RIP, spent many long nights in the 90s listening to Art. Pure entertainment.

This is actually now a best practice (and a requirement in some places). There have been tons of folks fwacked by trains by pulling into the oncoming lane to get around their gate then taking the rail crossing at an angle to get around the gate at the other side. Studies showed this behavior was more likely to cause…

I’ve never had an issue either with their financing either though it was quite some time ago. My guess is that anyone who had their ducks in a row and filed their insurance with them promptly never ran into issues. The folks that either forgot to file, had their filing lost/it was illegible, or failed to get the…

Shocking.

Would be curious to see a follow-on study discussing why they believe that this manner of death was possible in the Hunley while it was never seen in future ASW. WWI and WWII submarines were subjected to depth charges which created orders of magnitude stronger shockwaves that were imparted on pressure hulls which had…

It just rolls it back to the 2015 standards. It’ll use the same flood planning (ie historical actual data) that had existed since the 1977 flood plain management standard rather than the 2015 version that required using best guess estimated future projections of sea level rise and increased precipitation predicted by…

Tied a string to the throttle cable and hand throttled my way back home (couple hours away) after the pedal bracket decided to commit suicide. Since I only have two hands (full disclosure) it was not the easiest to manage the wheel, throttle, and gear shift...especially from a stop or in my neighborhood at the…

I’ve had a parking pawl shear off on an auto and a parking brake cable snap on a manual...both on cars less than 10 years old (these weren’t janky rotten jalopies...standard commuter vehicles with regular maintenance). With the former it wasn’t a huge deal, truck just rolled forward a foot or so until the wheels hit…

If they’ve cracked the nut on HCCI it means lower NOx . The whole idea is that you have an air/fuel mixture at just the right conditions that when the piston nears TDC you get simultaneous ignition everywhere...there’s no flame front which is the major NOx contributor. You minimize the flame component, you minimize…

It’s all different. In the absence of witnesses/videos/other evidence the assumption both by police and insurance is that each person rear-ending the other is responsible. So in an A<-B<-C; A would be responsible for nothing, B is responsible for his front and A’s rear, C is responsible for his front and B’s rear;…

Heh, just a few years ago all the buzz was that open wheel series and works touring series were all going to die because LMP1 allowed manufacturers a test bed to test road-relevant high performance technologies (hybrid/diesel) in a format that tested not just speed but durability. I doubt any prognosticator saw so…

Neutral: I used to consider them as an interesting datapoint until I’d read more about them. Apparently a grenaded transmission and a slightly annoyingly placed functional window switch are equally rated demerits to ‘quality’. That’s nonsense and I no longer pay attention.

They never release the dataset on this which is why I hate the news folks latching onto that figure. EX: Ford selling one GT at 450k and 21 Fiestas at 15k gives an average transaction price of ~35k but doesn’t mean most people are buying 35k cars. I suspect it’s skewed that way since the cars that always anchor the…

In addition to zoning ordinances he may be in violation of there’re also nuisance torts. You cannot do something on your property that you know would cause unreasonable interference from someone else’s use or enjoyment of their property. Rarely will someone win a purely aesthetic nuisance claim, but leaking…

5th: They’ll just call them GTX or XGT instead of GTI.

Yes it’s illegal in most places (as always with federalism, there’s exceptions to every rule). There’s typically a whole section on when and how backing is allowed and a general ‘illegal backing’ law that reads something like “at no time may you back on a freeway unless in the performance of a public duty or in an…

That was the original plan, but after they got their glut of initial funding which exceeded their expectations they went down the rabbit hole of making things ‘better’. Originally it was a remanufactured metro engine paired solely to an off the shelf 5 speed manual...it’s morphed into a bespoke three cylinder with a…

3rd gen Prelude seats were great IMO. However, that was in 1995ish...by around 2004 when I got rid of it they had worn in too much and were still fine for me, but anyone who had a different butt/leg/back shape found them obnoxious. Plus, I don’t think I’ve seen any, in ages, that didn’t have the outside driver’s…

Car companies have been stalking on-line for the better part of a decade and denying warranty claims for track events for all of automotive history. It’s obnoxious, but it’s absolutely a known risk.

Everyone’s hitting on the fact that the per-claim costs for a Tesla are higher (no-shit, the other cars in the same category with high per-claim costs are low-volume like the M6, RS7 and Ghibli)...what’s more fascinating is that the Tesla’s are involved in 40% more claims. You can argue whether it belongs in the same…