Right. But my mental image of the cars includes the US bumpers, so they look right to me, even if that’s not what the original designer intended.

Those two statements are not contradictory. It is entirely possible to take comfort that one has stood up to environmental extremism without going out of one’s way to do so. It’s an extra benefit.

You know, as much as people bitch about the US bumpers, to me that’s just how the car looks. I’m not going to replace them on my 560SL with the ROTW (rest-of-the-world) bumpers, because it would just look Wrong. Same goes here. For better or worse, that’s what the car looked like originally. (Yeah, I know it’s an…

Don’t worry about the looks. Drive it like you stole it, enjoy it, wrench on it. It doesn’t look like it’s going to fall apart under your butt, so the looks are in the real of “OK”. NP.

No, I don’t roll coal. For one thing, why would I get my diesel Mercedes dirty like that? For another thing, why waste fuel, and therefore money, like that?

Me!

Turbodiesel? Manual? Convertible? Hell yes. That price isn’t out of line for what it is, its age, and its low miles. Not sure I’d daily the thing - the (pre-facelift) New Beetle convertible I had as a rental once had a trunk so tiny I could barely get one roll-aboard bag into it - but it should be a hoot.

Merciful $DEITY.

“Standards are wonderful things. There are so many to choose from.”

Amen. My roommate, who is still driving the 1998 Corolla he bought new, described my experience with Lexus service as “you’re buying a whole lot of ‘not my problem’”...as in you take it to them and they take care of it, no hassles, no quibbling, no questions asked, but “when can you bring it in so we can fix it?”.

Neutral: Battery swapping pretty much has to catch on. Charging your Tesla, even at Supercharger speeds, is just far too slow compared to a visit to any of a hundred thousand gas stations along the Interstates.

No, no, Godzilla! Oooooogley. With a capital oog.

Funny, the Tiger never appealed to me so much as the Opel GT that followed it.

I’ll have to take your word on that one. I’m not a BMW guy; they always seemed to me as a driver to lean a little too much into the “ultimate driving machine” thing at the expense of refinement.

Until you’ve driven a diesel, don’t knock it. I’m on my second, a 2015 ML250 Bluetec; the first was a 2008 ML320 CDI that I traded in on the new one at 192K miles, pretty much Mercedes’s version of this same thing. That torque makes them much more fun to drive than you’d expect from the displacement, and they’ll tow…

Why does this remind me of the PT Cruiser convertible, which was generally adjudged pointless?

Very much so. Like all German cars, you have to keep up on the maintenance, but if you do, they’ll run forever.

You also get hydraulics that spring leaks if you look at them cross-eyed, and get really expensive to replace. If you get a 1995 (and 1996? Don’t know when they fixed this problem) you also have to deal with replacing the wiring harness at some point. Not sure the buy-in’s cheaper, especially if you shop around and…

It’s a driver, but one in very good condition. A prepurchase inspection is mandatory, but if it doesn’t find issues, you can get this one and be confident it’ll go for many, many more miles as long as you keep the maintenance up.

Don’t pooh-pooh the D-Jet. It can be dealt with. There’s plenty of expertise on tap. The big issue is people letting fuel sit in them and get old, and that varnishes up everything in sight. Even then, a fuel distributor rebuild, the biggest problem, costs about $300.