3rd gear: It seems a bit short sighted for lawyers to be all excited about autonomous cars. There may be a few big cases in the early days, but over the longer term there will be a vastly smaller number of crashes and this will likely put a lot of ambulance chasers out of business.

Arg, I miss my weekly gaming sessions so much! My GM and half the group has moved away though. We really should try a setup like this. Of course normally we’d be in one room with a few cases of beer and half an ounce of weed.

I never even knew there was a controversy. Doctors have been recommending the HPV vaccine for years and I just assumed that most people would get it (assuming it’s free). Maybe it’s because I don’t live in the US?

I wholeheartedly disagree. Parking yourself in the middle of an intersection with no turn lanes and hoping that the people driving along at 50mph behind you see you is crazy. Trying to cross multiple lanes with a 30mph+ speed differential is reckless no matter how many hand signals you make.

In most cases, it would take LESS effort to just obey the law, but it would be extremely dangerous.

Lots of great points in the article and in the comments. I’d just like to add that many times following the law is really unsafe. For example, I commute in the downtown core a decent sized city and often need to make a left hand turn. It would be suicide to cross a couple lanes of traffic to park myself in the middle…

The problem with talking about the auto bailouts is that they should really be talking about the bank bailouts. Those are far more controversial.

GM didn’t design their system to fail on purpose. They were negligent in fixing an unintentional fault. Huge difference.

The thing is, what VW did was on purpose. And it is likely that far more than 124 people will be killed by those increased emissions. It won’t be possible to directly attribute specific deaths to them but dumping bad stuff in the air does hurt and kill people.

The 500 is a 4 cylinder.

Interesting intake noise when decelerating. Sort of a stuttering sucking sound.

I know that it will never happen, but tipping for drinks needs to die. Pay bartenders / servers a decent hourly wage.

While I personally wouldn’t want this, it’s probably worth $3k just for the parts. Too bad about the electrical drain. It could be something small, but considering the work that went into this, they probably put the effort in to try and fix it already and failed.

Certainly illustrates the diversity of the word.

I haven’t watched the video, so sorry if it was mentioned there already, but what is the estimated cost (per person and/or kilo of gear) relative to the Soyuz? The article states that the Soyuz is $80 million / launch. I’d imagine that Boeing and SpaceX are quite a bit cheaper, but I’d like to see some numbers.

It’s price isn’t that bad, but why would anyone want this? Buy a similar priced MB diesel and it will be far better. This is only for poor diesel + vintage VW fans. I wouldn’t want to own this for half the price.

Such Jalopness.

That does appear to have a small super charger.

Dat engine bay

It really bugs me that they rarely (if ever) have vehicle troubles or run out of gas, or have to look for gas.