A team at Princeton Optronics working on replacing conventional spark plugs with laser igniters has produced a running engine and they claim that replacing spark ignition with lasers could improve the efficiency of gasoline powered engines by 27%. Considering that the basic design of the spark plug hasn’t really changed in over a century, this would be a revolutionary step, frickin’ lasers or not. Read More >
So I’m driving along the other day, and I get up behind a Saturn Relay. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this vehicle, imagine a minivan with 1992-era styling and a 1994-era interior and 1996-era switchgear, except it inexplicably came out in 2005. Seriously: it was the kind of thing where, when it debuted, you checked both sides of the van just to make sure General Motors knew everyone was doing dual sliding doors now.
“When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.” How many times have you heard that phrase used by gun-rights advocates? It’s a catchy but glib way to characterize the role of police in American society. The courts have ruled time and time again that the police have no duty to protect an individual citizen, and you should have no expectation of that individual protection.
The problem with the deduction that comes naturally from the above statement — therefore, I had better protect myself — is that very few of us are prepared to exist in what the late Colonel Jeff Cooper called “Condition Yellow” all the time. “Yellow” means that you are mentally alert and prepared to use force in your own defense. “Condition White”, on the other hand, is what happens when you’re asleep, daydreaming, using both hands to repair an automobile or tie your mistress to the hotel bed, playing Lumineers tunes on an Adirondack-topped acoustic guitar, or making your way through the tenth “Challenging Stage” of Galaga. Chances are that you’re in “White” right now. To test for this, have someone in the same room with you, no matter how large that room is, point their finger at you and say “Bang” quietly. If you weren’t prone on the floor with your personal weapon out before they finished the word, you’re in White. Congratulations! You’re not paranoid.
TTAC commentator Land Ark writes:
Hello again Sajeev!
Before my new Honda question, just an update on the issue you helped me with previously. Short answer: I sold the Civic and made a few hundred bucks. The more I looked into it, the more I started to come to the realization that there likely was nothing wrong with the AC system, it was just not a good system.
On to my new question:
My coworker, who drives cars into the ground, recently lost his high mile 2006 Caravan to an accident. He asked me for some advice then ventured out on his own and bought a new van; a 2006 Honda Odyssey with 71k miles. As soon as I saw it I cringed. Read More >
A couple of years have passed since the last Manny, Moe, and Jack Edition Junkyard Find, so we’re due for another car that was customized with every manner of stick-on hood scoop, property-value-lowering vinyl decal, and brightly-colored interior-trim piece that can be had at your local auto-parts chain store. Here’s a fourth-gen Toyota Tercel done up as a shoestring-budget Fast-n-Furious-type machine. Read More >
The above video is mildly NSFW
“Hey, I want to replace my BMW 3 Series because it’s no good in the snow. I want something just like it but I want it to be cheaper, because I’m tired of making such a big payment. I want it to be sporty but I also want it to be practical. I’m open to used but I’d prefer new. Thoughts?”
I received the text message above about a week or so ago from a friend of mine, but I’ve gotten essentially the same text over and over again for the last several years.
The question comes in many forms, from many different people, but it can essentially be interpreted as follows:
“Can you use your years of knowledge, experience, and expertise to give me an answer to a wildly uneducated, unrealistic, and ill-informed question that I will then entirely ignore and do what I wanted to do in the first place?”
Plenty of Mazda B-Series pickups were sold in the United States, mostly badged as Ford Couriers, but starting in 1983 (when the Ranger appeared) your only choice for obtaining one of these cheap-and-simple little trucks was your Mazda dealer. I spotted this somewhat rusty ’84 in a Denver wrecking yard on Saturday, and it looked like it still had some good miles left in it. Read More >
John writes:
Hi Sajeev!
I’m still only three years into the car business and I still haven’t wrapped my brain around one thing: xenon headlamps. As a used car manager I’ve replaced plenty of xenon bulbs (pricey) and even some ballasts (really pricey).
