Pfft... the majority of dealerships I’ve gone to have let me take a car out on a test drive without a salesperson along. Around here its only the Honda dealers that insist on going along - and then you have to listen to their incessant lying on the trip and deal with the idiots insisting that you’re not allowed to…

Sadly, they kind of do that in one respect already - evidently if your Tesla needs a repair, it isn’t unusual for them to charge outlandishly high “recertification” fees or they’ll shut down features of your car.

2nd:

Asking for price cuts on future orders? Absolutely normal.

Asking for refunds on past orders? That’s unusual at best.  And any refunds on past orders cannot be used under GAAP to show a profit going forward.  Gotta watch Tesla’s accounting department carefully on this...

Insurance should only be paying for what the car is worth. If she owed more than the car was worth, she needed to have gap insurance. If she had both and they’re still only covering half of what she owes and the other half doesn’t represent her deductible, THEN we might say there’s an issue.

I would argue, though, that FAR too many people think that social security is legitimately their retirement plan, and FAR too many people think its fine to retire early when they could be building a better future for themselves in retirement by working a bit longer. SS should be an “avoid abject poverty” plan rather…

Agreed.. I was just slow on the uptake. :)

On the USPS side, I see it as something the government does well AND poorly. On one hand, its amazing how much they’ll do for so little money, and the fact that they’ll deliver/pickup daily at EVERY home is crazy when the postage rates are so low.

Then there’s the fact that the…

As in most free trade agreements, tariffs are phased out, but some limited ones remain.  The EU’s new agreement with Japan eliminates 99% of all tariffs.  By your definition, that isn’t free trade, but by any rational definition it is.

NAFTA is considered a free trade agreement, but there are certainly a fair number of…

What is not possible or not economically viable?

“I think the right way to phrase that would be: “Tax funded programs that benefit the taxpayers are inherently good”.”

As a liberal myself, I would actually qualify this in that “benefit” means that an alternative method of arriving to the conclusion without government interference (or a method with less government…

The EU “are not proponents of free trade”.

Except with:
Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Egypt, Georgia, Iceland, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, the Palestinian Authority, San Marino, Serbia, South Africa, South…

Yeah - some of it is correlation, of course - what leads to high sulfur emissions also tends to cause high particulate emissions, but there is some causal effects, too. I don’t remember the exact ratio, though, so it might be 99% correlation, 1% causation, or 50/50, etc...

Pretty typical response from someone who knows they’re not correct - “I won’t look it up, you have to”.  You know, there is this thing called Consumer Reports, where you can find out what the actual failure rate is, right?  Because it isn’t really any different than average anymore.  Do some fail?  Sure, but…

2 years, since they were recalled in 16 (I’ve got an ‘06 Fusion). Dealer is now telling us here that they’re getting ready to start scheduling repairs, so parts must be just about to flow...

At least I can hope.

2% wouldn’t be that much over industry average failure rates. If it was that low at its worst point, people wouldn’t avoid it.  20% is horrid.  But you said “pretty much all”, which isn’t accurate at all, or even close to accurate.

np... but to be fair, it was completely accurate on sulfur emissions (ie, particulate emissions) from those ships before standards improved.  They let those things belch insane amounts of smoke...

No, “luck of the draw” is not acceptable.  I would have avoided the powershift myself.  But “pretty much all” is nowhere close to the truth.  It was a high percentage, but not that high, and its pretty much average now.

Your allegation is not supported by any data.

So if its less than 1% of total sales that would fall under these lower emissions rules, can we all agree that even if the higher efficiency and cleaner vehicles are more expensive to operate, cutting off all sales of gliders would have no appreciable increase in cost of transportation?

“Also, vehicle emissions have been one of the smallest contributors to modern air pollution and has been for some time now “

All depends on what you call pollution - sulfur compounds or particulate matter? Sure. Nitrogen compounds? Not so much. And certainly with CO2 not the case.

I’d like to think so...

But a few years back they proposed putting in large increase in mpg requirements for semis. The industry howled in protest about it being too expensive and undoable.

Turns out the manufacturers were able to start hitting their targets at costs so low that the extra purchase costs were generally…