Reminds me of the post that took GM (I think) to task for “trying to out-beige Toyota.”

I love that you rail against misconceptions about battery pricing, say they’re cheap, then don’t say how cheap they are. One person’s scale of cheap————expensive can be waaaay different than somebody else’s.

But...free stuff. Do you not like cars?

Well I’m still a fan of it; The 3-valve gives you all the intake breathing of a 4-valve head, and all the bigger-exhaust-valve acoustics of a 2-valve monster engine from the dark ages. It’s the best of both worlds.

I would question your idea of “incredibly old”. My still pretty nice BMW 535i is twice as old as your version of “incredibly old” and has an engine that was designed in the 1960s.

I want the most ~2000ish car: Still in an era of enough simplicity to give me a driving experience that could hearken to the 1960s, just enough modern to be safe, efficient and not look like a gross decade inside, and just enough of a mix of the two that it’s from the golden era when many cars didn’t break down unless…

With the rate at which people are just brutally ragging out E36s and sending them to the JY (inexplicably every BMW model surrounding their era has been totally immune) you’ll have parts for years.

Yeah if you want to take a windows-down drive through a crisp, woodsy spring morning while working three pedals, occasionally spinning a rear tire and actually hearing your engine, you’re starting to get priced out of the market. Just about all that’s left of the truly cheap (not $10,000 cheap, which apparently is actu…

Hey, it’s an elemental car for somebody who appreciates basic living and basic driving. You roll down the windows, row through the gears, listen to the engine and drink your own pee.

Well they’re better than the what appear to be 13” throwaway wheels on the green one up there.

That’s pretty damn amazing. How the hell did that not catch on in one of the dozen iterations of it?

So basically they came up with an awesome idea, then switched which wheels should do propulsion and which should steer by mistake, made the most almost intentionally undriveable car ever built, then didn’t just say “hey, maybe if we put the steering wheels at the front.”

I find it funny that you were making a pretty simple, general point about internal combustion engines yet managed to find the weirdest fucking piston engine design I’ve ever seen as your example.

I can’t believe this hasn’t been starred more. The mechanical camshaft is the single biggest compromise automotive engine performance (aside from piston engine architecture itself). It’s just an enormous handicap, that’s been band-aided by the introduction of variable valve timing and variable lift. Unfortunately, as…

A nearly dent-proof body panel is a negligible benefit?

Yeah I agree, saying plastic body panels were a dead end is just absurd. They’re still used on damn near every bumper in production.

Technically fuel injection is just an evolution of carburetion, just done at a higher pressure. Carburetors operated on very light delivery pump pressure and intake vacuum to deliver a fuel spray, then the original throttle body fuel injection units were relatively low pump pressure 1 or 2 injector carburetor-looking…

That was a pretty great summation of the whole deal.

Holy crap a series hybrid before even trains had them. Ironically trains have used them ever since, and it took nearly another 100 years before we had a production series-hybrid car again.