The 3.5L is actually a decent engine (The 2.7L was the total turd known for early failure), but it is an interference engine with a timing belt which is just about due for replacement (100k mi interval on these), and the timing belt on these is difficult/expensive to service, so tack another $1,000-$1,500 onto the…

-ND

There are plenty of non-corrosive ice-melt/traction aid options, but salt is “cheap” (at least upfront, but the long term costs due to infrastructure damage are never taken into account, not only is is rotting out cars, it is also rotting out bridge beams, re-bar embedded in the roadway, etc.) so they stick with it.

^This, while I understand the “historical significance” of the old Packard plant, at the end of the day it is an “abandoned” building (or series of connected buildings really) that have been sitting largely empty, with much of it exposed to weather and little to no maintenance for over 60 years. Much of the plant is…

Gutless V6 in a giant boat = automatic No Dice (and the Ford 3.8 has reliability issues as well).

This scrap yard is in Turkey so it meets EU (European Union) environmental/safety standards, a night and day difference between this and the unregulated cesspools in India and Bangladesh.

Turkey is part of the EU (European Union), so they do have decent safety and environmental protocols (at least as ship breaking yards go). Scrap yards in India, Bangladesh, and China on the other hand are absolute disaster areas with no regard for workers safety or environmental contamination.

it was, these were 25-30 year old ships and would have likely been retired in the next 5 years or so anyhow, COVID just pushed up the date. The big difference is normally such ships would be sold to the “second-tier” (smaller, often cheaper) cruise lines and sail another 10-15 years before ending up in the scrap yard,…

A lot of the new ships are being build to run on LNG (liquified-natural-gas) which is about as clean as fossil fuels come. But many of the older ships are still burning bunker oil (not even “low-grade” Diesel, this stuff is more like road-tar, literally the “sludge” left over after refining a barrel of oil), though…

-ND

“I can see it preventing wrecks with the less attentive though”

Leave it to “Comifornia” in almost any other state if you aren’t driving a vehicle you just don’t register it and then when you (or whoever you sell it to) register it again you are only hit with the cost of a new registration, but not in California they want to charge you back registration and late fees for the time…

“What happens if you just, you know, don’t?”

Why should anyone even care about climate change? Even the most pessimistic models put most of the major effects far enough in the future most of us will be dead or rotting away in an old folks home (this includes Millennials and Gen-Z barring any breakthrough medical advances drastically extending the average human…

It’s only illegal if you get caught. As long as your local PD aren’t complete NAZIs they probably have better things to do than be the “registration police” (though of course most will still add that to your citation if you get pulled over for something else).

Yes, but you might die of dysentery a week later.

unless you live where they salt the roads, then the frames turn into Swiss-cheese (if you’re lucky enough to have one of the recalled years Toyota may pay to replace your frame or buy the truck back from you though).

-CP

Does it come with an Italian mechanic named Toni, so he can fix it again, and again, and again.......?