Yeah, what’s that about going to war with the army you have, not the army you want? Same with selling this shit to the public. I honestly can’t figure out how some people manage to feed themselves and we expect them to understand the various degrees of self driving? Not only that, but the requirement of constant vigila…

I read this as they didn’t make a good car for the money.

My sister has an Ascent and I don’t find the CVT any worse to drive than a regular auto—maybe even better since it’s not always hunting for gears—but for me, I hate CVTs because a lot of them struggle to make it 100k, never mind the 200k or so a clutch alone in a manual would get me.

I just watched a video where a lightly modded 2018 STI could barely stay ahead of a new BRZ in a drag race, never mind the WRX. I don’t know where you are, but WRX insurance is very high in MA, then there’s the aesthetics and being a magnet for scumbags.

2006 Mazda3. Rusted worse than an ‘80’s Subaru and felt more fragile over bumps as if the front subframe was mounted using old condoms as bushings. I guess it was a little better to drive than a Corolla, though worse than that’80’s Subaru, so I’d say it wasn’t quite the driver’s car the press made it out to be.

So fucking stupid. Tailgating is not only unsafe and blah, blah, blah, but it’s very likely to just piss off the person in front so they block the tailgater and maybe it escalates as it did here. Keep a respectable distance and either wait for a reasonable opening or—surprisingly!—they might notice and move into the…

I can’t recall ever seeing a good one, but there probably was at some point. It likely wouldn’t have lasted since it wouldn’t have had the Real Housewives drama, stale humor, and concocted fake nonsense with a ridiculous deadline any child who built a large Lego set wouldn’t believe that seems to be the necessary…

Damn, that would be some impressive work if it was done by a high school student illustrating a clever middle schooler’s idea.

When an FBI agent and BPD officer confronted and shot a terrorist* in the parking lot outside one of my work sites a few years back, the Feds showed up with a pretty ordinary looking RV, just with one of those retractable antennas like mobile news vans use. I joked that it needed were the retractable blast shields…

Was going to say something similar. As disgusting as I think megayachts are, this is actually kind of cool and reusing a commercial vessel. With the upkeep costs of this thing and infrequency so many of these pleasure vessels get used that means a lot of them are rented out part time, I wouldn’t be surprised if this…

I can’t remember where I found out about them. I want to say they were factory built for the rally team, but they may have been farmed out or a custom job in limited production. Last time I saw them mentioned was probably something like 25 years ago and my memory isn’t amazing to begin with, but from what I remember,…

A shadow vessel can be essentially just a fancy water taxi. When you’re talking a megayacht of even a fraction of this size, there aren’t too many places to dock it, so they’re anchored offshore and the shadow vessel is used to get around locally and to shore. As someone who likes boats, I find the whole idea of…

I grew up with sociopaths in my family. TheWalrus had nothing in his comment reflecting that. If you’re anywhere near MA, I’m sure the surviving sociopath in my family would be willing to spend some quality time with you if you’d like a live lesson in the behavior of a sociopath. Throwing around terms like “sociopath”…

I loved those little engines! Gear-driven cam. I remember seeing dual port heads someone made for the EA81s way back when I had one, but they were extremely expensive back then. Are they fairly attainable now?

Regular Ej22 was open deck, but the turbo version was fully closed. The latter was expensive to build being sand and die cast, so Subaru went cheap and just bumped up displacement too high to come up with the POS 2.5 when the overpriced STI came to the US instead of bringing the closed deck 2.2 back where they could…

If the Canadian ones followed the US models, they were GL or DL with 1.8 or 1.6L engines respectively (though I’m not sure if that GL/DL match to displacement was strictly true). EA81 series engine. About as sophisticated as a garden tractor, only slightly more powerful, and at least as easy to work on.

It was the EA81 in the BRAT/Leone/GLs—OHV, gear driven cam. Replaced by the EA82, an OHC version with a separate timing belt for each head. The XT later had the ER27, basically a 6-cylinder version of the EA82.

Even when you could get decent ones in the $25-30k range, I wasn’t interested. Good looking, but slow and there (were) cars I thought were more interesting for the price at the time (mostly Gandini’s work: Espada, Khamsin, Montreal). Money kept going to a house instead. Even with the large price increases of those…

I wonder if they really saved that much doing that or if the idea was more to push people into more profitable trims.

There are adaptors. I used one on a bike build to convert a ‘61 Columbia Firebolt step through cruiser to a 6-speed freewheel, which ditched the coaster. It’s the only brake on that bike and it works well for a rear brake only and it SEEMS solid, but I don’t completely trust it as the only brake and there’s no cheap…