I’m guessing that part of the reason for the awfulness of BMW’s designs (as well as Mercedes’s designs) is that they are not building cars for the US and European market anymore. They are trying to capture the nouveau-riche market in places like China and Russia (and perhaps the Middle East as well), and the favored…

Putting heavy electric motors and batteries into light, nimble classic cars is the automotive equivalent of sacrilege :( 

This is absolutely idiotic. You know what’s a great control gesture to change the volume of music? Even better than twirling your finger in the air? Twirling a physical knob that controls music volume.

Carbon capture is not viable at all. EV production is getting greener by the day. Lithium replacements are on their way. Synthetic fuel is still poison we spill into the air we breath. Petrolheads will have to change their ways, as do we all. The lack of noise from EV’s is a big fat bonus. It will take a while for al…

Right, so it’s roughly a 15% to 50% reduction in CO2, from an already small number. Even if we could wave a magic wand and switch all vehicles in the world to be EVs, that wouldn’t impact climate change at all.

Synthetic fossil fuels though, fuck that noise. That would add carbon to the air, which would exacerbate the issue. It would only be feasible if there was some way to totally capture or eliminate the carbon.

Exactly. And the worst thing is that EVs are NOT the environmental savior that they’re being sold as.

But my point is that at the end of the day its about the environment. None of the experience or anything matters if you don’t have planet to even experience the cars on. It’s an unfortunate reality that a lot of us are going to have to swallow.

It’s not just saving a few bucks at the pump - if we chose smaller, lighter cars instead of safer huge tanks, we could save way more CO2 emissions that we’ll ever save with EVs.

In a Facebook car group I’m part of, someone just posted about getting rear-ended in a Tesla. Damage photos look like not much more than a fender-bender - damaged bumper and a dent in the rear deck lid. The cost for repairs was $15K+, and that was at an independent shop, because the insurance company refuses to work…

I think a sliding door in the back would be pretty cool. Not sliding sideways like on minivans, but sliding up. Just a rail on each side, and the rear hatch slides up on those. With an angled rear, you wouldn’t need much vertical space for it to open. Or it could either slide up, or hinge at the top like hatches…

So much this. Self-driving cars are a fundamentally bad idea, and I hope they will never happen. And I fear that they will - and the only way they could is if every vehicle is automated (and they all communicate), and manually driving a car is banned on public roads. Self-driving cars (and all their sensors) are a…

This. QuadLock is awesome. Very simple design, very secure, handles the vibration problem, and from what I’m hearing the wireless charging option is super fast. By comparison, the BMW cradle looks like it was designed by cavemen, and it uses a Qi wireless charger, which I’m not sure will keep your phone from losing…

> Nice Avantime.

Oh wow, I just checked KBB value for my ‘09 E90 M3. I thought I overpaid for it a bit when I bought it a year ago (it had low miles and I’d been looking for a while, so I didn’t really haggle with the seller), but now KBB private-party value is a few $thousand more than what I paid. Even the trade-in value is more…

Not to mention MUCH lighter. The 2015 228i suggested in the article weighs 3,500 lbs. A 2021 Miata weighs 2,300 lbs.

If that had been a 70's Buick, the semi would have crushed everything but the solid frame underneath the body. Heavy doesn’t always mean strong.

If those cars were routinely lasting 250,000 to 300,000 miles like today’s cars, they’d still be on the road.

Burn this image into your brains for the next time some idiot writer or commenter tells you how much better cars were in the 80s-90s.

Stated otherwise: Can you imagine how much money we cold save on Gas if we rolled back safety standards to 90's levels?