""When the cemetery was bulldozed to make way for tennis courts" Pretty much sums up the USA right there."

Ford did a series on the durability testing of these engines when they launched in the F-Series because they know that market cares about longevity. I'm not really concerned there.

So I guess every SUV on the market is a 3 or 5 door, despite the fact that they're universally referred to as 2 or 4, right? The Honda Odyssey I guess wasn't really the first four door minivan, since by these rules every minivan ever made has had at least four doors.

"America's only diesel two-door (car)"

Strongly disagree. My roommate has a MkV GTI with the DSG and it's brilliant. At worst it's a bit rough in low speed reversing, but anything forward it handles just fine.

Obviously the "Stock Car" part is a big thing, personally I feel that if racing class is labelled as anything involving "Stock" it should at the least require that the body, chassis, engine, and drivetrain are based off production models.

Senior tech and sorta-management for a VoIP provider here. I drive an E46 325i, my second in command drives a chipped Mk5 GTI. The boss drives a beat old Impala (not one of the good ones, the first generation of the FWD V6 shitboxes).

Check out the G8 SportTruck prototype that was shown at a few auto shows, that's exactly what it was.

Nope, it's literally the same engine, 100%. Check the power numbers yourself, the more restrictive intake and exhaust of the 'Vics give them 5-15 less HP every year. Even after the '04 bump where the police models were once again slightly different from civilian models (better intake) the 'Vic only had 250HP and 297…

They could have either.

Crown Vics have (well, had, unfortunately) the same 2V 4.6L as any mid-90s Mustang with a mere 250 HP in the latest (2004-2011) version. Special police engines haven't been around for years. The last 5.0 Crown Vic was built in 1991.

I'm with you on this one. Below 40 degrees, getting my E46 in to first or reverse is a fight at best and it's nearly impossible to smoothly shift in the first three gears until I've driven 10-15 miles. It comes with the territory when you want to row your own gears. Different fluids can help (or in my case new…

During the early days of the site, the threshold was much lower. They jacked it up when the marijuana petitions started getting close to the old limit (then pretty much ignored them anyways when they still reached the new much higher limit).

It's a long story, but here's the tl;dr version:

"What this means is that when you see four glowing red lights in front of you in a nighttime L.A. traffic jam, you know that there's something fast and expensive up ahead."

It's a crowdsourced database of pretty much everything that may be of interest to a driver. Speed traps and red light/speed cameras were the main purpose in the beginning, since then they've expanded to also cover accidents, construction, dangerous curves/intersections, school zones, toll booths, etc. as sort of a…

Actually even a receive-only radio transmits to a certain point. Most electronics do to some point, but radio receivers are worse because of how most of them work. The frequencies being received are converted down to an easier to use range through a process called heterodyning, which involves mixing the received…

Helium is not gathered from the atmosphere, it's a secondary product found in natural gas wells. Helium in the atmosphere actually floats up and eventually is lost to space. Because of this, as far as we're concerned any helium used in balloons or otherwise released to the atmosphere is as good as gone forever.

A lot of these guys are running with "tuning" of various quality. A large number of the high-power exotic videos I see have CELs, so I just assume they're running a catless exhaust or some other modification that makes the ECU unhappy and either can't fix it or don't bother.

It did. Like the Jetta, the Passat received a cheapening in US trim for the current generation. I think the US Passat is actually considered an entirely different car than the RoW model.