Easy way to “tax the shit out of gas” and not hurt poor people:

Ramp up the gas tax over a few years. Say, add 25 cents per gallon each year until you’re at $4-5 per gallon in tax.

Use the revenues to provide a fully refundable tax credit If your additional gas tax is $4 per gallon, and the average American uses 500…

What generation?

I had a 97 Taurus - it had a few spots where it would rattle and squeak, but every last one of them I was able to fix in a few minutes for a few pennies...

I was in a meeting once with execs from Boeing, GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Lockheed-Martin. Over lunch one of the Boeing execs started ridiculing the GM exec:

“When one of our planes has a problem, even when its 20 years old, we’ll send a team of technicians out into the field to help fix it, and do most of it on our…

pfft... I’ve had plenty of experience with Fords and they’ve been no less reliable than any Toyota that I, or anyone in my extended family, has owned.

You know, on the XK8, you’re looking at a range of age when Jaguars were actually just meh for reliability - they weren’t the disasters most people think of from years before.

That said, when you need parts, be prepared to take out a HELOC...

What the hell is an unexpected curve on an interstate?

Oh, wait, I live where interstates are like this:

This isn’t surprising - if you looked at the publicly available info on the equipment used in each system, it was clear that GM’s system was superior from the get-go.

I don’t think it’s possible to really review the EcoSport without considering it in the context of the closest vehicle it’s replacing: the Ford Focus five-door hatch.

That’s enough airheads to last me about halfway through trick or treating.  Not enough.

That’s enough airheads to last me about halfway through trick or treating.  Not enough.

I’d argue Takata might be the worst. It isn’t the highest in the number of fatalities, but per the NY Times, Honda and Takata knew of the problem in the late 90s, yet still pushed on with adopting the faulty inflators. Other manufacturers then started to join in with using them to keep costs in line years after they…

Let’s just neglect that the Explorer with other tires wasn’t worse for rollover than competing vehicles, or that the Firestone tires on other vehicles similarly jumped their failure and rollover rates.

I’d put a big caveat on #2, that you even hint at.

When your car is old enough that repairs can cost more than the car’s value, then you’re also in a world where a car of comparable value not only might be facing similar repairs, but you also are then looking at a car that you don’t know as well. I mean, if I had a car…

Repairpal’s estimates for my area for the compressor and the fan are at $1800 using generic aftermarket parts, and I’ve found their estimates to be too low for what any reputable shop will charge anymore. Most shops here are now trying to charge $120-150 for brake fluid, too.

It’s obscene.

THIS.

And it isn’t even just gas. Insurance, repairs, etc - all that adds up to even more. And finance charges or the lost time value of that money.

If you take the Pilot LX/Accord LX, and figure 12k miles per year at $2.75 per gallon at 22 mpg / 33 mpg respectively, add in the small insurance difference (based on my…

Discounts.

Sadly its now pretty much an average transmission for reliability but with crappy shifting - if they’d have come out with it that way from the beginning instead of poor reliability with crappy shifting, they probably would have made more money.

The thing I hate about the PowerShift is that technologically it was actually impressive in many ways - Ford just botched the intro of it with bad seals and some electrical gremlins, combined with their usual weak programming of transmissions.

Now that they’ve got the bugs mostly worked out, a decent powertrain…

This is very true.

But people get suckered into the “cargo volume” argument - which inevitably is misleading unless you’re going to stack cargo to the ceiling and leave the backrow occupants in danger. There is more useful cargo space if you fold the seats down, but otherwise, the Escape is fundamentally no more…

True. But it’s also not part of the testing suite for cars.

Drive like a rational person and it isn’t hard to beat the EPA estimates. Hell, I’ve reached 34 mpg hwy average out of a 2010 Ford Escape that was only rated at 28 mpg, all while sticking right at the speed limit.

1st:
We’ve been through this already.

There are VERY few vehicles on the market today that are built in Mexico/Canada that don’t already hit that 75% threshold. The current NAFTA agreement tracks “domestic content” which is just US/Canadian content. These following vehicles may not hit that 75% mark already (mexican…

Certainly the latest bit of that partnership - I’m not 100% certain if they had established a more limited partnership before or not, though.