Well it was a long story, it was sold, the buyer had the intention of fixing it up but instead made it worse and just kept it abandoned in a shed without ever having done the ownership transfer so my mom “bought” it back, also with the intention of fixing it up but there are too many projects currently before it.

Self driving cars with proximity sensors and all that would probably do that, or suddenly become spooked when you approach. This system is as far as I can tell aimed mostly at non self driving cars with driver aids, so if there’s a module that’ll at least alert the distracted Camry driver and hopefully correct his…

On the other hand I’d love to have something like this in my classic car or the motorcycles, just a simple system to let other cars know that I’m there and I’m way more fragile and slow than they are. Maybe even bikes could get them and pedestrians.

Actually, I was thinking a module aimed specifically at classic cars and motorcycles would be awesome.

Never seen one of those, my mom’s was the basic 1.3 4 speed 4 door in dark green, and my grandma had an almost identical ‘79 in light green. I still have the dark green one but it’d need a full restoration and parts are really hard to come by.

When I was a kid my dad had a Wagoneer and my mom had a ‘78 Civic, not automatic though. Good memories in both those cars.

There’s quite a few cars where this won’t work; the “lock” button doesn’t work with the door open to avoid leaving the keys inside the car.

Haha, I have a friend who was called a few years ago by the VW dealer to tell her that she had won a car. She hung up on them at least twice until the guy explained that by having had her headlight bulbs replaced at the dealer (who does that, btw?) she had been entered in a raffle and had won the car.

Yup, it’s just cosmetic damage, the roof can probably be pushed out from the inside, but as you said the car’s a beater now since fixing the dents and paint is probably more than the car is worth. Also, maybe a wrap would be cheaper than the paint?

Fun fact, apparently the Porsche Carrera GT has such a tricky clutch that the engineers designed the engine computer specifically to avoid stalling it when pulling the clutch out at idle. Most people don’t know this, try to feather the throttle thus overriding the computer, and end up stalling the car.

You can do up to 1991, the last of the carbureted cars are probably the best for DD duty.

Yup, I would have definitely gone NP if NOT for the mods, those made it an instant CP.

I always tell myself to do it like this and next thing I know I´ve got a bare shell and boxes full of parts everywhere.

Statistically speaking, two mildly unreliable cars should be more reliable than one reliable car (probability of both failing at the same time vs probability of just one car failing).

Yessss!!! But no, seriously don’t do it.

All the other ones will die, W123s never die.

I rented a 500 the last time I was in Miami and it was fine on the highways, usually I’d find myself traveling way faster than most of the cars around me actually.

This is exactly the type of car where you really, really don’t want the automatic.

Yes, anything with less than about 120 hp should come with a stick shift actually.

Was it modified? I have a Morris Minor with pretty much the same drivetrain and it has about 42 hp from what I remember. Full throttle all the time and hills + high speeds is impossible but other than that with good anticipation it’s possible to go faster than the flow of traffic most of the time.