Whoa, really is a 2-stroke(ish)

This is a car for someone who understands why you premix oil in the gas, or have a sohn adapter, who understands why you put special aftermarket coils on, who understands why you probably remove the cat converter, who knows to never turn it off cold, to rev the heck out of it, and who is ok with an engine that lasts…

Quick thinking on the part of the FA — if this had been an international flight w/ meal service they would’ve had the standard issue tools to deal with this situation:

I delivered pizzas in my 94 DC2 gsr. It paid for gas to and from school, around town, and usually whatever mischief we could get into. Making the same 10$/hr or so today at these gas prices would barely recoup my losses delivering the damn pizza, much less getting anywhere else i need to go. 

I mean, I think the fact that cars are very expensive and kids don’t have an interest in driving is linked, no?

You make a lot of great points, and certainly many mistakes in the area of serviceability are the faults of pressures from purchasing/higher management. But engineers absolutely make errors in this area, and I stand firmly by my assertion that the vast majority of engineers do not wrench (or if they do, it’s rare and…

You know what, after thinking about it a little more, actually often times it IS the engineers’ fault.

Manufacturers really don’t have an incentive to make servicing that easy, especially if they can pass that down to the customer. If they can make production easier and less costly while at the same time making it more difficult for the home mechanic, the better.

Supposedly Toyota took the engineering teams for the new land cruiser out in Australia past cell range by 50km and said - “now your system is broken, what are you going to do?”. And the purpose was to show then where the vehicles would actually be used and why it was job #1 above all else to make the components…

Nope. If you left it to the engineers, all bolts for everything would be exposed and easy to reach. However the designers... those artsy people who create the shape of the vehicle, they have no idea there is even an engine in there. It’s their fault not ours.

Just out of curiosity, where have you seen MR2s for sale for $5,000? I did a quick cars.com search of MR2s under $10,000, and only two came up. One was $9,999 and appears to be in good condition. The other is $4,995; it has crash damage on the right side and is for sale at a sketchy buy here/pay here kind of place.…

It’s entirely possible that it does just need the tracks and pivots in the regulators lubed (WD40 IS NOT A LUBRICANT!), but also equally possible that the regulators are shot because this is the era of plastic window regulator clips that crack and disintegrate and fall into the gearing.

I’ll lump on the GTI mostly because it’s double the cost of the economy car it’s based on but 90% of the interior is identical. If you want to have a good time in a Golf, you could have bought a Golf and saved 10-18K. It was great to drive and you could actually use all its HP, unlike the GTI, in everyday driving.

A certain segment of the population needs to get over this infantile “you’re not the boss of me” attitude about living in a modern society. When you are patronizing a private, highly regulated business in which mistakes can result in many people dying, it is entirely reasonable to require you to abide by certain…

Boomers were in their early 30s (at the very oldest) when this car released. The boomer generation started post WWII around 1946. Some of them couldn’t even drive yet, as that generation ended in the 60s. If you really wish to blame a generation for this, it would be the Silent Generation, as they would have been the…

So basically every comparison made in the article is completely irrelevant? if a ram TRX gets 12 MPG on the EPA combined I’d hate to see what it gets on the USPS cycle.

It's the USPS cycle. As I noted elsewhere, just shutting off A/C moves the estimate to 14.7.

I think the real question is that when the EPA said 8mpg did they rate it with the EPA test cycle, or did they rate it for USPS use... because if it’s the EPA test cycle... that’s probably going to be closer to 3 or 4mpg when in actual use.

As if we have the infrastructure and government support for mass transit in the USA. It’s a nice idea, though. 

I doubt people are doing that, tho. They are more likely taking out 84 month loans on something large and overpriced.