I’d be all over it *if* it were actually a deathtrap. Like “shoehorned an LS in this” type of deathtrap. But even after all of the work getting this POS in to running shape, your perfect, probably-not-going-to-happen scenario is still........ a 60hp Spitfire engine?

Same.

I usually do think “Miata”, but yeah, am totally with you on this one. Wife and I rented an Abarth Spyder (ie, Fiata) in New Mexico for a long weekend a couple years ago, and it was definitely the highlight of our trip. Absolutely perfect Route 66 car, and we did, in fact, drive for several hours on Route 66 in it.

Based on my hour-ish test drive, it does, in fact, suck to drive.

Counterpoint: I hate the current dealership model. There might be a dealership model that would work and be good for everyone, but it would look quite a bit different than what we have today.

Can I put guns on it?

Step one: Buy van
Step two: Get hot girlfriend who agrees to be photographed daily
Step three: Profit!

I came to make the joke that a glass bottle of Arizona Iced Tea would would be my personal weapon of choice only to find out that they discontinued them and now only offer weak-ass plastic ones?

Just FYI, the Miata is *cheaper* than either the FT86 or the BRZ.

What are you talking about, I bet he “loves the blacks”.

Again, like you said, changing to lightweight seats would net something like 70lbs, so why didn’t Toyota/Subaru do that? Same with spare tire, jack, battery, etc?  What about a lighter-weight frame like the Miata has?  

Test drove one in 2015 and HATED it. Felt cramped, loud, and while the handling was sharp it was almost “twitchy”. Not really that fun, didn’t feel that fast, and didn’t feel sporty either. And it was horribly impractical. Didn’t help that the car had been sitting on the Honda lot for 2 years and they still wanted…

Eh, my issue is that from what I’ve heard most people don’t actually use the back seat for anything. So why not yank those out and make it lighter (and probably cheaper), too?

The CR-Z failed because Honda took a car that should have been lightweight, fun to drive and economical and missed on all three. It was expensive, it sucked to drive (at least on the hour-long test drive I took it on), and it was way more expensive than it should have been.

The fact that it weighs more (a lot more) than a Miata shows how much room for improvement there is with the 86 twins.

Take a lightweight sporty car and weigh it down with a bunch of batteries and additional electric motors? Yeah, that didn’t work out to well when Honda did it.

Well, also don’t forget some authors using the gray/black system being used to punish people they don’t like. After I pointed out to one of the Giz authors that if she’d gotten the super-high-tech $200 mouth guard for free to “review” it, she should have noted that somewhere in the article, I was somehow magically…

ANY time people see a visible tax they complain and think that they’re being taxed to death. The average American pays ~$100/year in federal gas tax and maybe double that in state taxes.  So, $300/year total in gas taxes.  But if you were to ask anyone, they’d probably estimate that they pay THOUSANDS.  

Let’s just call the couple hundred dollars that EVs don’t pay in the gas tax a “we won’t have to spend trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East to protect the oil” tradeoff.

FYI, most of the “raiding” is done from the general fund to the transportation fund. For example, here in Wisconsin there’s an annual transfer of $88 million from the general fund to the transportation fund (and in 2019 they grabbed an additional $90 million as well). https://www.wasb.org/jfc-approved-transportation-bu…