very WTF moment...felt that flick once jumping on the freeway at night after work....uphill circle ramp, and RIGHT before the merge, there’s a swath of water from sprinklers running across the ramp. front slid first, a foot or 3 out of line, and then caught right as the back end broke loose...when the back end caught,…

As a fairly new rider, I lowsided on the freeway in friday night rush hour. was fortunate not to get run over, and I probably hit the pavement ~40mph. i slid further than the bike did, and where my pocket knife was in my pants pocket ground through my over pants, through my jeans, and most of the way through the clip…

shall we mention the 110:

surprised no one has pointed out...”eclectic” motors?

i still have one or two around somewhere as well, along with the mentioned-above ed roth style flaming eyeball.

as a parallel thought: daily drove a manual mazda pickup till late last year, handing it off to family and replacing it with one of those “huge trucks” (which are ONLY available in auto. i’d still 100% rather have a manual, even in just day to day city traffic; the only exception would be if i fought SF Bay/LA style…

These two (Transit Connect/Promaster City) are probably the closest modern products to the 5, and having spent a long weekend with one as a rental when my prior truck was in the shop, I can see why they get the love they do.

We picked up a rental from Avis a few years ago for a big trip (for space reasons), and ended up with a basically new (5 miles) SUV We proceeded to rack up just shy of 3400 miles in the 10 days we had it,, going from the middle of CA to portland via crater lake, then over to Yellowstone via Boise and Craters of the…

it seems fairly consistent from what i’ve seen...we shopped for probably a year before pulling the trigger, and it seemed to fluctuate a little, but consistently there.

i realize there’s some space between MSRP and sticker, but we shopped full size SUVs prior to purchasing a truck, and scratched that because even tahoes/yukons and suburbans/yukon XLs were stickering into the 70's and 80's.

agreed. maybe i’m a tad cynical, but i also put most of the blame on the dealers, be it one or more of garbage sales games (here comes the 4 square...), outrageous markups, or just lousy attitudes.  The last 2 are why i never made it to the first, though i was giving the titan a serious look at one point.

how much of it is about how good (or not) the Z is as a sports car, and how much of it is what i’ll sum up as “dealer shenanigans”?

https://www.autotrader.com/cars-for-sale/vehicle/725375357

agreed on the Optima seats, having had a couple as rentals. one of those times involved spending 8ish hours on the road in a day, too. not the worst ever, but also not great.

never been pulled over on the (red) bike. being out late at night can be a big factor for getting pulled over, though. used to get pulled over regularly either in the bone stock white honda, or my noisy little truck.

What you do when you’re trying to actually have a steady income and a running business...rather than the PE “strip mine it and leave the husk to die” method.

I’d call Red Lobster a great (and fairly clear-cut)example. PE took over, sold off land under the restaurants to finance the buy, which forced the company to lease it back (the article notes, at above market rates).

Straight up...there should be no “chance”.

why do I suspect at least some of that number is private equity fuckery?

the same ones that built houses near Laguna Seca and complained about the noise?