Sparknotes: Visited a friend in a suburb west of Boston, and parked on the street. When I returned ~8 hours later, it was nighttime, so I didn’t immediately detect that anything had happened, and drove home. The next morning, I head out to my car, and notice that the front bumper was significantly damaged. Retrieved…

Or NYC. Or Philly. Or Boston.

Agreed on all points. I hate city living, as does my wife, both of us having grown up in suburban neighborhoods. Even before the pandemic, we were looking to GTFO and move to the suburbs. Under no circumstances do I want to raise kids in a city. Luckily, before the worst of the coronavirus, we found a house, and we…

You know, even if people weren’t dying by the tens-of-thousands, ‘lets cram all of humanity into small apartments in hyper-dense megacities under the guise of socialism’ would still be a terrible take. That it was made right before a pandemic demonstrated the significant drawbacks to dense city living only makes it…

As an ‘outsider’ looking in (SSC manufacturer), my experience is thus:

Oh, well if you’re talking DoD/DOE nuclear, that is a whole different ballgame.  Totally different from commercial reactors and their corporate BS.

This is very accurate. We generally order the same ASME BPVC Section II material as would be used in any other pressure vessel, but the quality (NQA-1) and design (BPVC Section III, NOG-1, etc) requirements add significant amounts of cost.

There you go again, using ‘soul’. I’m not convinced there’s any such thing. Cars are a function of the engineering and manufacturing that went into them, nothing more, nothing less. You may be entertained by that GTO that leans around corners and is probably a deathtrap in any kind of accident, but I don’t see that as…

If you’re implying that they’ve engineered out the cars personality to the cars detriment, I agree with your premise but disagree with your conclusion.

Everything is a compromise. I personally love the fact that I can buy a car that’ll do 10's in the quarter mile from the dealer with a warranty, easily pull 1g+ in the corners, not kill you if you happen to get into an accident, all the while getting nearly 20mpg highway. To me, that’s ‘fun’.

Define ‘fun’.

Based on the content of the post, I feel like tuning is probably not in their future. Nor would I consider the Stinger to be a ‘Luxury’ car.

Mitsubishi, Chrysler, Mini?

Hmmm....

Well, yeah, but you’d have to be driving a Volvo and that would kill your soul instead of your body. (C’mon, I couldn’t resist.)

Although not entirely without merit, I don’t really see the small overlap test as the major determinant in a vehicle’s overall occupant safety. Vehicles in general are so much safer than they have ever been.

Even manufacturers using older platforms were “dialed in” by the mid 2010's.

Are we allowed to count the Jaguar C-X75?

Doing the exact opposite (focusing on boring, mainstream cars *coughLancercough* and rarely refreshing them *cough10yearscough*) doesn’t seem to be working for them either.