I didn’t expect great mileage, but maybe a couple mpg more on the highway. Really, manual aside, you might as well get the V6 as mileage is so close and the larger engine will be less stressed. While I always beat the EPA highway mileage even in a combined cycle (on my smaller, much more aerodynamically efficient cars)…

Friends of the family had a MB dealership and the owner loved the cars. He told everyone to get MB Tex over leather even though it was cheaper. He used to say something like you can’t tell the difference between new leather and 20-year-old MB Tex.

You mean, live the same way everyone did before the ubiquity of cell phones and NOT have to be in touch with someone every second of the day?! The horror.

Transmission brakes and maybe rear brakes.

They had transmission “brakes” and maybe rear brakes before front brakes were used. When front brakes first came out, GM didn’t have them, so they put out an ad campaign against their competitors that did labelling them as dangerous. That is, until they started equipping their own cars with them, of course.

All of these! Since they’ve mandated stability systems, a full defeat button should also be mandated, but I’d also be willing to pay for it.

I’m with you—the annoyance and time saved not dealing with getting a car fixed and the peace of mind of being able to trust it are the real luxuries to me.

That’s a good one I didn’t think of. On 90% of the cars and for 99.9% of drivers, all they do is cost more and make it ride worse.

I’ll be your second vote and as a New Englander. I hate them. Prefer being cold for less than 5 minutes and not having swamp ass, increased weight, cost, and electrical strain.

Any kind of automatic transmission, active safety annoyances, what passes for leather upholstery, heated seats (and I live in New England and, yes, I’ve tried them and I hate them. I would maybe go for cooled seats if they came separate, but would forgo the latter to not have the wasted weight of the former), power…

My grandfather used to say that, usually followed by: and it’s a good thing. While he’d speak fondly of Pierce Arrows and his old Packard, if I had been able to buy him a 1928 Packard, he’d have likely thought it ridiculous waste of money for “some old junk”. It was those things’ involvement in his memories that were…

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find any vehicles of that type to look special, but that’s what’s selling. There’s a few that I think are OK looking, like the Aston Martin or the Macan, but nothing I’d ever get excited about at a $25k price point, never mind what they sell for. Boring is in. Even the Lamborghini…

I think another part of that equation is getting into it to begin with. I’m GenX, so I grew up with primitive computers and cars that still used carbs and distributors. Adding tech advancements on top of the simple things I already knew and fully understood made it easy to learn and keep up, but if I had to learn the…

Besides my hatred for subscription based models for anything that isn’t a consumable and the scam of completely unnecessary, no-value-added, less reliable, less secure (both in terms of susceptibility to hackers and loss of connection), higher energy consumption cloud-based software that exists in an age of cheap…

There was a guy who did that around me, too. I don’t know what the exact car was as it predated me living in the town and I was told the story from other people who were not car people, but it was a Ford because I remember them telling me he had painted on it: This is a Ford Lemon. He also reportedly drove it for…

It’s not paying for the patent that’s so expensive, it’s discovering and defending them from what’s almost always going to be a much more wealthy entity. Without that backing, it’s cool to have a patent plaque on your wall, but that’s about all they’re good for. OTOH, even without a patent, you can still take some…

The Lamborghini Countach in Cannonball Run. My father was sort of a car guy, but was into that over-processed garage queen street rod nonsense that seemed especially popular in the early ‘80s. I didn’t like him and I didn’t care much for those cars (at least the undriven World of Wheels types), but then I saw that…

Exactly. What is the calibration schedule and how is it performed? Is it even calibrated before delivery? That’s particularly important for something that sees a lot of temperature change, vibration, and shock. Granted, nobody is probably expecting accuracy to even the tens of pounds, but without some way of…

I prefer the boring to whatever abomination that last style was. I thought the new Civic might be an acceptable fallback for a next car in the likely event that I hate everything else, but I guess that’s out. It’s bad enough that everyone is dumping manuals, but the worst of all is the horrid CVTs they went with. And,…

Even when you don’t negotiate and don’t need approval for a 10-year loan, it takes hours and, just when you think you can finally leave, they send you to the parasite to sell the scam nonsense they try to tack on. Yeah, I’m a daredevil, I live life on the edge, and I don’t need Truecote or the extra insurance for my…