Dear Kinja: Stop showing 2 year old articles in the top stories

Oh hell no...I just got in a huge fight last week with some dude in the “what car should college students buy” article over it. They’re not as catastrophically expensively bad as say, VW and Audi, but their build quality has always been pretty shit.

While we’re at it, when your employees go out of their way (like walking a hundred yards to the farthest corner of the lot I parked my MINI in, to try and save its paint) to key the shit out of a “competitor’s” car, your security and HR staff should be trained to have a better response than, “This is Ford property,…

Cooest Astro is still an Astro. CP.

I rolled my eyes so hard when they were fighting to remove the helmet law in Michigan. So many people saying, “it’s about freedom, man!”

It’s pretty, but the MKIV generation was the single most unreliable set of VWs, pretty much ever. I...can’t agree with you on the MK3, though. They look like Tupperware versions of MK2 to me, and if I was gonna own any Jetta, it’d be a MK2 with that deck lid spoiler they used...

Just ignore the EDT part of that, and it’s always late enough for brown liquor. On a galactic scale, there’s really no spatial difference between our time zones worth noting, anyway...

MINI tried to design interesting dashboards. Everyone (Jalopnik staff included) shat on them for it, so they went and made them all boring.

It’s a MKIV VW. It’s CP at half the price.

There’s an awful lot more to VANOS than seals, and I’ve personally been around for the replacement of more than a dozen solenoids between my R55, my buddy’s E46, his wife’s E39, and some rando’s E38 at a car club get together. My R55 accounted for 2 of those, the E38 was 1, so that’s at least 9 solenoids between the…

Look at the bodywork below it. They just come with the dent from the factory now...

You could always buy a Honda, or a Toyota...They’re comparatively more reliable to the brands you’ve mentioned owning.

You specifically said:

OK, so you didn’t even have an N14, you’re just offended on behalf of all those who have. Got it.

So 4 people in a 4 page thread had an oil seal on the tensioner replaced (which was handled via TSB, so replaced for free, and without any of them having an engine failure), and that somehow equates to most N14s needing their tensioners replaced regularly through 7 different revisions of the tensioner, and many…

There were some seriously questionable choices in kit in MINI’s past. The CVT on the R50, and the N14 in the pre-2011 R56 are the stand outs, but let’s not pretend the Brits have ever been known for solid build quality. I love, LOVE my R55, but I’ve got no illusions about its rattles and quirks. I’m glad I’ve got the…

It’s still intentionally trying to hit the batter. The pitcher should’ve gotten called out for it, whether the batter was upright and swinging, or getting called out for setting up a bunt.

Doesn’t change his obvious intention when the ball struck the bat, so the rules still side with the batter.

Not with enough frequency that it was a noteworthy issue. The biggest failure in the 2nd gen MINIs was the timing chain tensioner backing out of the block, causing catastrophic oil loss and timing failures in the N14 engine. In 2011 they switched to the N18, which finally solved that issue (after about eleventy…

The current generation (F series) of MINIs are using BMW’s engines. The previous generations used engines from Tritec and Toyota for the 1st gen, and PSA (Pugeot/Citroen) for the 2nd gen.