i ended up telling off Mazda salesperson from the next town over megadealer; we’d stopped in looking at BUYING a 3, they harassed us endlessly with lease offers.

Yup, having dealt with a couple Kia dealerships in my area...the Stinger’s worst enemy (and Kia’s overall, really) is Kia dealerships.  They’re still trapped in that barely-above-a-buy-here-pay-here-scummy-used-car-lot mentality instead of practically letting the cars sell themselves.

we have a SI in the household...that manual is high on the list, though i haven’t been able to talk anyone into handing me the keys to an RSX or S2k.

he sent an agent in his place so you wouldn’t know it was him.

but by the time it makes it through the mail, at least half of them will have vanished.

i want to say it was Hot Rod that had an article some years back on the supercharged Grand Prix when they were new, did a stock/mild/wild comparo, but google has failed me at finding any references to it.

bad wording on my part...working out with the better half to share a car...shuffling work schedules to accommodate only having one car instead of the usual two.

That, and for some inexplicable reason, AAA still uses them for rentals when your car is in for insurance work. I used to rent from Hertz for sheer convenience since they’re close, but it was bad enough that not only did we stop, we turned down the offered rental the last time and opted to instead balance sharing a…

haven’t gotten to look inside one, but seen a couple out and about; what you mention about “something the Ranger used to do” is exactly the vibe i got; it’s a modern version of what the ranger was, and, factoring in the bigger cab, it seems pretty close in size to my single cab Ranger-clone.

the same way a San Francisco Mayor can blab key evidence in a serial killer case and still have a long career in CA politics? Party affiliation.

i sincerely hope we have better nav options in the early 20,000's, not that any of us will be alive to see them.

that was a big part of it, yeah. when i was in the market, neither of the ford dealers (nor most of the other dealers around) would even give me the time of day, and internet shopping wasn’t nearly what it is now (early 2000's).

interesting...i haven’t seen any of those on rangers over here (west coast).  have seen factory mustang wheels, though.

on a side note, pretty sure those wheels are from the mazda twin. also, the chip key that they drilled a hole in when the end broke off, rather than replacing it, is a nice touch

i know you aren’t.  there’s a moto cop in socal somewhere (riverside, maybe) that posts helmet cam footage.  saw one where he was splitting lanes in rush hour gridlock, lights and all, on the way to an accident, and had a van try to squeeze/block him, and about shit themselves when he hit the siren.

hertz screwed me in enough little ways that i don’t rent from them anymore (last straw was waiting an hour and a half past the appointment for them to get a car ready, and being late for work as a result, only to find the car so low the fuel light was on). it’s slightly cheaper and slightly less convenient to do…

That house makes the car look like a better buy, actually...

what if Miata still IS the answer?

fine, i’ll keep my coleslaw with raisins to myself.

agreed, and i kind of class the track they were trying to build under “it was already there”, since the air force base didn’t close all that long before they were trying to build the track..maybe 10 years at most. and even as it hasn’t been an active base, it’s an air museum, so they still have air traffic on the site.