Well, if we can have plump hatches we can certainly have ruined wagons too! But to me, CUV works just fine for anything with added ride height and butched up appearance but with no real off-road ability. It covers a much broader range of vehicle than station wagon, which is a very narrowly focused term to me.

They would make $30K profit on the diesel, and they probably make $130K profit on this one. Maybe more than that. Laughing all the way to the bank.

To which I also say, nobody who would actually buy one gives a shit. It's very much like living in a 15,000sq/ft mansion and complaining that good help is hard to find. Utterly and completely irrelevant. If you are going to complain about something, complain that they have all the refinement and driving ability of a…

I'm with you on the manuals. When I can't get what I want with a manual, then I just don't buy it. If I could get one with a stick, there would be an F31 BMW in my garage, not an e91, but since BMW won't sell me one properly equipped I will just save the $55K and spend it on something else.

I don't care how it sounds on the outside, on the inside you can barely hear it anyway. It's both more powerful and MUCH more efficient than the N52, I'll forgive it not sounding as nice. I have about six weeks of rental time in 328i's and 228i's with the N20, and I am more impressed the more I drive them. The only…

A wagon on stilts is a wagon spoiled, IMHO. We have a term for a wagon on stilts, it's CUV.

Your state is weird. My Range Rover registration says "truck". :-)

Oh, no judgment implied. I care about one set of things in a car, my friend cares about a different set of things in a car. Equally valid choices. What costs the earth is if you want a car that drives really well AND has all the toys. Gets really expensive, really, really fast.

We will have to agree to disagree, as to me it is an SUV, which is not the same thing. A Suburban is not a wagon either. And both are trucks, not cars, which take them completely out of any comparison anyway. A CUV is a car.

Plump hatch is PERFECT - I have struggled with what to call this sort of thing for a long time, because it is NOT a station wagon, and it isn't really a CUV either. I don't see any wagons in your picture though. To me, these are the basic requirements of a car to be a wagon:

Not feeling the complaints. I don't think it looks much different inside or out. Same basic shapes and forms, new detailing.

I am simply not pimp enough for that car.

As I pointed out to one of my coworkers when I bought a new Abarth in addition to the new BMW I had bought two years previous and he was asking me how I could possibly afford that - "The Fiat is one year's tuition at a decent state college, the BMW is one year's tuition at a decent private college". He has three…

But not shaped like a seat - that was the Mercedes innovation. GM had the joysticky sort of thing with a couple of rocker switches IIRC.

The question is, how much? If it is 5-series\E-class money, maybe. If it is 7-series money, NOPE.

Door mounted is the very best way to do it. Grubbing around in between the seat base and the door sucks. Putting them on the center console sucks too. Mercedes invented this with the w124, and EVERYONE should copy them. Don't reinvent a wheel that is already perfected.

The weird thing is I actually dropped my car off at CarMax this afternoon and picked up the check, and they gave me back the logbook. Said they won't keep anything with the prior owner's name on it. Weird, that, seems like them having the records would help them get their outrageous prices for their cars. <shrug> At…

I don't get why this is so hard for people. Every one of my four cars has a 3-ring binder. Every scrap of paper related to the car gets 3-hole punched and put in the binder, with a tab for each year. It takes seconds. And it pays HUGE dividends. I just sold my '13 Abarth to CarMax and got stupid money for it (well…

In my area pretty much ONLY parking enforcement still uses the 2-wheel lift trucks because so many vehicles are AWD. The parking guys don't care because they have no responsibility for damage done to the towed vehicle.

You can make book on that- I have seen an AWD car be dragged away from an illegal parking space by a truck like this with the wheels dragging and howling. Also cars dragged down the road with the parking brake solidly set on and the wheels not turning. The tow truck drivers do not give a single fuck, as they have ZERO…