Its coming, fast. A good friend of mine has a leased 2017 Murano Platinum with 30,000km on it. His lease ended, and the Nissan finance people were almost begging him to keep it, finally offering him a purchase price of $15k CAD. That’s crazy cheap for that car.

Eh, as somebody who has one leg in the Apple pool, the other leg in the Android pool, and one arm in the Windows bucket, I can at least understand the casual Apple guys. The products generally do what they’re supposed to do and all that, but it’s hard to argue with the resale value. They re-sell for so much money that…

Eh, you get used to them in a day or so.

Really? You want to give somebody a criminal record for loaning a car to somebody else?

It’s “up to”. 

Cool. Could be almost anything - not all engineering cars are subject to abuse. Somebody could have simply ordered a test vehicle to prove that the production A/C units are operating to spec, in desert conditions.

What? Seriously? Those turds were $2,999 when they were just a few years old - nobody wanted one. They’re deep into “it’s worth however much gas is in the tank” territory now, have been for years. 

Definitely. It’s one thing for execs to be paid large compensations when the company is highly profitable, and when that profit is directly related to actions which were taken by leadership - if an exec is paid $10m and their actions have made the company profit $billions, then that’s absolutely reasonable.

It’s really not surprising, though. We have a ton of various Toyota hybrids (among a broad mix of various makes and models) in a large fleet, at work. They’ve been the most reliable vehicles we’ve ever had, by a wide margin.

You never knew what you were going to get. They act completely different when they’re cold vs when they’re hot. Three take-offs from stop signs on a hill and they slip-and-slam. Then after it has cooled down, you might get massive slip. Wild that anybody ever green-lit the design, and even more wild that people bought…

Useless trivia of the day: the proper spelling for this car is “smart fortwo” without any capitalization. It, and the Nissan cube are the only two cars I know of, which don’t have their names with a capital letter.

There are about a dozen pickups in the parkade of our condo tower, in an urban city- not one of them has ever hauled, towed or been off road in its life. They’ve turned into lifestyle vehicles because “one day I might need to buy a potted plant”.

And so have cars. Trucks still have terrible fuel burn, comparatively, to cars. 

I think the beef everybody has is the sheer size and unnecessary baggage of modern trucks.

They certainly don’t, but summer programs, day-cares and summer camps are open for business in normal situations. Right now, they’re closed. 

Lol, just play some good streaming music. I've become a huge fan of listener-funded KEXP lately.

Wouldn't be the first person to have a financing term which is considerably longer than the actual life span of an FCA product. 

Lets see here. Work in an oil patch, as a longshoreman or have a similar low-skill, high risk, high pay blue collar job. Like shiny things but have no financial sense. Think that a Jeep is a “nice” vehicle. Finance the whole thing, because no financial sense. Like big truck because big truck. Completely fall for…

Nah, let’s be honest here. It begins as a 100k Jeep, which is marked down to an 80k Jeep because of rebates, which turns into a 50k Jeep the moment you drive it off the lot. It becomes a 30k Jeep after a year or so. It’s then sold to the kind of person who can’t afford its maintenance who blows it up after two years,…

Eh, squarely average household income, living in a 650sq-ft condo. Wife takes transit to work, I carpool to work with another staff member. We share a 2010 Prius, don’t have cable TV, infrequently eat-out, and simply live a low-cost lifestyle. I’d go with “we’re really frugal” rather than “we’re lucky”.