Who in their right minds pays $300 for a cell bill? You can get unlimited talk and text nationwide for $10 per month plus tax. Add unlimited 3G data and you can get it for $25 plus tax. Add unlimited 4G and its only $35 per month.

$300 is for suckers.

15-20 years ago, I had to pay $35/month for cable, $30/month for phone service plus $0.10 per minute for long distance, and a cell phone? Way too expensive. Dial-up internet was possible, at $15 or so per month.

Now I pay $8 per month for Netflix, get almost all the same programming (at least the good stuff) without…

I’ve done more than proper maintenance on my Japanese built Camry. It didn’t get anywhere NEAR 200k before needing other repairs. If I didn’t do them myself, I’d probably be averaging $800+ per year in repair costs now. Fortunately, doing the work myself keeps the repair costs down to $200ish.

“Having not done any research, are we sure that car prices *in general* (ie: base model Camry from 2000 vs. base model today) are rising faster than inflation?”

They aren’t. Not even close. A 1998 Camry LE with auto, for example (what I drive), had an original MSRP of $20,218. Incentives were almost nonexistent, and so…

Actually, wages are rising with inflation:

BTW, turning off the TV can save a LOT of energy if you have CRTs still. Even plugged in while off they consume more than LED TVs. But when on, the energy difference is massive.

$500?!?!?! I don’t come anywhere close to that in OH.

1 CCF of natural gas contains about 102 kBtu, or the equivalent of about 30 kWh. Last month, I paid $1.10 per CCF of natural gas, including tax (yes, we have to pay sales tax on gas, thanks to our “tax cutting” (ie, tax shifting) state government). Most of my gas…

OTOH, at least Nissan is guaranteeing range as the battery ages. Tesla won’t do that.

62 months for a used car is crazy. But 67 for new? Not necessarily that bad. The average new car produced today has a lifespan of about 16 years, so you still have about 2/3 of the expected life left after payments are finished. The bigger issue isn’t the length, but the terms of the loan - ie, how much down, and at…

Remember - 54.4 is the target for cars only (truck targets are lower), and that’s not the same mpg used for the sticker on the car - it actually translates to a bit under 40 mpg many cars are already at or very near that requirement already. The targets also vary by the size of the vehicle, thus allowing a larger…

Interestingly, Honda was fined in that case as well for having known about the problem and not reporting it. Just like this time.

2nd: Who says the tech companies can do it better?

Ford paired up with Microsoft for Sync - it was leaps and bounds ahead of its competition when it came out, but Sync2 (also w/ Microsoft) sucked. Now they’re working with Blackberry using QNX (also used by GM, VW, and Mercedes, among others).

In other words, the auto…

Competition is always good. I don’t want the price of the car to go up $10k because Apple got their hands on it and overpriced like always. I also don’t want people to be stuck with Android as the only other option. I’ve got an Android phone that is generally a great device, comparable to an Apple phone over 2x the…

That would make MUCH more sense... but it is a heck of a lot more dramatic to make it sound like they were gliding along with no power for 25 minutes.. With one engine running they really weren’t in that much trouble.

25 minutes without power? I thought most commercial airliners had a glide ratio of about 20:1, so with a 13,000 foot altitude loss, that would mean a glide of about 49 miles. 49 miles in 25 minutes = 118 mph.

Something doesn’t add up to me - that’s well below stall speed. Naturally, I didn’t account for the time it was…

Read my response. You were correct - the problem went away when switching to other tires.

Here’s the problem with your assessment - did they realize there were stability issues? Certainly. They had multiple choices - significant redesign of the chassis, lowering the engine, or stiffening the suspension and lowering tire pressure. They chose to stiffen the suspension and lower the tire pressure (the easy…

Fair enough, though your previous post certainly implied that they were unreliable.

Our corporate fleet here is still Gen III Tauruses and an occasional Aerostar. I know we’re cheap, but this is getting ridiculous.

No, you said “Explorers rolled because they were poorly designed pieces of shit”. The fact is that they didn’t roll over any more often than other midsize SUVs (including the GC) when they had tires other than the Firestones. Had Ford changed the suspension design or lowered the vehicles engine, they would have had a…

Yes, they did. But any other tires operating on that setup didn’t have the problem. The route they took made them more sensitive to problems in the tires than they would have been with more significant changes, but if the tires weren’t defective, they didn’t have the problem at all.

These sorts of design tradeoffs…