The joke back in the day was “All the power of a 4 and the economy of a 6!”

Screw this - punitive measures don’t work, but rewards do. A friend of mine worked as a long-haul truck driver for a few years told me of a system in his vehicle which allowed higher top speeds for a period of time based on fuel economy. Save fuel and you get to drive a little faster at times, something that was great…

I’m crazy for minivans, especially the 1980-1990 VW Vanagon, and have always wanted a proper successor, so I read anything that has anything to do with ‘VW’ and ‘van’ with great interest. This abomination had me about as excited as the EuroVan - next to none.

Well, I believe that some German engineers did a little suspension tuning (probably the same ones that took the sharp little Golf Mk I and made it into the horrendously flaccid Americanized 1979-1984 Rabbit) and that fancy restyling, but yeah, not quite enough to warrant that appellation...

Nahhh - with big bumpers come big shock absorbers to, well, absorb the shocks. No structural damage to the E21 whatsoever. That thing was a tank, and if I get another one I wonder if I should just leave those ugly bumpers in place. They really do an amazing job of protecting the car even if they do look like shit…

A friend of mine and his wife wanted to avoid unreliable Chrysler crap and decided to buy a VW Routan instead. Given their advanced degrees I thought that they were smart people, but that assumption came into question when they bought a VW instead of a Chrysler citing better build quality and reliability. Apparently…

Well, I still expect to be driving my 2012 Mazda5 21 years from now, and hopefully it will still be as clean then as it is today.

And I used those big-ass bumpers on my E21 to ram a guy on the freeway. Repeatedly. No noticeable damage whatsoever.

There. Done.

And that kind of envy and petty jealousy is why I’d like to squeeze between those two poseurs with this one:

Or the fancy Yamaha YCR-900 that lifted tapes in from below, but didn’t have the strength to lift the high-end metal framed cassettes I used on occasion...

There was an article years ago about a woman that got caught up in a flash flood and luckily survived. Afterwards she went out and got a bunch of those glass breaker/seatbelt cutter safety tools to give to friends and family should the same thing happen to them.

A friend of mine bought that exact car back in the day. I took it for a drive and can only remember getting in and getting out, and not a single thing in between. For some people that’s just what they want, a Camry before the Camry became the epitome of forgettable. I prefer actually remembering the drive, no matter…

And over the years I’ve come to appreciate the value of simplicity. I’m perfectly OK adjusting my own seats, and a sunroof never really held any appeal for me. I see those two things in particular as sources for trouble later on, and have experienced failures in both on older cars.

True, you didn’t say that, but I took your post as an opportunity to go on a tangent and rant about prissy perfectionists and their hopelessly idealized world. Yeah, it’s now worth less than one that hadn’t been hit, but in the overall scheme of things it matters not. I question the sanity of anyone that freaks out…

It seems to be all about treating manual transmission buyers in the US as cheap bastards, and this applies to more than just Mazda. I had a friend all set to buy a Mazda6, but then she decided that she wanted a sunroof more than she wanted the manual. I say that her priorities are a little skewed, but there are…

On the flip side, one of the more difficult ones to spot is the Mazda5. You could get all sorts of colors if you wanted an automatic, but a choice of only three if you wanted a manual (like mine). I didn’t really want a red car, but figured that was the price I had to pay to get the transmission of my choosing.

I feel for perfectionists and think that they should receive proper treatment for their disorder, as they should for any other form of mental illness. Whilst perhaps not debilitating, it is a problem that hopefully can be corrected.

Boo hoo - it’s a damn car, and therefore is meant to be driven. Sometimes that happens on public roads, with the potential of being surrounded by idiots. That means taking some risks, and if the owner doesn’t like that then they should just lock it up in a vault and protect their precious investment. I’m not…