It’s not too bad; the wind chill is mostly from behind, so I wear a coat with a hood. That said, over 200 inches of snow this winter, and a lot of zero-degree days, so sometimes heated seats seem like a wise investment.

Only some kind of idiot would daily-drive his stripper car as his only vehicle.

How do all of you feel about the vertical row of nearly identical gloss black buttons positioned as far from the driver as possible? My thoughts are uncharitable at best, but I was wondering if perhaps I was just being overly traditional in my UX.

My car has less than 200 hp, 250,000 miles, no doors, and 100 mph once snuck up on me when I only had one motor mount, and half the engine’s weight was resting on the distributor.

🤣 This Wagoneer is in substantially better condition than my daily-driven XJ. Different people need and want different things out of their cars. (Hell, you probably want doors, which I haven’t had in years.) While the correct answer for you may be “Pass”, that’s not the correct answer for everyone.

I guess that depends on what your economics are. If you buy an XJ with a blown engine, you’re going to spend a whopping $300-$400 buying a decent replacement - and that’s assuming you don’t just need to replace the head, which is less than that brand new. You can put a completely new high-end suspension on it - not…

If you know how to turn wrenches, a rusted body is the only barrier to fixing an older vehicle, particularly one with a large enthusiast community and widespread parts availability. (If you know how to do body work, even that’s not a barrier.) It’s not really about having a low bar, but rather about possessing basic…

If driving down “ambitious 2-tracks” is what you’re interested in doing, a lifted 1-wheel-drive VW on A/T tires sounds perfect for you! But that’s the thing: it wouldn’t work for me, because what I do is a lot more demanding. I live in the wilderness, and I’m a photographer, so I regularly have to go (okay, choose to…

Except that he DID buy a Honda...and it cost him dearly. Whereas I spent $1500 on a well-chosen XJ five years ago, and certainly haven’t spent that much again maintaining it for the last five years, despite putting it through...rather more than any Honda would ever survive.

Zzzzz - wait, what’s that? I’m sorry, I fell asleep when you said something about a Subaru Outback.

I actually used to drive an Outback, as a work vehicle, and it zzzzzzz - whoa, sorry, dozed off there for a second! I must have some kind of narcolepsy, involving Outbackzzzzz...

Do you have some kind of tally of how much he’s spent on parts and XJs? Because I got into precisely this kind of comparison with several people who insisted my XJ was vastly more expensive than their reliable boringboxes, and every single one of them died of cardiac events when they learned how little parts for an XJ…

It’s great all these people are around to do your thinking for you, David, because I’m sure otherwise it would never have occurred to you to buy a more reliable vehicle. 🙄

Well, it’s worth noting that they DID collide all the damn time, for one. But also note that cars of the era weren’t actually that huge: this Bel Air Townsman (one of the longest cars of its era) had a wheelbase about the same as today’s Equinox, and nearly a foot less than a new Suburban. In overall length, today’s…

10/10. Would daily drive. Though honestly, it’s basically just the road-going version of my actual daily driver, so...

You roll down a window a little. It’s not a big deal. When the whole car is the same temperature, defrost isn’t really a thing.

You just roll down a window; it’s not a big deal.

Sure, but the penalty for those things is death; the penalty for not having a heater is “minor discomfort for brief periods”, at most. Like, David owns a coat, and gloves, one presumes. He’s not likely to die because his car heater doesn’t work.

It’s honestly not that big a deal. You wear a coat. You know people used to ride horses to get places, right? All winter long? And some people still get into leather boats and kill whales amongst icebergs, dressed in animal skins? I mean, you know snowmobiles are a thing, right? Humans are pretty tough creatures: a…

What’s this “heater” you speak of? 😁

A completely valid point of view, for a certain kind of person. But an alternate moral of the story: with a small amount of initiative and skill, and very little money, even a two-decade-old car with hundreds of thousands of miles on it is a reliable road trip vehicle. He drove 1,300 miles, with only minor,…