Cars We Drive!

[Dino944]

Please share your comparisons when shopping for a new car. Highlanders are surprisingly hitting luxury brand prices depending on how they are spec'd. I have an uncle with a Highlander I think he said was $60K when all was said and done.

We won't be spending anywhere near that on whatever we buy. We always buy 1 vehicle that we basically drive into the ground (take to grocery stores, trips to NYC, and other places where parking sucks, etc), so we try to keep it as inexpensive as possible. Our basic criteria are AWD, at least 30mpg, and if possible under 30K. The last 3 vehicles that we used for this purpose a Nissan Atlima (204K miles), an '04 Legacy (202K miles), and '10 Legacy (246K miles). My wife and I actually like Subies more, but with their falling drastically in terms of quality rankings, we are leaning toward either a Camry when AWD is available or Rav4 Hybrid. So nothing exciting. We were just surprised to find out how long a Camry is. It is about an inch longer than a 4Runner.

 

[otc]

Why?

 

[clee1982]

maybe he finally said enough is enough...

 

[nootje]

Parking space where he just fits and needs to back it up into the wall to fit?

 

[Thrift Vader]

Brake Checking Tailgaters?

 

[otc]

My best explanation is that he is an awful parallel parker who parks by "feel" and that he thought getting a rubber pad might make it ok to back into people's cars?

And when you see a rear bumper this bad, it is always a sign of an asshole. Occasional bumping might be unavoidable in tight city spots, but your rear doesn't get that bad unless you consistently back into cars while parking.

 

[Kappelan]

Got my Seasuckers. Will be trying to use them on my Volt and Model 3. Hopefully my skis won't be lost along with the seasuckers and thule ))

 

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I just don't trust those things

 

[clee1982]

My best explanation is that he is an awful parallel parker who parks by "feel" and that he thought getting a rubber pad might make it ok to back into people's cars?

And when you see a rear bumper this bad, it is always a sign of an asshole. Occasional bumping might be unavoidable in tight city spots, but your rear doesn't get that bad unless you consistently back into cars while parking.

My high school teacher park by feel , ALL the time, and it’s a tiny hatch too...

 

[Kappelan]

I just don't trust those things

Metoo but I've read so many positive reviews that decided to give it a try. There aren't many options of racks for Chevy Volt so I hope it would work

 

[Dino944]

My high school teacher park by feel , ALL the time, and it’s a tiny hatch too...

My friend had just finished parallel parking his car, and a guy with a small car pulled up, put down his window and said, "If you pull forward a little I can park behind you." My friend said, "If I pull forward, I won't be able to get my car out when I want to leave." The other guy responded, "Just use your bumpers man. That's what they're for!"

 

[jet]

He would have for extra money...

Washes are good. I have about 3 options I use depending on scenario. 2 bucket shampoo with microfiber mitt, quick spray down at the coin op, or coin op spray down followed by the method where you use a stack of folded microfibers saturated in ONR and simply never reuse a so side (the coin op won't yell at me because it doesn't really look like a bucket wash... More like just drying the car). Can't convince myself to just use ONR without an initial pressure stage... People say it is fine, but I just wanna blast the grit off first.

The latter was mostly when my building's garage was out of commission... Now the wash bay is available again (and the hose even has hot water).

Now that there is salt on the roads, I wouldn't mind finding a good touchless with an undercarriage sprayer... Coating guy said that's ok as long as they use decent chemicals, but most of the drive throughs around here still have contact brushes...

Good that you're doing your best to maintain it, I imagine most people don't keep up with it for too long or think ceramic is impenetrable. Not a fan of rinse less washes but you gotta do what you gotta do I guess. That's the problem with automated washes, harsh detergents. Ideally you'd have an undercarriage sprayer for a pressure washer for that application though. I'm thinking of doing a light ceramic on a couple of our cars but the polymer and sio2 spray on sealants are so good and easy it's hard to convince myself.

 

[A Y]

Finally Porsche learned their lesson, cf. today's announcement of the manual-only 6-cylinder GTS Cayman and Boxster.

 

[jet]

#savethemanuals

 

[HRoi]

Uh oh...poor 718 owners. This news will turbocharge (pun intended) their inferiority complex...