First gear: I never thought I’d be giving Hyundai a second though, but dammit that hybrid Elantra is a looker and checks all the boxes. I can easily see that excitement melting away once I made contact with a dealership though.

Reminder to everyone that if your insurance company won’t you select where you get your car fixed, you’re getting fucked and need to change to a more reputable company, or at the very least, a less dicky agent.

The really sad part of this is your typical truck buyer has no idea where their truck is built. In fact, you could tell them and they’d fight you over it.

The point you’re obviously missing is GM gets it’s gigantic US sized profit made even more gigantic on the backs of these workers. Even with the raise, the pay is obscene. There’s a massive amount of middle ground that could allow GM to pay the workers much better yet still sell these inefficient, resource squandering…

Fast forward to a sad day in the future, about 11 years from now. You’ve sunk an additional $20 grand beyond the purchase price (which ends up being just under $10 grand when you factor in shipping a non-running car) into this thing, and it’s still not anywhere close. In sad defeat you sell it for about what you paid…

Of course it’ll be a generic piece of crap, priced higher than anything with comparable features, but guaranteed to have shittier quality. Because Volkswagen.

For the same money you could get a brand new Legacy Limited with all the advanced safety features, a laundry list of comfort and convenience bells and whistles, CarPlay and of course, all wheel drive.

We such unhinged shit as a full-size dump truck roaring down 25 mph residential streets at 50-55 nearly every damn weekday completely unchecked so I’d welcome a fleet of these locally.

Heat tape, ye gods, what were they thinking? To me Hyundai and KIA are on the edge of being acceptable mainstream players with some of the best looking vehicles out there, so it’s no time to fool around with quality issues. If they want to be a top alternative to Honda and Toyota, they need have the same exacting…

I dunno, it’s still ugly, just a different kind of ugly. I’m a big fan of the under bumper mount gizmos, well worth the fifty-three bucks, and a least the plate is low and as far out of line of sight as possible. These wraps keep the plate up high, front and center where you can’t not see it.

Perhaps your sovereign nation of one will grant you an exception allowing you to drive without a plate.

Sounds like a supremely dumb idea. I can’t imagine these not coming back with damage about every other rental. And you’d have to be the world’s biggest idiot to buy one after being thrashed daily by idiots who aren’t even qualified to pilot a Corolla.

That driver seat be nasty! Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

This could be a fun car (not this one, a substantially less soiled example) but you’d have to do redo the interior to pull in the other colors, mouse gray is not acceptable.

Neutral. Please. Go look at any Toyota and then tell me again the Mazda isn’t The Absolute Living Embodiment of Restraint even with the extra chin thingy.

Not only not worth a shit, but generally worse than none at all.

I don’t understand how someone could be so hellbent on buying a car right-this-damn-minute to accept shit like this. No CarPlay would have been a deal breaker on my most recent new car purchase from 2019, four model seasons ago!

I tried to keep an open mind, but then saw the massive armrest with cup holders and reverted to my original thought of There is no such thing as a restomod done right.

One version of the 1976 Dodge Dart brochure refers to the 4 door sedan as The famous Dart Sedan so of course I named my car Famous.

Star. But it’s not just Harleys, it’s bro trucks, fart cans and shitboxes too.

Traffic cameras suck, but I’m onboard with this because when you can hear it your house and the windows are down and the TV is on IT’S TOO DAMN LOUD.