an apprentice…

1) It’s funny that people buy the 30% profit margin idea, because their financial results clearly do not back that claim up. Maybe on the highest trim models, but certainly not on the average one going out the door.

2) We’re talking different eras, media formats, and reliability of reports.

3) Those wait times in the…

A“short enough time” is still weeks to months. That isn’t unskilled labor. It’s replaceable, but not easily. Hell, a Walmart worker generally costs $4000-5000 to replace, and THEY are truly unskilled labor. And UAW workers aren’t paid $100k/year.

Yeah, I don’t buy it.  Ok, maybe at FCA’s Warren Truck where they didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, but hardness testing is NOT complicated enough to waste an engineer’s time on.  Dimensional measurements are NOT complicated enough to waste an engineer’s time on.  I see operators doing this sort of work…