In modern day, especially - there are so many possible options. Use a combination of the driver’s door switch and the seat occupancy weight sensor to either electronically actuate “park” or electronically actuate a parking brake. This seems trivial and expected in something like a purpose-built postal vehicle!

Too bad! I love my ‘12 fortwo because of how cute, playful and adorable it is! It’s charming and makes me smile. 

Totally agreed. Used to have an iQ - the drivetrain was the only real let-down. Would have been a great EV. They actually did sell a very small quantity of them as EVs, called the eQ.

31.6L/100km. Ouch, but no worse (actually, better!) than most large RVs. 

The real question: how many fortwos could fit inside?

Time to increase the bar for required training to something reasonably serious, increase the testing standard to “fairly difficult”, and seriously increase the budget for public transit for those who don’t want to / can’t pass the difficult test.

Hmm, are you sure this failure was caused by the failure of the spot weld? It really seems like the adhesive was the primary support, with the spot weld there just to hold everything in place (while the adhesive sets?). The missing adhesive tells a bigger story.

Most cars report SoH and most of them are used accessible. Use some common sense: if a 5-year old EV is displaying 100% SoH, something is wrong. If it shows something like 94%, that's the correct number. 

OBDII is part of an emissions standard: if it doesn’t have a tailpipe, it has no requirement for an OBDII port.

If we were to browse around batteryhookup.com and get some new-old-stock modem batteries and use an Aliexpress motor controller, charge controller and motor, 10-20hp should be no sweat — with plenty of range, on the cheap. 

If a delivery truck or a Mitsubishi Mirage can do that merge, you don’t need WOT in a Tesla.

>by fitting these Transit Connect vehicles with cheap rear seats intended solely to be thrown in the trash.

The crazy thing is $28M is not even a lot of money for many people.

500 Abarth is happy to run on 87 or 91 octane, but there’s a catch:

It notices knock well before the driver ever will. It detunes itself, and it consumers about 15% more fuel on 87 octane.

What you’re left with is a perfectly driveable car, with slightly less power and a more “peaky” feel, which consumes enough more…

Cargo vans. Every single one of them - but especially the GMC Savana / Chev Express. It’s a 25 year old design, which has had very little innovation during its timeframe. The tooling costs must have been amortized decades ago. It’s a bare-bones tin can, with terrible quality control, banged together using the kind of…

Really common here. The cheque is stuck into a reader, OCR’d and the transaction is done electronically on the spot. It’s genuinely no different than a debit transaction.

Normally not true, currently true. Their entire supply chain is in scrambles right now. They don’t want to be obligated to meet deadlines that they may be unable to meet right now, so they’ve switched off orders altogether. Can’t even order most models as a fleet customer right now.

Check out batteryhookup.com - hard to beat them for DIY storage. Basically they sell new old stock cells for pennies on the dollar.

‘85 Chev S10 with the 2.5L, 92hp
‘86 Civic 1.3L with 60hp
‘89 Mazda 323 with 82hp
...And currently own a 2012 fortwo, with 70hp.

If you live in a dense city where the absolute fastest you ever really can go is 90km/h, you really don’t need more than 100hp for anything. 

$1.58 / L in Vancouver, BC right now. Nothing new - we’ve seen that sort of pricing many times. Works out to $5.97 / gal (CAD, but there’s no sense in doing the conversion: I earn my salary in CAD and it doesn’t translate to the equivalent in USD). Fully expecting $1.70-1.90 / L in summer.