“They welcomed you in, regardless of how much or how little you knew about cars. Regardless of whether you were a super fan or just a schlub trying to get to work. Damn, I miss that.”

What’s interesting to me is that Mercedes made a product that failed utterly in not one, but about every category you can think of. And they still imported it.  That requires either a monumental amount of self-delusion or hubris, take your pick.

Easy? Removing unused rear seat headrests usually requires a crowbar, rubber mallet, and a hand grenade.  

Or I suppose you could re-body a MkI Audi TT convertible...  I seem to remember someone compared Audi’s with and without Haldex, back to back, on the track, and the results were basically the same.

This really isnt’ surprising. When you restrict time off to a sufficient degree, people eventually realize the only way to get a day off, is to get “sick.” And working excessive hours also means many times those sick days, are in fact, sick days.

Um, good luck finding one of these.  At the dealer it’ll be white, silver, grey, greyish-silver, or black.

What no one seems to care about, is whether the 4wd actually helps anything. I’d like to see track times for identical 2wd and 4wd cars. Mazda won’t do that, as they’re hoping to cash in on the suburban drivers who are convinced that a 2wd car is a rolling death trap.

Not you or the previous owner. Bought an e46 from original owner with full records, at 85k. Drove it to 220k. But it averaged about $2k a year to keep going, with me doing most of the work. BMW is really good and spending enough money to keep a car going for about seven years (plastic parts everywhere), at which point…

You’d be surprised how many Craigslist ads appear to be from men given an ultimatum, filling the letter of the promise, but not trying to sell the car at all.

It's an early 2000s 1.8t. change the oil regularly, and don't let the timing belt go more than 60k, and you'll be fine. Maintenance wise about like an E46 BMW, so you know what it'll take to keep reliable.

+1 first thing I thought of

YOU RADICAL!  If we start teaching kids about compound interest, we’ll have to give up the weeks spent on quadratic equations and Venn diagrams!

When you think about the execrable CVT’s that were foist on the public for years, you have to wonder just who made those decisions?   What nitwit exec thought this was necessary?  They obviously had never driven a CVT, or maybe the one in their Audi was better.    In this case, who was presiding over this whole…

Care to detail that out?  The E36's are pretty reliable.

Considering how rare modern Corvettes are on the road, I have to wonder whether the “halo effect”, if any, is worth it for Chevy. Yeah, a few people care, but otherwise, meh.

Basically he’s saying that you’re taking the most experienced people and showing them the door, so that’s lost for new designs. Not understanding Your comment, as my experience is that most of those older workers have kept up on their skills, and are pretty efficient at putting out work. Exactly which “outdated” skills…

I remember watching one of the Die Hard movies, and they’re in a control room of some sort, with a bunch of old PDA’s scattered about (look up Palm Pilot kids). Before phones mated with PDA’s and became smartphones, these little computers had a lot of the same features as modern phones, but were limited by no internet…

Exactly this.  I see SO many ads with “no title.”  Usually this means there’s a title loan involved the owner won’t pay off.  But in this case, the one person who has a snowball’s chance of getting the title, is too flippin’ lazy to do the legwork.

So these days the going rate for a car that isn’t some shade of silver, white, or black, is $30k?

For a kid who never had the money to buy the factory manual, the Haynes was the next best thing.