Phone bills were really high 30 years ago. You paid ~$50 a month in the mid 1990s for landline phone service (about $104 in today’s dollars). 10 cents a minute was considered a good price for “long distance” (Sprint flooded the TV airwaves for these long distance plans), which was any call outside your immediate metro…

Re New Car Prices: I think we are making a lot of apples to oranges comparisons.

Yes and no. F1 cars mange to make turbos work just fine in track duty. It’s just a matter of setup and appropriate cooling. 

Edit: meant model S plaid if it wasn’t already obvious. 

I don’t think most 500hp cars will break traction from highway speeds with AWD. But you could probably do it with 1,000. 

We already live in this world. Used Model 3 Plaids are getting into the high $40s. That’s not even getting into the cheap/plentiful Hellcats, which while not quite 1,000hp are firmly in the “way too much power to be wielded by morons” land.

I think they would eventually run into competitiveness problems without turbos or a hybrid system. No question that the GT3 is blisteringly quick, but in 10 years when every performance car has 1,000hp, it’s going to look a lot less so. They aren’t getting 1,000hp out of a naturally aspirated engine that fits in a 911…

I’m not talking about Volvo guy, I’m talking about the guy who paid $11k with crippling interest for a used Mazda. This was during the period when basically any running and driving car was worth 5 figures.

 EV depreciation is less than it looks on its face for tax credit eligible vehicles. If you paid $40k and it’s worth $30k next year, your real depreciation is only $2.5k if you took the $7.5k tax credit.

I don’t understand people who feel the need to go to a dealership to find out how much their used car is worth. 10 minutes on the internet would have told him better than going to two different dealerships. 

The people who get into these megabad car loans are typically pretty desperate. They need transportation to get to work and for whatever reason don’t have access to better forms of transit. They also don’t have the mechanical skills/knowledge necessary to identify a good cheap cash car.

That “7 Trillion” number is talking about implicit subsidies, which you can justify as basically anything. Having roads could be an “implicit subsidy.”

Yeah, EV market is in a weird place. Everyone has said they are switching to the NACS connector and supercharger compatability, but only a few non-Teslas are currently available with NACS and supercharging. I do think the non-Supercharger Level 3 network will get to the place in the next 5 years or so that…

Ok, I will bite: which subsidies are you referring to? 

It has in the used market. A used Plaid is by far the cheapest 9 second car you can buy. Lightly used Model 3 Performances are going in the high 20s. 

Price would be fine if it were a full-fat STI, but at a similar price (inflation adjusted) to what the STI cost, it feels like quite the letdown. A nearly $15k premium over a base WRX is a lot to ask for what amounts to an interior and suspension package.

The acronym is just a direct translation of the Japanese: スバルテクニカインターナショナル株式会社, (Subaru Tekunika Intānashonaru).  I doubt the Japanese folks who came up with it in 1988 were thinking about what the acronym would mean if translated to English. I’m sure there are English phrases that would have a funny acronym in…

The point is that no bed bugs should be a baseline expectation for any class of service. Should have zero to do with whether the passenger was sitting in first class.  

I’m talking first class. Turkish has a great business class, but no full-blown first.

Nobody should expect to be “Waited on hand and foot” in “First Class” on a U.S. Domestic regional jet. You get a slightly wider seat, free booze (probably only 2 servings), and maybe a snackbox. A lot of carriers will offer last minute upgrades for these sorts of short hop flights for under $100. If you are looking…