I was headed down to a friend’s house in Castle Rock from Conifer in Colorado and got pulled over in this ratty green Impreza that I owned. For some background on Conifer, there is not what I would call a large police presence in the area. It’s a little ways up the mountains, one four-lane “highway” to the city,…

I know why they may not bring the FiST here. They really don’t sell that well, especially compared to the larger FoST. Source: My wife and I bought a Focus ST recently, and had a hard time finding one that would stay in stock long enough to actually snag it. But the same dealers barely stocked the Fiesta ST.

I think automakers are forgetting that many buyers don’t buy enthusiast cars to set lap records but to drive and have fun. DCT’s aren’t that fun normally. Automatics can be fun but usually aren’t. CVT’s are the physical manifestation of the word “joyless”. Manuals ARE fun. You don’t walk into Ford and demand an…

I’m having a hard time with this. I don’t know why car companies think that an “enthusiast” vehicle needs to be priced out of the range of many of those enthusiasts. I would love to have a Wrangler, but the gas mileage of the JK just isn’t good enough to justify trading my Land Rover, and the JL is so insanely…

Drive an R-Design with a polestar chip. Your mind will be immediately changed.

I feel like there are other places where you could lose a couple pounds by overengineering the hell out of them. Why the wiper blades? Why not skeletonize all the things? Think of the possibilities. Skeletonized panels, skeletonized windshield, skeletonized engine block. You could lose hundreds of pounds! And nobody…

I’m going to have to refute the “nicest interiors” comment you made in the article. That title is held by Volvo. Nice article otherwise though, this does look like a decent little car!

I think it’s better than hard black plastic at least...

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I thought the Senna was pretty even before the carbon treatment.

You also get tax credits that help shrink the gap. And what if gas prices go back up to $4 a gallon? Just let people enjoy what they enjoy.

The Land Rover LR3 key fob can be programmed to do a few funny things with the “personal” button (which doesn’t look like a button, just the logo of the company). I currently have it set up to be able to turn on the lights. But you can also set it up like a traditional panic alarm or even can be set up to raise and…

I sold cars for a long time. People are funny. I would always show customers two or three options when they looked at a car. I always pointed out something that fit their needs and most of their wants but at a lower price point that would comfortably fit their budget. They ALMOST ALWAYS picked the more expensive car.…

Ha! As if a used Altima is worth anywhere near $20k....maybe if it’s fully fully fully loaded.

My wife LOVES her Juke too. The only downsides are like what you mentioned above (TINY fuel tank, CVT, barely any cargo room, some reliability issues). I don’t think the CVT was really all that bad, it’s kind of fun to mash the gas and wait for the turbo and trans to sync up and rocket you off into the distance all…

Agreed. I think diesel got a bad name and suddenly the emission levels are unattainable with current technology. When you have millions in R&D dumped into a car and suddenly you can’t sell it because of an enormous regulation change, wouldn’t a company almost be incentivized to cheat an easily-cheated test? They were…

The rear end is dangerously close to being a banglebutt and the front is dangerously audi-crashed-into-mercedes. Still a good looking car. Would drive.

Oddly, in Colorado I never had a bad experience looking at Hyundai’s. My wife must have driven every sedan on the market, and I would say our drive of the G80 and later the Sonata was nearly as good as our experience driving the Lexus IS and RC. The really disappointing ones were Honda and Ford. We had to go to 3…

My guess would have been “Tour-Cross” like how the KTM x-bow is. According to Kristen in the article it’s more along the lines of the Xterra naming convention I guess? Because of the lack of hyphen maybe/

I need a new pair of underpants after this article.

I rented a Camaro SS convertible one time when I was tooling around up in Buffalo one time. It was surprisingly very nice. Nice enough that I considered buying one. I may or may not have accidentally burned out of a toll booth or two.