It’s sucks that they put the awful Northstar V8 in the XLR. Ok, I’m just regurgitating internet car lore, but I hear it’s /really bad/
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I did a website refresh for a company selling head gasket sealer goop (called steel seal) and they specifically had an extra large sized bottle just for north star V8s.
The problem with North stars is the head bolts are too small and the thread pitch too coarse so they pull out of their soft alumunum sockets and the cylinder head slowly stops clamping the head gasket which then fails. They made an improvement at some unspecified point but never issued a recall. So if you are looking at a north star there is like a 4/5 chance it has the death bolts and there is no way to tell except the take the top off the engine off and measure the bolts.
Total shit show.
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I would never drive a Caddy
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Clearly more of a Lincoln man
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I have a long wanted to drive a very big, very old, and very crusty caddy convertable on the remnants of route 66, from Chicago to Santa Monica
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that explains why the STS was (and is) so dirt cheap, I see 
… if it wasn’t such an exotic encounter here, I’d have test drove the STS and probably gotten one just for kicks.
Now that i could afford an XLR (right color though? nnnnope), I’m old enough to know i don’t need the hassle (and slowly gettin’ old enough to be a caddy driver, the irony, the irony)
CTS-V Wagon in mica red would be ace though, fastest dishwasher on earth would be a thing I’d realize w/ it (don’t tell me about the RS6 estate, it’s not the same id everyone knows from a mile that you have a Hulk under the hood…)
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Love how this has an Austrian flag button for hazard lights, add a giant revcounter for the seemingly? auto-box (Does this have D and D+?), and i am sure the lead Designer went on to coin the ‘all {x} at your fingertips’ phrase.
Which i’ll let slide here, because he meant it!
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I feel like a boomer for being bummed about this, but it does kind of coincide with my lack of enthusiasm for newer cars.
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Oh, no I’m right with you. I absolutely hate the gadgetification of cars. It’s bad enough people are “expected” to get a new phone every couple of years. A new car purchase should last you at least a decade. My car is 13 years old and even its computer is sort of a pain in the ass. If I didn’t have a kid on the way I’d probably be in the market for something from 1994 as my next car.
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If I were single I could turn into one of those weirdos with a vegetable-oil powered 1982 Mercedes 300D, easily.
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I look at my alarm clock that I’ve had since the mid eighties that still happily displays the time and my Sony Dash smart alarm clock thing that literally boots to a black screen because the servers were shut down years ago. It even had basic alarm clock functionality that Sony disabled with one final fuck you auto update they rolled out when they took down the servers.
I was hype for the IoT before I ended up with a closet filled with devices that will never work again.
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I have a GE alarmclockradio wrapped in woodgrain that might be older than I am and I expect to outlive me.
Unless they decide to make all radio digital so that over the air radio bands can be repurposed into, I dunno, an exclusive communication network for amazon drones.
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Money can’t buy you taste, 3748th episode:
Like… No.
In other news, someone saw that fancy steering wheel pic above and testdrove the new Lexus SUV w/ a similar setup. Kind of interesting to see them being so much into ______ by wire, the GR 010
also uses brake-by-wire, but only on the front axle, the rear axle gets the hydraulic treatment… rulesets, yeah.
Anyway, wheel,
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I just don’t know if I can bring myself to trust software controlled steering. My fuckin’ wifi doesn’t even work half the time.
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As soon as they started putting in those little shoulder belts on rails that automatically slipped on when you turned on the car I knew we were going down a bad road
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it just feels like it’ll be such a long time before these features aren’t in the dullest possible software early adopter chronology. I don’t doubt that they do / will mostly work, but right now it’s all these overpriced mostly speculative innovations that are getting 90% of the market attention. I’ve said this before but I’m really glad to have a motorcycle and a hybrid with 50k miles on it because it seems like anything you can spend money on now is like “I am an enthusiast, but not in fact of cars”
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I am looking into used Miatas again and the prices are just Wrong in my mental ledger of what these things cost, ~20% higher than 2019 across the board even for the ugly duckling baby RX-8 years
My hatchback has appreciated since I bought it
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