Get off the superslab.

They’re about as close as it gets.

That was tedious.

Among the options BMW plans to reduce are engine variants (Peter mentioned the four 5 Series diesel offerings as an example of unnecessary complexity), steering wheel count (“We have over 100 steering wheels on offer,” he said.) and crucially, transmission offerings.

Cheating the efficiency test cycle and cheating pollution controls are pretty different. Both are cheating, and both are bad, but one merely results in slightly worse mileage (i.e. more CO2, provided someone actually drove their car in the manner of the test cycle) whereas the other results in radically more…

Absolutely not, same kind of cheat could happen on gasoline engines.

This is true of all sports cars over $50K. If you want to see garage queens, check out Ferrari.

No real room for anything, submerged pillbox style driving experience, hairy chest and AC/DC stereotype, etc.

None of that conspiracy thinking explains why the Euro/USA/Japan standards aren’t unified. The reasons are primarily political, not economic. GM would be happy to build one set of headlights instead of many.

Things are better than before, but the regulations are comprised of thousands of little rules imposed by different political authorities in the major regional markets. Some are agency regulations, some are public laws. It would be a huge and disruptive undertaking to unwind all that. Maybe someday.

Nowadays you want a turbine housing with the least thermal inertia so the catalyst can heat up as quickly as possible, which means getting the turbo right up against the cylinder head. It’s true excessive EGT will kill a turbo, but that’s not primarily caused by distance but rather flow restriction.

Also from Reuters:

The whole point of exclusivity, if you’re into that sort of thing, is excluding people.

That’s automatic climate control for you. If you ask for a temperature over 65 and it thinks it’s under 65 outside, it’s probably venting directly and not running the compressor.

It was cool and breezy when I got in my car this morning (June 20, 2017). Half an hour of driving later, it was 95 degrees outside. There was no indication of this inside the car other than the temperature display.

Agreed. The author’s same line of reasoning could be used to say that a mercury thermometer “doesn’t measure temperature” either, but rather volume of a fluid.

Whether a knob or lever, the control’s position must correspond to the state of the thing controlled.

The biggest drawback is the back seats. They’re not especially comfortable, and they don’t fold down at all. Technically they can be removed, but they’re so large and heavy that it isn’t practical. It really limits the utility of the van to passenger duty only.

Styling aside, I think the Metris is a great cargo van. There’s nothing like it in the USA. The passenger version, though - that’s a harder sell.

“At a given closing speed.”