Erratum on the Geo Storm; only the 1990-91 models had the semi-concealed pop-up headlights, the ‘92-3s had fixed headlights which were those special proprietary extra-tiny sealed beams only GM used and only for a few years.

I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not but I love that there are only 5 Five-Timers’ jackets. That needs to become a running joke.

There was a school of car design, frequently seen on humbler cars, where clean and simple ‘70s designs were brought into the ‘80s by piling on plastic crap. I call it Kamei Rabbit Syndrome;

You’d be surprised how many professional truckers get by with, at most, consumer GPS that doesn’t have truck route or bridge height information programmed in.

It all makes sense, the pre-hatchback Prius is the pre-Urkel Family Matters of cars. 

They don’t “refuse to build” them, there wasn’t enough of a market for these to sustain them in the first place even at a *MUCH* higher profit-per-unit than the small cars that have been dropping like flies for the past 5-6 years. 

It’s a matter of degrees. Blocking a road for an hour or two by marching in or sitting down on the road is one thing, blocking it for almost a month with dozens of constantly idling, honking trucks is quite another. 

If nothing else, it’s not worth performing as long as it’s in service as a police car. Might as well send it to auction as it is, 2-3 years from now, and let whoever buys it at auction do what they will with it. That usually means a back seat from a junkyard (I once looked at buying a CVPI with a nice plush…

I’ve long had a Berenstein/stain Bears-like memory of Ferris Bueller’s, that the first time I saw the movie in the theater back in the ‘80s when the Ferrari was at the bottom of the ravine you could clearly see the broken chunks of fiberglass making its’ body and the VW pan the whole thing sat on.

I know nicknames for Golf generations haven’t really been a thing, but can we call this one the “Grumpy Cat” Golf?

“The next time a dealer tries to charge you for this ask them to send a picture of their Nitrogen fill tank, most of the time they ‘can’t find it.’”

The story here is that a no-hoper (3% of likely GOP primary voters, that’s 1.5% of all likely voters in GA) candidate for a state office has a mofo WRAPPED BUS instead of a clapped-out minivan with hand-painted signs. Who’s funding her?

Here I was thinking the way to make it bleaker would be to move it to the US so the Satsuma would have 5 MPH bumpers and authentic mid-’70s emission-control/automatic-choke-all-the-things drivability problems.

The problem is that things *are* working, in the sense that the franchise is making money for Disney. As long as that’s the case there’s no incentive to move beyond the dark antiheroes that were so edgy and not-the-norm...25 years ago when SW was staging its’ comeback with Jar-Jar Binks and pod racing.

“Old Fart Top Gear”, gotta remember that. I usually call the pre-Clarkson, really old Top Gear “MotorWeek UK” as well. 

One clip that sticks in my mind that’s actually one of the less gory ones (not sure which specific film it was from or how it was bracketed, I saw it in a documentary on these whose title I can’t remember) showed a 1957 Ford that was recognizable as such due to an almost-undamaged headlight/grille/bumper area even…

“...the Ford Integrated Tether System (FITS).”

So the name won’t fly but can we please have pickups in colors like baby blue and lemon-pie-filling yellow with white steelies *and white dog-dish hubcaps* again please” I’m so sick of everydamnthing being Fragile Masculinity Black or Settle-For-Silver.

Never did the put ‘em to bed dressed for the next day trick as a parent but after transferring from Catholic to public school for seventh grade I did pick my school clothes the night before for the next day and lay them out until I got used to the whole not-having-a-school-uniform thing.

On the new side the industry’s already been phasing out their entry-level models since about 2015-16.