I’m surprised that the speed control wasn’t all electronic by then. The original ones were vacuum powered mechanical things, there not being microchips in the 50's.

Reminds me: what happens if a Tesla or Range Rover with those flat door handles is left out in winter? One time when I lived in Maine I had to bash my way through the ice to get to the push button door handle on my Lincoln. (And more bashing around the window to get the door opened.)

There weren’t intermittent wipers yet, but it would have been hard for hydraulic wipers to accomplish that. One time I was parallel parking my ‘62 Lincoln and suddenly the steering went dead and smoky steam stuff started billowing from under the hood. I knew exactly what happened and I was right. A hydraulic hose to…

Well, there’s all those airbags all over the place that keep you alive and not maimed in a crash, and the expense of all the engineering, testing and structure that keeps the passenger compartment intact. 

All that is because where you live was built up after everyone had a car. You can’t infer that a walking and public transit based system would be super time consuming and impractical. You don’t live there.  

I agree, although something smaller fit better currently. If you are going to put real crap back there you can slide in a sheet of plywood first. My whole sofa fit in. 

My model Sube came in metallic beige, white, black, and metallic charcoal. Every time I look at it I’m glad I picked the last one, although I never pictured having a near-black car. Too close to actual black?

That’s a 1984-94 E model. 

More than once when driving my 40-50 year old 1962 Lincoln Continental I thought “this is as good as it gets”. Not exactly an ecomobile, and a unit body besides, but there’s a lot to be said for wheelbase, weight, and being four inches lower than the last Town Car. Of course, speaking of weight it also had hundreds of…

The ones that are left.

Four cylinder cars with loud exhausts have always struck me as being really silly. They sound terrible, not cool. 

Maybe you can find some lead to add to your gas tank. 

And them being really really stupid vehicles with an image that goes along with really really stupid owners. 

The problem is the sprawling suburb, as nice an idea as it seemed at the time. Mass transit doesn’t work that well with sprawl. Some places are allowing rezoning around transit like BART stations so they can be denser, which is a small thing that can be done. 

The federal gas tax should be 34 cents a gallon just correcting for inflation. I don’t understand why Democrats have not made any attempt to fix it. Of course Republicans would have 100 “reasons” to not change it, but I don’t know how you can seriously argue about making it the same as it was almost thirty years ago.

There’s no comparison between any Rabbit/Golf and a Fit in terms of ride and NVH. I would not recommend a cheap R/G though. 

200K miles is about what I would expect out of an automatic trans. Of course highway vs local use is a big factor. 

The Wizard has a video of that engine, which he also considers one of the best. He describes replacing some little plastic bit that fails with an aftermarket metal one. 

Once again....I’m very familiar with the just now over last US generation Fit, including road trips in both the passenger and driver’s seat. The last gen is better than the previous one (I have spent some time in one of those also) but it’s still awful. I considered buying an HRV, built on similar engineering but…

There may be a Vibe around somewhere that’s even cheaper or better.