“the budding resort town of Nha Trang”....it was HQ of the US 1st Army Field Force, Vietnam (1FFV) a major subsidiary command of the US Army Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV).

Easy. No automatic transmissions allowed on vehicles over 6000 lb GVWR!

The best road test summary for an F150 Lightning went something like this: “It is a nice EV but it can’t do truck things”.

https://modestoradiomuseum.org/the-first-border-blaster-xerf/

25 gal. of gas? My 2012 F150 Platinum 4x4 has a 36 gal. tank and I usually carry three 5 gal. gas cans in the bed when I am off in the mountains fly fishing or elk hunting.  It is a truck for hunting and fishing not working.  I don’t do working anymore. 

Keep in mind the people who buy this stuff are not the people with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to make their fortunes. They inherit or marry the money.

How much fuel?  That is were the KLR stands out, large fuel tank.  If you actually go adventuring in, say, the southern Rocky Mountains, you want lots of fuel.

Here is the Rothmans car with daylighters and cleaned up. 

Thanks for the data. 5"-4" & 171 lbs. is a really “full figured” woman. I am surprised the average is that portly.  It is a BMI of 29 which makes half the women “obese”, BMI 30+

Norway is uncomfortably authoritarian despite being “democratic”. Regulation and taxation of booze is as bad or worse than of automobiles and driving. Germany occupied Norway in WWII and it is almost like the Germans left but Nazism did not.

I was thinking the other day there could be a Tesla road service business....a truck with a big diesel generator feeding a supercharger rate charger.  Uber type system to call on the service to come to you.

The old, old Ford “Big Six”, 300 cu. in. All iron, push rod straight six. Lasts for decades or a few hundred thousand miles whichever comes first.  Not unusually found in Ford pick-ups and boats running for 50 years. 

Texas’ power grid is fine. The “deep freeze” was an unknowable event. At no time in human history has Texas frozen for a week from the panhandle to Mexico. One professor said ts was Wisconsinian. By that he meant the last geologic record of such widespread cold was in the last glaciation known as the Wisconsinian.

Yeah...it is all relative. For 35 years I lived in an neighborhood where a lot of Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter pilots lived. One friend had this bumper sticker on the family Volvo wagon: “My Other Car is an F-15E Strike Eagle”.

Yes, these are nice cars. But, the next in the series, the R107 cars, are better in every way that I can remember. The C107's, the SLC coupes, are most interesting cars as well. R107 450SL’s were imported to the USA in large numbers and those and other xxxSL’s are plentiful and affordable and affordable to rejuvenate…

How can it be an Alfa Romeo if it does not have a twin overhead cam, 4 cylinder, 2.0 liter engine and a manual gearbox? 

This is not proper. There are just too many other cars on the road and too many places of limited visibility to make this high speed run rational. As any pro race driver will tell you about public roads, it is not your skills that get you killed but the other guy’s lack of skills that kills you.

Texas is not flat. I guess about half of it, or more, is some real mountains, a lot of Hill Country, vast areas of rolling hills. The roads and highways closest to the Gulf of Mexico are interesting even if flat. 

This is all rather a shame. I simply do not see the point in racing computers with wheels. That includes dual clutch paddle shift. Race drivers should be able to drive fast and operate traditional ICE engine, single-clutch, gearbox machinery efficiently. “Back in the day” is was common for a driver to get passed if he…