People are bending over hard to justify it. I just take it as typical GM carelessness. Why bother doing a good job when you can do it cheap? Their flagship sports car gets a diesel glow plug icon because they’re cheap and careless. Isn’t that a GM hallmark? Design great things then cheapen them during manufacture by tr…

BMW requires special 0w-60 oil for their fast spinning engines too. At least this one in particular.  Their idea of fixing the problem is fixing the oil. Not the engineering itself. 

Sure, but the sad part is that BMW couldn’t be bothered to build it correctly the first time.  It’s like many things BMW. It’s a great engine when new. Not so great when it gets old. 

Back when a greenhouse was actually like a greenhouse

Good list. 

The 2 and 3 UZ’s have weak rods. Other than that they’re great. Not much aftermarket support. No support for manual transmissions. The VVTI blocks are good to over 800 hp though. What you need is the older crank and rods mated to the new block, heads and intake.

I’d argue “reliable” is a pre-requisite to “best”.

Too bad about the Vanos failures... It’s a fantastic engine let down by poor parts quality.  BMW should have let the Japanese build it for them. 

I don’t like to admit it but 55 IS old. 

The far more impactful and ominous advances are in the less recognized advancement of AI/algorithms that displace white collar jobs. 

The issue is that you have robotic wrenches and robotic arms which work properly most of the time so, you only need one wrench turner supervisor to supervise 20 wrench turning robots. It’s not that new jobs won’t appear, it’s that one person will be able to do the work of 20 people.

What you have is many more people living on the edge of solvency. We saw what happened in ‘08 when there was a hiccup. People were suddenly 200,000 underwater on their homes. In many cases, it made more sense to walk away from the loan then keep making payments. It’s one reason more than 1/2 of the US can’t afford a…

Remote vehicle assistance “will be an important part of our mass deployments for the foreseeable future,” Laura Major, Motional’s chief technology officer, told me in an email.

Somewhere along the way Boeing stopped being a company of engineers and became one of suits.

“Test teams are applying mechanical, electrical and thermal techniques to prompt the valves to open, and are moving forward with a systematic plan to open the remainder of the affected valves, demonstrate repeatable system performance, and verify the root cause of the issue before returning Starliner to the launch pad…

Yeah Fits are narrow but tall. You may rub elbows with the person sitting next to you but, you’ll have plenty of head room. 

Lastly, the Prius has a CVT (“e-CVT”) purely in name. It has absolutely nothing to do with CVTs as they are generally known.

My point is the “scene” is a pale shadow of what it once was. The number of people modding is a fraction of what it once was. One reason is that the complexity of modern cars is beyond the ability of most anymore. Engine swaps have become much more difficult because of canbus.

Very few people modify cars these days, even Hondas. The hobbying spirit died after the ‘90s for most. Sure some get messed with but it’s not hard to tell.

I’ve had numerous domestic cars from the ‘90's and 00's. Which is what we’re talking about here. The last was my mom’s old 2000 crown vic. It had voluminous maintenance records and still drove “old”. The plastic intake manifold had melted in places. This was after it had already been replaced once. The drive-line was…