* pedant alert* extra contact patch doesn’t necessarily mean more traction. Contact patch area is defined by tyre pressure and vehicle weight - if you just want more contact patch make the vehicle heavier, or reduce the tyre pressure...

belts, brakes, anciliary replacements? 23 cents per mile in maintenance doesn’t sound too bad for a conventional car. Possibly even lost earnings though maintenance downtime.

Funny enough I regularly drove both a Yaris (or Vitz in US) and that mini. Even though the mini could put a small speed readout on the lcd display infront of you, it annoyed me more than the Yaris. Probably because the cool perspective trick the yaris did means less eye focusing (a clever mirror meant the yaris…

Baby wipes are your friends here. The route from garage to toilet in my house regularly gets a good coating of oil/grease (owner of a triumph spitfire) & baby wipes mean that sometimes my wife doesn’t even notice!

You sort of imply that the major head to block fastners will run into tapped holes, this is probably not a great idea.
Anything majorly load bearing should probably not be run into tapped holes in something major, but into a nut. This way you can control the hardness of the thread and if you strip a thread you don’t…

Wagon. Fast. Brown(?) BMW 3 or 5 series. 3 series might struggle with some double strollers but I manage with a UK spec. double

This is worrying, I usually fast forward through all the bits which aren’t Edd. I’d hoped that as his replacement Ant has put out some enjoyable shows it would not change too much for the worse, but I’m not sure that’s the case now.

It looks like it puts significantly more weight on the front wheels, by taking weight off the rear wheels. Look around the 2 min mark and the rear wheels are barely touching the ground

Apply the handbrake/Ebrake/parking brake if it’s a manual, works like a super crude LSD and will send some torque back the other way. Anyone with a manual RWD should know this trick as it helps prevent getting stuck on mud or snow/ice.

The real reason is down to humidity. The fresh air is very cold at altitude and when they heat it up to comfortable temperatures it becomes very dry. This air then dries out your mucous membranes which are a first form of defence against pathogens entering your body. You likely get sick from the first person who…

Rubber skirts probably help in this respect a lot.

Many soldering issues come from lead free solder, which causes the brittleness of joints being discussed below. I believe Lead free solder came from EU regulations to limit lead ending up in landfills. Somewhat annoyingly it has caused the early failure of solder joints and hence lead to the premature disposal of many…

It’s still fake noise, just generated with fuel and resonators rather than speakers. Having said that it’s just as fake as calling models “sport”, adding alloy wheels which are heavier than steel wheels, etc. etc.

It’s only the victor’s (Robert’s) history which states she was abducted. It’s very possible she went willingly.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Most people drive SUV’s because they are “safe” as heavier cars tend to do better in car on car collisions (at the expense of others).

If we’re talking money no object, you’d have to be pretty silly to get a spitfire over a TR4, TR6, or (probably) a TR3. This is coming from a spitfire owner who ownes one because, unfortunately, money is an object.

If you have clever vvt then you run it like a prius engine (miller cycle) and keep the exhaust valves open for the start of the compression stroke to drop compression. Delaying injection of fuel can help too. Although the article did say wankle derived, so I have no idea how you do that with a wankle architecture.

Studies like these are short sighted. Yes faster=more energy=more likely death. But what about causes of collisions? I’d rather have money spent on better road layouts which reduce the chance of a collision (sightlines, junction layouts etc.) than have it spent on new speed limit signs and enforcement.

Baby paraphernalia usually dictates something bigger than a compact. E46 touring was the best compromise I came up with.

About 500 bhp per ton. Ideally with as little horsepower as possible. Just enough power to weight to be a ‘silly’ amount of power and keep you from wearing out the floor mat under the throttle pedal.