Fading Brakelight Obscurity III - Green-Orange-Checkered Edizione

King of Posters
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1632

Car buying in 2024 has turned me into an excel sheet psycho. Yeah I’ve got price comparisons and incentive data but have you ever compared vehicles by grams of carbon / mile traveled (including lithium ion battery production)? 80 lines and 20 columns and counting.

My search has been hamstrung by the fact that almost all online revierws about cars are still traditional metrics like 0-60 times and how “fun it is to drive” and back seat space in inches and how cool the front grill looks, but what I’m mainly interested in is minimizing environmental impact and how well it drives itself in traffic, which are weirdly hard to pin down. MPGe is a decent metric but why don’t most reviews mention kwh/mile, just for example?

I’ve been all in on getting an EV this go around and was set on the Bolt but I missed my window to get a new one with all of the incentives and free home charger install by about 3 weeks it seems (I got several quotes back at the end of May but wouldn’t pull the trigger until my company officially announced my new salary, and now there are literally zero new models in the entire USA), and all of the other EV models are either way too expensive or have some weird tradeoff that I’m not sure I can live with. There is a “used” ioniq 6 standard range not to far from me with 300 miles on it I’m looking at for a basically reasonable price but my wife is extremely skeptical of Korean made cars and has asked me to avoid them.

Despite the fact I’m not a huge fan of the PHEV model (from a production/maintenance standpoint you’ve got all of the headaches of both an EV and ICE in one car for an extremely limited use case) I’d get a prius prime but after the door recall and stop sale it seems that those are backordered out by like a year.

If I have to go ICE I’d really want one of the civic hatchback hybrids that are coming out “at some point later this year” and get 52mpg but every honda dealership I’ve talked to has none on allocation yet (so they think they won’t see any until 2025). Also the Honda Sensing suite has gotten a little out of date and doesn’t seem to have true stop and go traffic adaptive cruise control yet (it will bring you to a stop but you have to tap the gas to get going again).

Maybe one of these 2025 camrys? 50mpg and Apparently TSS3.0 is really good and basically drives itself in heavy highway traffic (70% of my driving) but you need to pay a $25/month subscription to unlock it. Also the LE models are apparently all getting gobbled up by uber drivers so dealers are selling them over MSRP. I hate it!

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1633

Camry hybrids are my favorite cars I’ve ever crashed

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1634

I’m heavily leaning towards one because the old guy who picks up my daughter for daycare does so in a sky blue 2001 camry that is the rattiest piece of junk I’ve ever seen. You can hear it trundling and gurgling down the road from a mile away but rain or shine summer or winter he’s always there in that thing 7:45am sharp, it’s never let us down even once in two years.

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1635

I can tell you I have a 10 year old prius C that I (against my better judgment at the time) bought new (but for under 20k which now seems genius) and it gets 55 mpg and there still is not a more appealing car on the market

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1636

just to add a new column to that spreadsheet (because we all need column-creep to get to 'AA, and then ‘BB’… :servbotsalute: ):

if you consider used cars as an option, their CO² footprint basically beats each vehicle which was produced anew, because it didn’t need to have been produced anew. So you are basically comparing sketchy :battery: production history with supposedly eco-friendly production means, while energy prices from yore are applied to the whole process…
also forget about trailers, roof boxes, open windows etc, they are all adding drag.


to end on a more productive note: am currently looking into what'll be the follow-up to my trusty ol' Citroën, and the market is a mess, on top of wildy varying aspects of what you need vs. what's sensible — and on _that_ end, I am suddenly wrapping back around to one point you've mentioned as being moot:

If I am buying an econo-box, and want to save energy, suddenly driving behaviour comes to the fore again:
if i want to keep momentum as long as possible, a sharp steering rack helps you corner with the least friction applied, and grabby brakes shave off speed which costs dearly if you have to accelerate again… so after all eco-friendliness, precise handling is one of the key enablers to move around as smoothly as possible (one catch tho: depending on regen-capabilities of the braking system, you want to use maximum regen as often as possible if you don’t have to accelerate afterwards again).

With that in mind, i’ve reached a point where i have to test drive a few contestants (Leaf 2, Honda e, BMW i3, Hyundai Kona EV), and have been hesitant to start that yet. otoh tho, the new Civic e:HEv mild hybrid with its ICE acting as range extender in 80% of the time crept on the shortlist as a wildcard contender, because if the difference between new car <=> used rat is ‘only’ a few grand, that’s a tough sale for many unknowns coming with a pre-owned, few years old car.

tl;dr:
it’s a hassle buying a car post 2020, and i feel for you :servbotsalute:

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1637

Hasn’t it been far too long since the last 24h endurance race took place?

