That wheel gap. Damn. Did “ACR” stand for “Active Crawling on Rocks”?

Matches up with a Mazda CX-9 fairly well. First gen, with the big center front grille and the claw-shaped red taillights.

RIP? A few minutes?

For consumers, it’s a wonderful way to check out a car, sit in it and see how it feels without being bothered by a pushy or rude salesperson.

Looked into it and accidentally realized there was some kind of rally marketing push with the IS. Including this incredibly aggressive commercial.

one wonders how these journalists—who are not sports journalists, by the way—will have time to get any meaningful journalism done in between all the fancy dinners and “mega-sauna” experiences

Hilarious. Any other zingers for us?

Did you drive all 200k on all of them yourself?

Re: the Civic, we all thought that at the time, but it really wasn’t bad. Especially considering how the eighth gen went post-modern-bar-of-soap. The 7th gen Civic may have been understated, but at least it holds up well and was a decent car to drive.

not the turbo models

So would everyone on Jalopnik, in the same way that we’d all take an M3 over a 340i—it’s a separate, far superior, and far more expensive model (and yes, a loaded S4 or 340i would be comparable, but the M3 that dealers stock is going to be $85k-91k).

But BMW also rates the M3 at 425 HP from its turbo inline-six engine, and it comes in a manual transmission. A Mercedes-Benz AMG C 43 has a claimed 367 HP from its turbo V6 and starts at just over $54,000, so it’s really all about the options and specific features a driver wants in this price range.

Affordable? Used TJs are like $8k for one with 150k that’s not rusted out. They hold their value fairly well, and are fairly in demand, so they’re expensive. It’s kind of like all the uproar about Ford’s $100k pickup truck. Pickups have been luxury accessories for 20 years—and so have Jeeps.

Hey, if I could do exactly the same work for the same clients but work for a company, I would. Self-employment in the US is a disaster.

This is the internet. I’m bored and everyone has engaged in discussion, so I’d call that a win.

My point is that this is a thoroughly useless article for a site that caters to a lot of contract-based tech people. If you use standard deductions, it’s not like you’re going to be able to change anything. Your rate is your rate, and it’s just like looking at a chart. This doesn’t “calculate” anything.

Is there a calculator for people who don’t live permanently in the year 1990 and do actual modern contract work as a sole-proprietor LLC? If you’re a salaried employee in an office somewhere, it’ll be a couple hundred this way or that way. Big whup. But the plan stands to affect the entire recommended business…

How much you want to bet those figures are “305"? Everyone I’ve spoken to at Subaru says that the company (at least in the US) truly does not know what to do with the WRX and STI brands, and that they’re successful in spite of themselves more than anything else—and honestly, it’s starting to show now.

I would call them morons, in the same category as people who buy get-rich-quick books and self-help bullshit. The shiny Bel Air that their father drove to church on Sundays suddenly became a flashy symbol of... something? Why were the fifties cool, exactly? And then they decided that any worthless, late-90s,…