Yo Stef. I know you’ve had some hard times recently, and I’m really sorry to hear that and I hope things get better pronto. I just felt I should remind you that your life does haz racecar, so it can’t be entirely bad. Plus you write articles that me and a lot of other people enjoy, so there’s that.

Will the autonomous future negatively effect poorer people? Potentially very much yes. I’ve been saying this for a while in discussions about autonomous vehicles, and mostly I’ve gotten comments that I’m stupid and wrong and a Luddite and I need to move out of the sticks. Those people are all wrong or missing the…

Here’s to hoping he comes in #1... but either way he’ll probably be relieved once he finishes!

I’ll be honest, if I was looking for a fun beater car and was in the area I’d actually buy that if I could get it down to say $1200. Yeah it looks like a mustang fetus had a baby with cancer, but that means it’s essentially a blank canvas. Then again I enjoy bodywork and know how to work with fiberglass, so maybe that…

First of all I realize your comment is a joke, but there actually are quite a few banjo players in western Mass. Boston has been a hotbed of folk, irish and bluegrass for many years, and Berkelee actually has a whole roots music degree that attracts a lot of talented acoustic musicians. Yes that’s not western Mass,…

back in the early 2000s someone straight up gave us one of these after one of my parent’s highly used hand me down fords died. Not sure what engine was in it, but it was a v8 of some kind. My mom then traded it to my neighbors (a house full of mechanically inclined brothers) for something smaller and better on gas…

The intersection of people with high quality banjos who also are into ‘90s Japanese sports cars is probably a small one. As a car lover and player of bluegrass I’m fairly close to being in that part of the Venn diagram, but I’m in need of a better banjo myself. My mandolin on the other hand could probably be sold for…

Agreed, as someone that still shoots photos on film I can dig the vibe and the grain... but the shake has to go for me to watch!

My first car tried to murder me right after I bought it... or maybe it was just trying to see if it’s new owner could hang. I was 16 years old and had just became the proud owner of a mostly rusted out 300k mile but otherwise well running 1984 BMW 528e.

Now THAT’s television

Ok, so on one hand this looks tacky and $1000 is a whole lot for an electronic switch with an aluminium handle. On the other hand.... am I possibly the only person that’s daydreamed about having a DD with a hydraulic handbrake? Up here where it’s snowy at least 1/3 of the year such a thing would be awesome and…

You say 90's Gallant, I say Group A rally homologation special.... with WHITE WHEELS people. Yeah it needs work and money, but they aren’t making any new ones of these. I saw a white one just like this at the Mt. Washington hillclimb this summer and it definitely stands out. Would I like it to be cheaper? Yes. Do I…

Something something thinking logically... yeah same, and I’ve never quite understood people that “followed their hearts” into some field with no jobs and no prospects rather then first looking for something they could do that also had the real possibility of providing a living.

Gotta love XKCD

Exactly

Yet another reason to be glad I went into Computer Science even if I didn’t like it as much as some other things. In the chain of jobs getting replaced by robots, programming robots will probably be one of the last to go... unless we all really want that future where robots build and upgrade themselves!

Can confirm. Saw one of these for the first time on the street this summer. Instantly could tell it was something special, and guessed it’s Fisker design without knowing more. Had to walk up to where it parked and take a photo. Then I checked the prices, and like you said it might not be much longer before they hit…

I went through this last year with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, except her budget then was basically nothing. We ended up getting an old jetta for $700 which she put about 15k miles on in short order before the headgasket finally let go. Still, that $700 was cheaper then potentially replacing the stage 2 clutch in my…

Being inexpensive (or reliable) aren’t the only things that make a car great. I will say out of the 3 subarus I’ve had over the years, I have had an unexpected $2000 emergency (bearing crapped out in my Outback XT transmission popping it out of gears) but I’d gladly say all 3 of them were great cars. Practical, fun,…

I spent a week ripping around the Irish countryside earlier this year in a rental Opel Corsa (99hp/5speed) and loved every second of it. Out of the limited number of small manual cars in the US, is this the one to get me the closest to that feeling? (I realize part of that feeling was also due to it being my…