So true. If it's not a hacked mess, a repaint in the relatively recent past means better looking paint for me. On two of my past old beaters, it was the original paint that sucked (faded beyond salvage).

It likely is "profitable" in a marginal sense - they sell it for more than it costs to make - but these cars are not designed in an afternoon in front of the CAD machine. A car is only truly profitable when the development expenses are recovered.

I think I can summarize your (and my) problem: you are not rich enough. I imagine a Ferrari would be three-competing-gold-diggers-in-a-jacuzzi fun if you had enough money to just not care. "Hahah, did you see the burnout the valet did? wooooooo!" Then you toss the keys to your personal…

My father-in-law has put 10s of thousands of miles on two Burgman 650s but at that point, it's really a step-through motorcycle. :)

I agree that was quite a deal. After my great luck leasing my '11, several of my friends have made noises about buying a used one.

There are a couple HUGE caveats with a lease. The obvious one is how much does this person drive? Too many miles and the lease is a non-starter. Less obvious is where is the car parked? Try to turn it back with bumpers and wheels all beat to hell and that $4k under water doesn't look so bad.

Your dog could potentially move forwards and not fall over on a nice sunny day. Good luck dealing with an emergency in low traction conditions with those tiny wheels and tires. As I said elsewhere, I AM seeing more scooters on the road, ridden by people showing the same level of commitment to learning to ride them…

As much as I loved riding and racing, when I hung up my leathers (in fact, they were cut off...a helicopter ride was involved), I discovered I liked mountain biking more. A bunch of my racing buddies took it up at the same time. Our mantra was: "more likely to get hurt, less likely to get dead".

You want more people to ride. Do you think Ma and Pa Camry/SUV driver would "take the time to learn to ride properly"? No, they'd fall down a lot and get hurt/dead.

Anecdotally, I've been seeing a lot more people buzzing around on scooters. Unfortunately, they are just as clueless as Joe Squid and Mr. Boomer, possibly moreso. I cringe when I see these people wobbling down the road.

Um, you don't think he was exaggerating for effect? Can you picture a Bugatti buyer filling out a questionnaire? Can you imagine Bugatti being so gauche as to ask him to do so?

The CTS-V is a way more realistic choice than a Maserati vs Altima or whatever, for an enthusiast who fully understands the trade-off being made (fuel, maintenance, etc). PERSONALLY, I prefer to go to 10 years. At that point there's a body of Internet knowledge about what the typical problems are for a particular…

Not only that but making claims w/o specifying the cell technology (GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc...) makes it sound like a hoax to me. I can't believe this thing is getting so much press.

I understand the ducting is the killer. No MAF gives the engineers much more latitude with intake design. The trade off is much more mapping work to get it all right. It's way easier when you have a handy little sensor telling you how much air is coming in. <- This summarized by an OEM calibrator (GM, Ford, Lotus,…

About 15 years ago, I drove my Lotus Esprit S4s to a customer site for a meeting. One of my clients was a big car enthusiast - mostly old American iron - and loved the idea of a ride in my fancy-pants Euro wedgy thing. I gave him a quick out and back spin but it sucked because their were no good turns. Just before…

I can't imagine a more useless vehicle for anything other than what it was designed for: not getting shot/blown up in a war zone. You can't see out of them, they are impossibly slow, prone to tipping over, complex, and don't even hold that much equipment considering their external dimensions. The MRAP I'm more…

Exactly. Here is a typical gearhead reaction to a ride in my pathetic old, slow 360: "Jesus f*cking titty CHRIST, this thing is AWESOME!"

Sure and Ferrari manages to keep 'em lined up for the abuse anyway. Ford? Not so much. In the GT case (just looked up some old threads :) ), the dealers played chicken with the buyers and lost. They finally started relenting in late '05, selling some cars at MSRP but now you had the situation that people were…

I can recall when the Ford GT came out, a bunch of regulars at ferrarichat were *very* interested. Right up until they stepped into a Ford dealership and were confronted with insane markups and a "take it or leave it" attitude. The common response was "f you" and a walk out the door, never to return. A lot of cars…

Hah. My friend is a BMW service advisor. A lot of wealthy people bought SMG-equipped M5 & M6s because they were the "best version". He spent a lot of time driving them around. "How come it's so smooth when YOU drive it?" My personal favorite story is the guy who bought an SMG M6 'vert WITHOUT TEST DRIVING IT. He…