Buy my 2001 MR2 Spyder or my 2002 Miata! The former’s definitely squarely in project status, but the latter was my daily until I picked up my Cruze...

Depends on the car. I can “disable” it on my 2017 Cruze by shifting down into “manual” mode and setting it to L6. But lately, I don’t bother. It’s smooth, seamless, and about the only inconvenience it gives is on face-meltingly hot days, it lowers the AC when the car is off.

Ecotec 2.4 fully dressed (alt, AC, flywheel, etc.) was a 310-lb shipping weight from the wrecker. Most weights I can find for the L44 put it at 362 pounds without any dressing. (No alt, AC, flywheel, etc.) so it isn’t exactly apples-to-apples on a compare I can offer without extrapolating weights on what an alt, AC,…

On my AW11, snap oversteer was coming because of the unpredictable way the open diff would distribute power among the wheels combined with excessive body roll in the rear. But on the Fiero, they used a Citation front suspension for the rear on pre-88's. While not totally terrible, the control arm used made slight toe…

Which is for the best. The 1ZZ they shipped with had precat issues where the ceramic cats in the exhaust manifold were sucked back up into the engine because of the VVT when going from WOT to 0% for a shift. I can only imagine the catastrophe if they tried to turbo it.

I’ve driven/owned both an AW11 and an ‘85 Fiero with an ‘88 Cradle swap. The ‘85 Fiero before cradle swap suffered from the same snap-oversteer issues the AW11 was plagued with. But the multi-link rear on the ‘88 cradle swap has eliminated the snap unpredictability entirely. It’s a suspension design thing, and while…

The engine in my AW11 was great. The problem was the rest of the car around it.

The LE5/2.4 isn’t terrible, especially once you crack into it with some ZZP parts. It’s the same block as the LNF/Turbo 2.0 from the Cobalt, uses the same ECU, and uses a lot of the same components. Add some neutral balance shafts, set of cams, forged pistons and a small turbo and you have an engine that’s actually…

Kicking someone else’s car is a dick move.

Because VA is a special brand of picky. If you try to register it in one house over another (even if he lived in each equally throughout the year), they try to claim tax evasion. He’s probably been bitten by that once or twice and wanted to get a reasonable, final answer on which house wouldn’t get him in trouble.…

NC is the same way. My Fiero just turned into a “Classic car” in 2015, and is now double its purchase price per year in taxes.

It happens here in NC, too. Municipalities and local DMV offices repeatedly forward calls to each other without first checking if it’s the correct place to forward the call. I was bounced 13 times before I finally got to the correct individual, and even then, it was just a voicemail. Which, I finally got a call-back 2…

Annnnd now all I can think of is Mario Kart. Is this dude and his bike now only 6 inches tall?

No, but over in the aquarium, they have several of the fish that mass-murdered Nemo’s siblings on display....

What, prey tell, is a banana clip? Oh, you mean a standard magazine for an AK-style rifle chambered in 7.62? Part of the problem with bans is that people calling for bans rarely know exactly what it is they’re banning or even if it’ll have a definitive effect on public safety. Look up what the primary type of weapon…

I’ll be personally following the F1 Firearms truck (#203) for this race because Demolition Ranch is naviguessing.

What rotary engine do you know that’s light? The 13BREW weighs in at over 410 pounds dressed. That’s only 20 pounds lighter than a fully dressed 7-liter LS7 V8... while making 225 less horsepower and 264 less ft-lbs of torque. And more recently, 4-pot piston engines have been producing in the 300-ish horsepower…

Better in what way? RPM? That doesn’t make a better engine. Center of gravity is still considerably lower in an OHV 90* V-shaped motor than in an OHC. That’s a hard, steadfast fact that you’re ignoring. But at your request, fine, I’ll leave you to your erroneous conclusions.

None of that explains what’s wrong with a pushrod motor, though. Especially considering a modern OHV is smaller, more compact, lighter, with fewer moving parts and a lower center of gravity than a DOHC V-configuration. From an engineering perspective, what, about any of those virtues, is bad? Please enlighten me.

I honestly think you’re overestimating how much torque you can pull out of that motor. Or what the ‘response’ of an NA engine is. I was posting conservative numbers surrounding a wide powerband for the FIAT. There’s next to no power under the curve on the Skyactiv motors.