Holy crap! You have pants on!!! Is that a pre-req for Lambo driving or something?

Looks like a giant F-104 with rear-mounted engines.

Evidently you haven't driven as extensively across the US as you think you have. I have been travelling for a living for the past 20 years, driving about 35K a year, all over the US. Sure, there are many stretches of mountainous highways, but there are many, many times as much highway going through vast stretches of…

Keep right is STRICTLY enforced. Passing on the right will get you pulled over faster than about anything else. Speed limits are more likely to be enforced by speed camera (often portable) than actual cop, but there are plenty of both marked and unmarked cops roaming around. Germans generally don't speed though. And…

I have good friends (married couple) who have a more than 100 mile roundtrip commute every day. All highway, they live 1 mile from the exit on one end and work at the exit on the other end. The answer for them has been his and hers VW TDIs. First a pair of 2003s, now a pair of 2012s. Currently one Golf (hers), one…

Compared to what else you can buy for the money, they are seriously Spartan. A giant iPad in the dash does not a luxury car make these days.

Love those MKIVs. The first car I ever bought new was an '02 Golf TDI. It would easily go 800 miles on a tank driving normally on a highway trip. IIRC, 16 gallon tank. Surprised the A3s tank is so small. Or did they just use 13.2 gallons to make the task harder?

As I said previously, the Autobahn is NOT generally a better road than our interstate highways. Especially on the couple thousand miles of near dead straight interstates between the east coast and the Rocky mountains.On average its a little smoother (though not so much in former East Germany), but it is also MUCH…

Our highways really are not that bad. While they are a little rougher than the de-restricted portions of the autobahn, they are also much wider, much straighter, and much less hilly. Most of the really bad parts of our highways are in high-traffic urban areas, which is a tiny portion of the cross country route, and…

I think 9 times out of 10 is a bit strong. With credit unions around me offering <2% on new car loans, most dealers are going to be hard pressed to beat them. I'm one for three on my last three new car purchases. BMW was the same as my CU, so I did it through BMW. Saab couldn't come close, but that was back in '09.…

The limiter is right on the money. BMW speedometers are very optimistic by design. My car shows 140 on the speedo at a GPS-verified limit of 130mph. Right where it should be for a non-sport package e91. But as you said, easy enough to get rid of the limiter.

Didn't say he wasn't. But he made the statement as fact that costed is not a word. It is. It was used incorrectly in that sentence, but it is still a proper word.

BTW - that was $9/hr for a management position. The guys under me made $6. And yes, I took a crappy $9/hr position at Staples for a year while looking for jobs in my field, because I needed a JOB. It was the middle of a recession - nowhere was hiring, in fact in the legal field in my city there were mass layoffs. And…

$9/hr in '93 is $14/hr now. Not exactly living large either way. Standing on your feet all day selling computers and copiers really, truly sucks. And then the BS of managing the department. All this excitement after spending 8 YEARS in school. I had MORE debt than you do, ~$50K back then, which is $85K today (and I am…

Not true, at least in the world of accounting. "Costed" is definitely a word.

Thankfully no longer unreliable. My Abarth is almost 2 and has had not a single issue. First new car I have bought that I can say that about.

I completely agree. By the numbers the FRS is fine. But it feels slow, and that is a big problem. The look writes checks the way it drives can't cash, despite how nicely it corners.

And yet they made it feel like a Toyota in its power delivery... Zzzzzzzzzz.

I'm an "old" - that's really precious!

LOL - I drove through about 3X that much water in my Abarth last night - monsoon rains and fall leaves are not a good combination for storm sewers around here.