:tarothink:

Yeah, fully agree:

But we have no idea who’s in it to win it/bin it, right?

Guess that got me covered then … and as every year, i will root for the nicest liveries (which often feature on smaller/smallest teams cars) and watch them struggle to a 18th or 42nd place :servbotsalute:

Saturday 1630 CEST, mark it in your calendars!

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1638

2 years later I finally took it in…and they are replacing my whole engine under warranty :cowboy_hat_face:

Back then I thought it would be smarter to complain about the oil consumption since that’s like a measurable problem. But of course it magically stopped burning oil during the test. This time I just complained about all the weird engine noise it makes.

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1639

So, Spa24h:

After sleeping through the start of the race, waking up to four or five Full Course Yellows, two or three crashes with multiple cars involved (one very scary incident with a Ferrari sitting at the bottom of the run up to Eau Rouge, and a 911 seeing it too late and driving straight through the back end of it), upcoming rain/Thunderstorm(s) … there was half an hour of good racing so far!

More action than in the GER vs Denmark match tho, which is paused due to bad weather conditions :genki:

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1640

well, another round of safety cars, some Benz driver managed to flip the AMG GT3 on its roof under Safety Car Procedure :roll_eyes:

Alas, fireworks over the track are the Highlight atm … and hey, look at that scary crash

and you get an idea what a highway pileup would feel like.

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1641

have to take my motorcycle to long beach and my prius to phoenix for totally unrelated importation critical paths but on the plus side that was the last post-moving thing I had to do to get the insurance and registration squared away

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1642

After reading all of the above I, uh, I think I’m just gonna put a new set of plugs in the CRV, maybe replace the belt, and call it a day.

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1643

long beach is done, those folks were helpful (my one fear was that I’d have taken my morning off on a two and a half hour roundtrip ride for nothing), motorcycle is imported for the nominal fee of $80

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1644

didn’t realize Danica Patrick was a lizard people and Atlantis person

https://x.com/jeppe_olesen/status/1805583460490256841

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1645

otoh, a lizard surely would feel at home in a sun-baked oval, and iirc one of her more impressive wins.came on an oval? … maybe … that was built on ancient Atlantis ground?

:tarothink:

(real answer is, sometimes it is better if you never knew a thing about drivers, similar to artists/musicians/actors etc.)

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1646

btw, immaculate gamer vibes with this one,

20240623_131009~3
20240623_131009~31920×1261 426 KB

20240623_131024~3
20240623_131024~31796×1992 471 KB

which wraps around to being cool when they even replaced the Carrera-fontart, as well as the classy diagonal line fontart at the front.

:servbotsalute:

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1647

do folks here watch rallying online. im thinking about subscribing to rally.tv for WRC and European Rally Championship live stages. what do folks think of this idea

i dont love how WRC only has 3 cars in it but it looks like ERC has more (Rally2)

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1648

you can watch the stages live, and also get replays of those live broadcasts. they switch between the cars as they go thru the stage*. i watched some stages from the Polish WRC rally like this, it’s really nice to see the event in more depth, and especially to see onboards for more than 15s.

however, it takes a long time to watch the whole rally like this, i think SS2 was 55m or so. i think that included some cars from outside the top class. if there’s 20 stages, its a lot of hours of viewing, which might be good or bad depending on how much you enjoy it (i got fed up after 3 stages, one of which was cut short EDIT: but we were watching replays one stage after another, and i have trouble watching anything for extended periods).

also because it is live you don’t necessarily get all the information about what has happened. for example i still don’t know what Ott Tanak hit in SS2, there was just no info available on the live broadcast.

i don’t know if the service also includes extended highlights.

(* i’m not sure if you can get a feed from just one car so you can watch the stage start to finish tho’, i don’t have the service myself.)

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1649

also, now that I know I’m actually insured properly and can take a bit more risk, I can affirm that lane splitting being legal here absolutely makes you feel like a god, because not only are you like 1 in 2000 people on the road who’s insane enough to ride a motorcycle, you’re basically encouraged to noclip through traffic

it’s very weird knowing that I am in a tiny tiny tiny minority of LA county residents who is a huge fan of both motorcycles and the subway since I essentially consider this free happiness

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1650

I feel like the move in LA would be to get one of the faster scooters so you have the shield up front in case someone opens a door on you

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1651
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