I love it. It would be perfect for exploring the infinite dirt roads of my local area. I’ve dreamed of rally/safari-ing my 318ti, to make driving down them less terrifying, but this would be even better.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. The folding panel double folds. You fold it out once when just the rear seats are folded and twice to cover the between seat gaps. It isn’t seamless, but it never bothered me. How big it is depends on how far fore/aft you have the seats slid up.

So I will say that I much prefer the load floor with the rear seats totally removed. They just bolt right into the floor and you can remove them with a big star bit and socket wrench in a few minutes even if they aren’t quick release.

I always thoughtFord missed an opportunity to create/market an adventure version of the Transit Connect, even if it was basically just having a version with vinyl floors or no third row, but a gear management setup in the big, cubic storage behind the second row of seats.

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be that rosy for a couple of reasons. The biggest is the 10 hours a day assumption I used is EXTREMELY optimistic to give an upper boundary and the average is likely to be closer to half of that and that is for actual ideally placed/tilted solar panels. For a vehicle that is rarely going to…

If you totally covered a Wrangler Unlimited’s ~60x95 in hard top you could basically fit 2 standard 300w panels, it would take ~29 hours of fully to charge the Wrangler 4xe’s relatively small battery (from which you supposedly get 25 miles of range in best case scenario). Even if we assume that you can get 10 hours of…

I actually did a lot of exploring in a TJ Wrangler. It was fun to be topless, but I basically never even put it in 4wd. As AWD systems get smarter to include things like sand modes, AWD and a few extra inches of ground clearance is all I need and I can prioritize other things. If you're rock crawling as a hobby,…

I agree. I’ve traveled around Himalayan India largely in subcompacts. We live outside Vegas now and are out exploring all the time, most of the time in my beater 318ti. There are obviously places I can’t/won’t go, but it’s a minority if there’s a road at all. I just drive carefully.

This van gave me some things to think about. I own an SUV, because I plan to take my family to see the wonders of the North American wilderness while it’s still recognizable to me.

The Ford Escape takes the top spot with 90 percent of its 2020 inventory remaining. 

Do you expect a lot of Hayabusa defenders? They seem to be more of a stigmatized than beloved bike at this point.

As a Transit Connect owner, this has been a long time dream of mine. Someone should do it!

To me, it’s not the EV part of it that lessens the excitement, it’s the other factors inherent with EV (and other modern cars), esp. the transmission. For a driver’s car, I love a manual transmission, even if it isn’t fast. You’re not going to find that on an EV which is fine, but I will miss it.

The red tube frame in the last picture definitely had me thinking Ducati.

I have a 1998 318ti MSpec. Super fun car to drive even with it’s lack of power. I bought it on a lark when we briefly needed three cars and it seemed buying and selling on after a few months would be cheaper than long term renting (or so I convinced the wife). It revs fast and is one of the more direct cars I’ve…

Because in their intention to build something on a budget, BMW accidentally created one of their last simple, light, direct driver’s cars. 

We go over this everytime iSeeCars comes up, but their methodology is just flawed. Grouping all model years in a range then looking at the percentage being sold by the original owner is very likely to bias the results in favor of cars that sold their highest number of units in the latter part of that pool. A car…

The payload of the Santa Fe SUV is basically the same as the Chevy Colorado. 

I like to imagine this as the sequel to the Jeff Gordon scares a car salesman video. 

Don’t PHEVs function as normal hybrids when you haven’t plugged them in? The Prius plugin has a 4.4 kWh battery vs. the 1.3 kWh on the standard Prius, so it does require a larger battery, but that’s still much smaller than fully electric vehicles (the Tesla Model 3 has at minimum a 50kWh battery).