I sympathize from Western Norway, with salty fjords, salty roads, 2000+ mms of precipitation every year and a government effort to end all car related hobbies rather sooner than later. The internet is a blessing!

Für die Science!

This is especially true given the context Germans viewed the Mustang in. To tech-loving, precision-designing, proud Germans, the Mustang could just as well have been a horse-drawn buggy. With walrusses up front.

A statement flows better if combined with an argument. 

A statement flows better if combined with an argument. 

Haha, my proctor was the angry type, too. I kept checking for a smile, a hint of emotion, any sign of life, really, in the rear view mirror while driving. After ending the exam, he said that the tiny mistakes I made would have been borderline too many, if I hadn’t secured the car so uncommonly well by constantly…

The dullest, cheapest most appliance-y family car I can think of today is also one with lots of potential: Give it proper motors, a bigger battery, and it might just rock a little:

As simple and straightforward as this one? I haven't really found many this size and format when I tried to replace mine.

I had mine for 7 years. Really the most versatile car I ever had.

Oh, I love the Probox. Would have been the perfect car to replace my Honda Stream with. Now this gorgeously simple version...perfect.

I had a Honda Stream for seven years. Same corporate face, but at least it was a minivan proper.

Volvo 440. From bumpety bumpers to painted bumpers. I could never forgive that and it all went downhill from there.

Ssangyong going down is the real bummer. South Korea is such a fascinating country, the Asian Germany, in so many weird ways. For decades, they have had a quite solid domestic luxury car industry, with Ssangyong’s Chairman being a highlight. If it’s Equus/Centennial, Ssangyong, Samsung or Kia, they all got stretch…

Trivia: The Lancia Ypsilon is best known for being sold with 120 (!) factory colours. Good luck sourcing your panel. The Opel Sintra was only sold in its native Germany for a short time. This was the time pennysaving GM bureaucrats broke Opel's back with the shittiest cars ever. The Sintra failed its EuroNCAP and was…

My neighbour bought a little Chinese tractor ten years ago for next to no money. It would go 80 kph with a one wheel brake (!), was the loudest thing in the entire Milky Way, and rusted everywhere, even *on* paint, not just under it, within three years. An insane little machine.

That train of thought has stopped me from investing earlier, but my bearish attitude gets disproved again and again by people with extra money in their hand, acting like sheep. Yes, Tesla is doing good, and they are creating and disrupting their market. But stocks do not rationally reflect that; they are way beyond…

I think leadership isn’t always about core competences. All he needs to do is surround himself with excellent specialists and experts, find a suitable vision, then use his *political* skills to fight for it. And I think he is a person that can attract progressive minds to his department. The fact that Jalopnik, of all…

Well-presented perspective, and I agree in every point. If transportation has ever mattered after the great transformation of our societies following WW2, it is now. “Rethinking mobility” is more than a catchphrase, and something that matters to every single household. Many have tried entirely new ways of (non-)…

It was motor-talk.de, which had a streak of most daily visits and most new daily comments at that time. I left when the project was sold to a tabloid publisher, but the site is still quite active. Back then, volvospy (later vvspy) was big, too.

Oh, I agree with you, but they work well in specific contexts. In May, I bought a car we only have 37 of in Europe, 1 in my country. But it only took hours to find 2 other owners, one of them in Saudi-Arabia, admittedly, via Facebook. That was quite impressive. 

There is a lot of life left in many of them (in 2002 I ran the world's largest Volvo forum). Many communities have migrated to Facebook and other media though; it can be a bitch to search for info.