Are you sold on their usefulness? To me it seems like a giant waste of money.
Henry Blodget publishes Business Insider. Blodget is a former managing director of Merrill Lynch who rose to fame in the late 1990s on his timely and correct prediction that Amazon stock would reach $400, then lost his $12 million/year job following the burst of the dot.com bubble, and then was permanently barred by the Securities and Exchange Commission over fraud allegations*. Blodget still has outstanding sources and contacts within the tech sector. In a post at his website, Blodget discusses the current excitement about tech companies like Google and Apple exploring automotive ventures, which some say are aiming at becoming the next Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG. Not only does he say that the tech sector is cyclical, that the current bubble will also eventually burst and that Apple’s outsized success with their smartphones has been anomalous even for that now routinely successful firm, he makes some sound arguments the next Porsche AG is not likely to come from the Silicon Valley. Read More >
In an op-ed in USA Today, headlined “Electric car benefits? Just myths“, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, calls for people to “stop our green worship of the electric car,” arguing that EVs end up costing society a lot of money while doing little to cut emissions of carbon dioxide. Even more provocatively, Lomborg claims that because EVs are, for the most part, ultimately powered by coal fired electrical generating plants, the pollution associated with cars that run on electrons will end up killing almost twice as many people as that created by gasoline powered vehicles. Read More >
I went back to Martin’s Salvage, located midway between Denver and Cheyenne, earlier this week. The last time I’d been there was in 2011, and the place is still full of so many staggeringly great 1930-1970 vehicles that I get overwhelmed and can’t shoot individual cars for this series. This trip, though, I held still long enough to shoot this crazy-rare example from the final years of the Rambler marque. Read More >
Will the steady procession of Fiat 124 Spiders into America’s self-service wrecking yards never cease? So far in this series, we’ve seen this ’71, this ’73, this ’75, this ’76, this ’78, this ’80, this ’80, and now yet another sporty little Fiat from the Malaisiest year of them all. Here’s a beat-up but not hopeless example I spotted in Northern California. Read More >
Last week, fellow contributor Doug DeMuro posed the question, “Has Mazda lost its zoom?” Some weeks before that, he asked readers, “When did BMW lose its edge?”
To be brief, the answer to the first is a simple “No,” while the answer to the second is – well, let’s ask BMW. Hey! Bavarians! How do you sleep at night, selling bizarre cross-coupes and sport activity whats-its and M-badged heffalumps like the 5-series Gran Turismo?
BMW, in a Rainier Wolfcastle accent: “On a huge pile of money, surrounded by many beautiful ladies.”
I see. So here’s my question – if Mazda is, as I posit, selling the strongest lineup of vehicles it’s had in decades, then why isn’t it knocking it out of the park?
Read More >
After I purchased my S2000 and was about to drive off the lot, my salesperson regaled me with stories about the Honda’s previous owners – an elderly couple who loved the sports car, called it their “baby,” but traded it for a Mercedes-Benz E350 Coupe because they wanted more room. None of this history was noted in their website or internet ads for the S2000, but why wasn’t it?
It turns out that most franchised dealer’s new and pre-owned vehicle ads on AutoTrader and cars.com as well as their own websites do not tell such stories because they are composed by automated services. The fun part is that dealers sometimes never proofread them, like in the example above showcasing the ultimate in Additional Dealer Markup. Even better is when dealers try to write the ads themselves. Let’s take a look.
When we last saw our hero, he was debating between keeping his Boss 302 or selling it and downsizing to a little pocket-rocket Fiesta ST for a year or so until the Shelby GT350 hits the showrooms. Wait, let’s leave that writing-in-third-person nonsense to NFL wide receivers and people with delusions of grandeur. Reset.
I spent much of last week crunching numbers and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Like our fearless leader (Obama, not Derek)—to those of you who voted in the comments section, I heard you. For those of you didn’t vote, I heard you, too. I read all of the reasoned opinions. I calculated. I planned. I schemed.
And then I said, Eff it. Let’s do both.
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