Hey Stef, I’m sorry I literally just saw this today. I have another kinja account that I’ve been using more. I’ll shoot you an email if you guys wanna come by this fall. 

It’s an 81. It’s been my daily driver for over 15 years. Bought it for myself on my 18th birthday, it was my dream car. Planning on having the first million mile El Camino. Swapped in a 350 and TH400 about 10 years ago. Do some upgrades when I can. She runs good so that’s enough for me!

Thank you for recognizing the true beauty that lies beneath the bad bondo and hail dents

Will you guys be doing any out of the Austin office? If so, I have an ugly El Camino but I love it so very much.

I’ve also had issues with Amazon improperly packaging their parts and getting an absolutely destroyed cardboard box with a damaged part inside.

I’ve always been a Microsoft user, but I would be very wary about jumping into any Microsoft consumer products. The reality is that Nadella only cares about enterprise facing products and Windows. Nothing else (excepting Xbox) has a long shelf life with them. It sucks to pay money for a device that gets abandoned…

Great article David! I admire their efforts to achieve something closer to a theoretical ideal, rather than just incremental improvements. Let’s hope it pays off, I’ve always liked Mazda and I’ll be looking for a new car here in the next couple of years...

Seat ergonomics peaked with 1970's-80's bench seats. Specifically, GM mid-size cars between 78-87. There will never be a more comfortable seat than the great American floating couch

It says to use Valvoline conventional 5W-20. I’ve found that it makes that noise if you use conventional. IDK what is causing the noise, maybe it’s not a problem, but I don’t like any weird noises coming from my engine.

If I use dinosaur oil in my wife’s 2012 Elantra, there’s this metallic buzzing sound that starts happening under hard acceleration. With synthetic, it never happens. I’m guessing that there’s a viscosity issue with the dino oil and something isn’t getting enough lubrication. Your chevy small block? Sure, use whatever.…

Part of my calculus in this question is how difficult is this part to replace if it does break? Learning that lesson the hard way with an Autozone water pump that died after 5000 miles because I didn’t want spend to an extra hundred bucks for the Weiand one.

Yes, love the gutters on my 81 El Camino. I like leaving the windows cracked while the car is parked and I don’t have to worry about rain getting in the car. Also, the car has cold AC, but it’s really nice to roll around with the windows down sometimes and it not be a tornado inside the car. My wife’s newish Elantra…

I think a reasonable finder’s fee would be the $1000 plus one hour of hoonage

Yeah, that’s true. Which is crazy! GAH MY BRAIN HURTS NOW!! That’s why having experienced techs either work on your car or being able to ask them questions is so helpful. At the rental car garage I used to work at, if we didn’t want to shell out $600 bucks for a new Ford AC compressor we would literally go to the…

I think the biggest difference is between remanufactured and new. There’s just no way to know about reman parts, I have replaced the water pump and the power steering pump in the last 2 years on my El Camino with a LT swap and BOTH of them are leaking now. I’m pretty much done with reman stuff, I just hate having to…

I generally agree except in the case of older cars or situations where the OEM parts had some kind of design flaw. A couple of personal examples are upgrading stock GM ball joints to MOOG because they have a longer service life and more rot-resistant boot (I hate replacing ball joints) and swapping out plastic…

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarifying info.

Then they got lucky. What if the actual database had been stolen or copies been made of it? Heck, even a bunch of screenshots. Could have been much worse.

I wonder why this type of thievery isn’t more common. I imagine that it’s only a matter of time before thieves gain access to these types of databases for other older but valuable cars (e.g. trucks, sports cars, etc.) and since Tesla is the only carmaker than can push security updates, everything else is vulnerable.…

When I was in high school (early 2000's), I would drive up to the Dallas/Fort Worth area on the weekends to work for my friend doing commercial window washing. The car I drove (and still do to this day) was a 1981 El Camino. I had just bought at the time and it came with some pretty sweet aluminum wheels and BFG…