The average car payment (half above the number, half below) for 2023 was $738.

While I have always been one to drive my cars until the wheels fell off, I think a lot of this has to do with the simple fact you CAN drive your car to 200,000 miles now were as a decade or more ago that was less easy to do. I drove a 2000 Mustang to 225,000 miles before getting rid of it, I got rid of it because it…

Yes, electric motors have instant torque versus internal combustion engines having to build up torque so the ICE car can then accelerate. That advantage absolutely works to the electric motors’ ability at wiping ICE cars off the record books. It’s pure physics at work.

It is called “patina”.

Keep the cars waxed. Your other maintenance tasks mentioned are continual.

You make an excellent point.  Go to the incredible (yet correct) trouble of decreasing the engine’s compression before slapping on the supercharger?  Yes, I doubt it 100% also.

Aftermarket forced induction will almost always lower the value of your car, and this is no exception. Also $26k for one of these in general is unrealistic. ND.

I highly doubt they did anything the lower the compression on the motor before they put on the blower. That engine is a serious nightmare for major repair/replacement and the supercharger would no doubt shorten its lifespan.  The addition of the blower makes the car worthless to me. It is the “other peoples mod”…

My least favorite car on NPOND: the high-end Germanmobile that’s got some years on it—one of those cars where if something goes kerblooey, your credit card is gonna melt from the swiping it’ll take to fix it.

I feel like we’re arguing two sides of the same coin.

Too droll—thanks for sharing.

Ted Cruz: the conniving scumbag who will say anything if it keeps him in power. Being a complete hypocrite, a two-faced liar: not a problem. Here’s a politician who would rail against the Ivy League to his ignorant cracker audiences when he’s an Ivy League grad. A man who had a brief moment warning about Donald The…

The city is paying an arm and a leg to get this one done so my fingers are crossed. We just sold our railroad terminal to a major company which went to vote and passed so we could make improvements like this. Just hoping the money doesn’t go elsewhere because that bridge needs to be replaced.

There are many beautifully shaped and elegantly constructed mechanical bits that are not art, despite the fact that they look like art. Partly because, no one is saying, I made this and it’s art.

I think I’ve seen that movie only once in my life and might need to revisit, so thanks for the reminder! For me, it’s the yellow Volvo (a 245, I think) in Beetlejuice that Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin died in after falling from a not-very high bridge. Probably not a great testament to the safety of the brand, since I…

Quite the artist half of the time—those still-lifes of flowers are incredible. Those portraits of black men with their dicks hanging out of their pants I can do without.

My mother had this fear of water in general due to nearly drowning in a pool as a toddler. While growing up, anytime we would go over a bridge (funny enough we live in Baltimore and have been over the Key bridge many a time) she would grab onto my father and repeatedly tell him that, “ . . . if we go over save the…

Regarding this gen of Volvos, that 1990 movie, Crazy People with Paul Reiser comes to mind. Reiser plays an advertising exec who has a nervous breakdown and gets into advertising truthfully. Thing is, they used real products in the movie’s ads. And there’s Reiser showing off a full-page Volvo ad: “Volvos. They’re boxy…

I dont know if I trust older bridges or newer bridges more. I have a similar fear. Old bridges are tried and true-but they’re also old so they could experience component failure. But they tend to have been over-engineered, like the brooklyn bridge.