What? No Phaeton?

Nope, even though I could afford it. Every 2WD Turbo Porsche I’ve driven, and that’s more than a few, have at the least waggled their tails out without any real provocation. And one of those cars snapped 90 degrees on me just because I tried to accelerate a bit on a wet road. Not fun. I’ll leave these cars to those…

What perverse things are you doing to your steering wheel besides turning left and right?

Re: Number 9, Money Shift.

Man, sometimes you are just plain fucking crazy. Considering the cost of fixing/replacing anything in this car, not to mention the motor and turbos, $35K is way too much money. No shade tree wrench I know has the means to drop and handle the W12 and transmission. At $15K, I might take a shot at this, but not a penny…

I own a V8 Phaeton. Great car, really. Love the stealth factor. Of course, I have an extended warranty. ;)

Uh, sorry...no. The on-the-road testing crew could just as easily design a system to “sniff” the exhaust from a few feet away using a chase vehicle.

Anybody remember Ford EcoBoost’s fuel mileage bullshit? 45 MPG? Not really. Ford engineers figured out how to game the test cycles. Nobody was punished. Nobody went to jail.

Worst advice you’ve ever given, man. And that’s saying something.

I doubt VW execs decided to cheat from TDI Day One. Too risky. I’ll take an educated guess that VW’s pollution control engineers sold a defective design to management. Then, whatever their novel non-Urea system was never worked properly and couldn’t be used in production. The EPA-cheating software was a hack intended…

Yeah, it’s pretty fucking bad for VW. Their best hope is that a mid-level engineering team will take the blame and say they lied to management. If that doesn’t contain the damage, it will take VW years to recover.

Check out Jay Leno’s SM: http://www.nbc.com/jay-lenos-gara…

COTD congrats, gents.

Sounds like we’re getting only part of the story. Any reputable bike tester who got a brake failure would immediately ask the H-D dealer for another sample or two. An occasional lemon is to be expected. You’ve clearly inferred that ALL of these 750s have a brake problem. Not a fair report.

Not everybody who buys a Range Rover is willing to buy another. My friend’s experience was so bad he traded it in on a Benz in less than a year, taking a huge depreciation hit. He simply could not deal with a vehicle that had parts falling off of it, inside and out.

Nice of you to ask, Sean. As gearhead with 50 years of motorcycles under my butt, I’ve ridden just about everything you can think of, and owned many. These days, I have 3 bikes: a 250 Honda trainer for my wife and kids to learn on, a KZ1000P for general riding and a Suzuki VS1400 light cruiser for, well, cruising. The…

Yeah, I bought into that H-D cult when I was a teen. My first bike was an ex-city-police Harley. The reality of the machine soon dawned on me: heavy, noisy, vibrating, slow, maintenance hog. I switched to Japanese bikes and never looked back. Over the past 50 years, I’ve occasionally borrowed or rented a hog just to…

I’ll second what others here have said: bike accidents that kill or maim anyone other than the rider are extremely rare. In my 50 years of riding, I’ve only heard of once such accident. About 3 years ago, a drunk Harley rider went wide on a turn in Canada, rode onto a pedestrian path, killed a woman and crippled her…

As some folks here have said, I’m not sure these cars are at the bottom of their depreciation curve, yet. To add perspective, I purchased a 2-liter V6 Dino in a divorce deal in 1977 when it was fully depreciated to $4K. I put 60,000 miles on the car over the course of 11 years. The initial cost of the car was far…

Good advice, Steve. But, impractical as hell. (I assume you’ve never been to the CA DMV.) I live in CA and have sold many cars as a private seller to private buyers. The one time a buyer wrecked and abandoned the car before registering with the DMV resulted in a claim on me by the towing company that took the wreck.…