I'm from upstate NY which is pretty much on par with New England. Trust me - urban Texas roads are generally worse. Blacktop can barely survive the sun intensity, so most roads are concrete. Sun and shifting soil and massive vehicles are a disaster for them and the incredible levels of corruption in local and state…

Uh, not in and in the close vicinity of Houston, anyway. They may spend a lot of money on new roads, but the old ones are mostly broken rubble.

If you're so concerned with the link to the physical world, why don't you display speed squared instead? After all, both your kinetic energy and aero drag are related to velocity squared, not velocity - so it would give you a much better feeling for braking distance, fuel consumption and the potential amount of damage…

Well, the flushes and inspection II would be based on vehicle age and the dealership assuming it hadn't been done yet. Valve cover gasket and oil pan gasket would be based on the vehicle smoking or excessive oil on or around the top of the engine, and excess oil on the pan / bottom of the car - easy enough to check…

That looks an awful lot like a BMW dealership estimate

It's not even that all mechanics are cheats - many are, but there are many more who are just incompetent, lazy or overworked - and they'll often lie to try to cover it up or get you to go away. If I could go to a shop, pay $80 / hour labor and 100% markup on parts (usually the price they're marking it up from is quite…

bingo, although the Challenger doesn't seem nearly as cartoonish as the Camaro imo.

Ford - for the love of God, please do not ugly up the Mustang to try to compete with the Camaro. Modern can be good... just not THAT kind of modern.

Texas Walmarts sell beer, unless maybe if you're in a dry county.

Everything else being equal, comparable E30s are worth more than E36s these days.

Um, no we don't. We call that a pad test. A rocket is a long tube, usually filled mostly with fuel with one or more nozzles on the end that produces thrust. Nothing like that was present. While I'm sure those guys loved being astronauts, that sounds like it wasn't a particularly enjoyable test. Most of being an…

They were in a capsule on the launchpad, performing a power systems test. There was no rocket or fuel involved - just a capsule pressurized with 100% oxygen.

The 3 crew members of Apollo 1 (one of the 3 disasters mentioned) actually did die on the ground. However, as far as I'm aware - Jeb did actually mention all of the flight related astronaut deaths in the US space program.

As I generally opt for an air-cooled motorcycle, even on 100+ degree Houston summer days, the only time I really take a car is when it's raining - so I'm going to say a roof - either fixed or cloth. Enough wheels to allow me to loose traction without crashing is also a plus.

GM isn't responsible - franchise laws are. The only weapon GM has is possibly the ability to cancel a franchise agreement, which opens them up to all sorts of lawsuits and is really too big of a hammer for that kind of job anyway. However, how do you really expect consumers to react to that disconnect? The dealership…

The Leaf and the Volt are both very political vehicles, and unfortunately for GM - the types of people who are interested in being early adopters for true and pseudo EVs are also generally the same people who have sworn off buying domestics. Living in Houston, there's a bit of a different political slant from where…

Unfortunatley for GM, they do have a lot of bad dealers, and it generally does reflect poorly on them. Rather than exhaust the list of shitty Chevy dealers in town, people are more likely to just jump to a brand that has a better dealer.

The only problem with the XJS was that it was produced for so long, they eventually got reasonably good. My dad recently drove a '94 4.0L with 160k miles from California to NY without issue.

Of course, knowing that there's traffic and actually doing something about it are two completely different things, the latter of which Houston choses to ignore. You generally have one major highway to get somewhere, and all alternatives involve traffic lights every few hundred feet that are completely out of phase…

Gotta love the number one reason - it seems like that's the justification that's most often used to get yourself into something you can't afford. My little brother loves buying 300-500 cars, but then isn't willing to spend more than 50 to fix it. Sometimes a cheap car in solid, running condition is really worth a lot…