Never been in one. I'd consider test driving one though.

My parents have a Prius II while it's a great car, the seats are the most uncomfortable seats I have ever been in. They're hard and don't contour very well at all. I loath taking that car on road trips.

This is the only reasonable advice. If you want to warm your interior by letting it idle go ahead but idling isn't so great either. I do development for diesel trucks, but I can also say with absolute certainty that every manufacture does cold weather testing down to at least -20F usually -40F is the magic number.

The…

God damn do I love reverse commuting. My normal 75 mph commute was reduced to 50 mph today, and that's only due to weather conditions not traffic. I didn't feel like pushing it more on all seasons.

I70 East was stopped, while I drove by on I70 West without a hitch.

My 2006 Jetta has DRL's without automatic headlights. Fortunately none of the dash lights up without turning on the lights, so it's not easy to forget. However I have seen many drivers without their lights on, but with the DRL's on.

I fought a ticket in MD on the same principal. I also showed that they needed to have a more precise time measurement because the error would allow a very large error in calculated MPH. Judge didn't care. Years later they admitted some camera's might be wrong. They also admitted ticketing in a school zone at 11 pm at…

My experiences in MD and PA are the same as yours. Certification is brought into court.

Keep writing Steve, I enjoy your stories and advice.

Toyota Crown here in Tokyo. I'm actually surprised they don't use Kei cars. Mostly they still use the old model but there's always a few of the newer models sprinkled in.

Yup our highest paid technicians make the same or more than our engineers. With the overtime opportunity they can clear $100K a year without so much as an associates degree.

Two-stroke diesel engines are commonplace in large container ships. Their thermal efficiency is around 50 per cent while four-stroke diesels struggle to reach 35 per cent. The difficulty, until now, has been in adapting two-stroke technology for an engine small enough for automotive use, which Renault is aiming to…

Do you have any NOx numbers for the 3 cylinder fiesta? NOx is formed at very high temperatures so it's possible to do lean burn without NOx increase so long as the combustion temperature stays low.

It uses electricity that's a fuel as well. Here's an efficiency contour plot for the GENII Prius motor.

Lighter and less friction. If you think of just the power cylinder unit, the more cylinders you add the more frictional surface area you add for the same volume.

Yes people forget how much energy we use from oil, a few plug in cars here and there don't make a big impact, but if we switch to a large majority of electric cars in 10 years than production/infrastructure won't be able to keep up. There's also the issue that conventional fuels for electricity move the pollutants…

I understand where you are coming from completely about the FWD thing, but you have to realize the 3 series platform is RWD to begin with. The Saab, Volvo, Ford, Audi are all FWD platforms. In some cases they AWD was added but I don't know a model ever made that offered both RWD and FWD packages. The M3 is supposed to…

I did the same thing on a few volvo 850's I owned. The OBD1 models had an underhood diagnostic that you could use to pull the milage (series of flashing lights), where-as the OBD2 models required dealer tools.

In Tokyo (Roppongi)

I mean it was decent enough for one play.

I drove this thing. It's called the Hustler. It works in Japan but I don't know why you would ever want one in the States. They really aren't that aerodynamically efficient, and they aren't that cheap either.