Leasing can make sense if you want a new car every 3 years or so (and lets face it, lots of people have what comes close to being a moral issue with that). You can think of leasing as the economic equivalent of buying a car with a pre-negotiated guaranteed resale value after 3 years. If it makes sense to you at the…

Cayenne Turbo is certainly a good alternative, as is a decked out Range Rover (sport or no sport), but if it were my money, X5M (there's a new one in the pipeline but the old E70 one ain't half bad either), partly because I find the Cayenne to be irredeemably hideous.

U.S. market version of 335 had a version of the M57 engine (also used in the E70 X5 35d). It was really the testbed for a lot of the diesel emissions stuff (particulate filter, urea injection, etc.), because all that stuff was required first in the U.S. market.

Links posted above.

Beaten like a red-headed stepchild

Man, the local Mercedes dealer wanted more for an oil change. Did that once, after that, found me a great independent mechanic, a Swiss-German one at that.

That's why I generally avoid the East Coast. Overly regulated in basically every way you can think of (except for maybe Vermont/New Hampshire/Maine). At least California is a nice place to visit.

I'd love to see a rotary launcher in action, dispensing ALCMs or SRAMs.

So true. When I visited Tokyo almost ten years ago I still smoked. So did everyone in Tokyo, it seemed. Yet, for some reason, on the street I felt really guilty about tossing my cigarette butts and would always look for the proper receptacle. Nobody ever said anything or looked at me or anything like that. It just…

Yugos were made in (wait for it) Yugoslavia, based on an old Fiat design.

For me that would be easy. M3 sedan. I think the 3/4s view of the ass of the 4 series to look heavy and dumpy. The E92 looked better than the E90 but I think for this generation it's reversed.

Rented one in Italy, driving from Siena to the coast way back in 2004. Driving around the tight streets of a Medieval Italian town, its size was handy, but once on "regular" roads, it had the most hateful transmission I've ever had the displeasure of driving. The fact that it had a Tiptronic type shift lever was just…

It's not clear to me, but are these bins the same length as the current ones, or just longer? Can they actually fit 6 bags in the same length as 4? Or are there just fewer but longer bins, and they reclaim some of the linear space taken by the bin walls, mounts, etc. themselves?

Not only was the YF-22 prettier than the YF-22, but it was probably a better plane too. But it looked too sci-fi and exotic for the Air Force generals.

IMO the YF-23 was a prettier plane.

It is galling that Estoril Blue is available on many regular BMWs with the M sport package, but not on the M3 or M4. It's a better blue than Yas Marina Blue.

Heh, I just said the same thing over on TTAC. New Passat looks really nice, but VW will never bring it here if it has to compete price-wise with usual midsize sedans (Camry, Accord, etc.).

Bought a 1997 VW Passat with a manual transmission and drove it from Houston to Austin from the dealer's lot.

What a big heavy SUV needs is torque, not power. These modern directed-injected engines may look good on paper in terms of horsepower, but they all have anemic torque. A good 8-speed like the ZF helps to hide that, but it seems that this car doesn't have such a transmission.

Customizations and special orders are a hassle to provide to the consumer, for both the dealer and the manufacturer. For the dealer, inventory and business process issues if it's not something they do all the time. For the manufacturer, it increases costs of production to be able to do so many variations on a car…