It amazes me that he even managed to gatekeep driving. Plus, I can't drive and even if I could, I'm not taking my dream M3 or NSX to a stupid toll road-turned-racetrack in the middle of a German forest, I'm driving it casually and maybe rip it down I-78. I don't have to prep it up or anything and I can still enjoy the car without having to leave my state, let alone the friggin continent. But I guess anyone who's a car enthusiast and enjoys doing 35 on a coastal road isn't a part of "car culture" now. OT: Oddly, I've been wanting an older CR-V recently, specifically the first and second gens. I have no idea what makes them so cool to me, but it might be because of all the customization that can be done to them for such a small SUV, if you can even call it one.
If I tried to reprogram my brain to align with what modern car enthusiasts think is normal, I would lose my mind. We've got at least one person who cheered when someone in Wales was hunted down and locked up over a months-old violation that harmed no one and didn't even come close to harming anyone, multiple people who think that demanding everyone obsessively stick to the exact center of their lane is a perfectly realistic and reasonable request, at least one who thinks all manual driving should eventually be restricted to closed courses, another one who seems to think we all have a moral imperative to want cars to be as boring and homogenous as possible, one who thinks that giving individuals the right to choose which safety features they want protecting them is evil, and frankly most of the forum has bought into every ridiculous, unachievable "zero vision" that has ever existed. At this point, what is the difference between us and the outright car-haters? The only difference is that we say we like cars - while agreeing wholeheartedly with the car-haters on everything else. None of what you mentioned is against car culture. What is against car culture is supporting the rules, attitudes, and cultural factors that make owning a fast or tuned car, and driving it like a fast or tuned car, as difficult and expensive as possible for anyone who isn't at least comfortably upper-middle-class. It's not about street vs. track; a lot of the old track racers would probably be sickened by what's happened to sanctioned racing too. It's not about old car vs. new car; it's just that new cars have significantly more enthusiast-hostile garbage to hack through in order to get at the essence of the machine. It's not even about whether you personally like to race. It's about one thing, which is: rowdy vs. dowdy. When you see a narrow, curvy, dangerous mountain road, do you see it as a driving road first and foremost, or do you reach for a bicycle or a pair of running shoes and start yelling about your rights at anyone who doesn't like what you're doing? When the IPCC releases new doom-and-gloom predictions, do you question them, or do you actively want the predictions to be true, as so many people these days seem to? When someone does something crazy, but in such a way that they avoid actually harming anyone, are you cheering them on or trying to write down their plate number so you can call the police? When it comes to new cars and modifying cars, would you rather have too few rules, or too many? I mean, come on. Just look at Car & Driver's latest sport-sedan comparison test. Four cars from four brands, none of which share a home country or parent company with any of the others. How different do you think they'd be? Apparently, the answer is "not at all"; all of them have 2.0L turbocharged inline fours with a torque peak at 2000 RPM or less and a rev limit between 6000 and 7000 RPM. Two of them (the BMW and the Genesis) displace exactly 1998cc; the Alfa qualifies as a major anomaly by being 1993cc instead and SOHC for some reason, and the Volvo as a minor one for being 1969cc. Two of them (the BMW and the Volvo) also use archaic naming conventions which refer to no-longer-available non-2.0L-I4 engines. All of them weigh at least 3600 pounds, which is absurd for mid-size cars especially when you realize that cars like the BMW 3-series used to be compacts, and somehow the FWD Volvo, despite having the fewest parts in theory, is the heaviest by a significant margin. They are also dimensionally and stylistically extremely similar. About the only good common thread is that RWD rather than FWD is still the class standard. All this similarity is despite the fact that the fastest and slowest cars in the test aren't even in the same world in terms of straight-line performance. And people here actually side with, and want more of, this awful homogenity! In the older, less-regulated days, it's likely that the Alfa would have had a lovely-sounding NA V6 somewhere in the high 2-liter or low 3-liter range (or maybe a snorty NA I4 if you went far enough downmarket, but that would be unlikely at the 280HP level), the BMW would have had the traditional 3-liter straight six, the Genesis, judging by the first models which were under the Hyundai badge, would have had some sort of large NA V6 or small NA V8, and the Volvo would have had the turbocharged straight five its trim name still refers to - and each would have been more unique, more characterful, and more like itself as a result. So it's not about whether you personally are pushing the boundaries - it's about whether you're deliberately being the reason someone else can't.
Car Culture =/= Car Enthusiast Culture. Car culture is extremely harmful to cities and the environment. We need to start upping our public transportation and this does not mean getting rid of cars, it means having other means of transportation. Unless you want extremely congested roads where you move at 10mph, I'd start doing research into the harmful effects of car production and over reliance. As a car enthusiast who enjoys driving, you should want this, because it'll clear up our roads and make driving easier. To clarify, I'm not some crazy NUMTOT that wants to ban cars, I'm a logical car enthusiast that knows the effects of cars, and how we could possibly curb that.
It's not that "car culture is extremely harmful to cities and the environment", it's that cities themselves are extremely harmful to the environment, the people trapped within them, and, in the end, to car/car enthusiast culture everywhere via their attempts to solve urban problems with national rules and initiatives. Trying to cram that many people into tiny, congested spaces just doesn't work and it never has, it's just that now car exhaust, rather than horse droppings, is what's making this obvious.
Sure, I get your point. I live in a very rural area, and I prefer living here. But we have got to make cities more livable. Cities do have a purpose, and cramming loads of cars into a tight space is just never a great idea. There is a time and place for automobiles, and sometimes they just don't work in these tight city spaces. These cities were made far before cars, and I think that we should stop trying to cram car infrastructure into them, and building freeways and diving them. I could go on and on into the economics, politics, and issues with freeways in inner cities, but my opinion is that freeways ruin cities. It's not a car problem, it's far more of an infrastructure problem. It's also that we're producing too many cars, that's why new cars sales are down. People just don't buy new anymore, people buy used because not only does buying used help the environment, you're pretty much recycling an old car. I highly encourage buying used for this very reason.
I for one suggest we get rid of all cars and replace them with tanks. You wouldn't even need to drive it since you could park in your work/school parking lot. That means it's better for congestion, and noise/air/ground/water pollution. Illegal to park there? Who's going to stop you. You got a tank. Here's a T54 for sale. Great for city commutes. https://tanks-alot.co.uk/product/russian-t54-main-battle-tank/
Not to mention that new cars cost a crazy amount of money, which is another reason to buy used, as used cars are much cheaper.
This. It's not "the environment" or "making too many cars", it's that cars can't really advance in any direction that makes a new car worthwhile as anything but a status symbol. Back in the old old days, you could expect any car to turn into a smoking, leaking, clattering Exxon Valdez on wheels within 100K miles, simply due to inferior metallurgy and manufacturing techniques. Bringing a car back to its former glory once this happened was often a difficult, expensive, time- and labor-intensive operation and frequently not worth it for someone who had no particular attachment to the car in question. On top of which, automotive technology was advancing at a rapid pace still, so by the time your car became more trouble than it was worth, it was likely that the new ones would be faster, more agile, and available with all kinds of useful stuff that didn't exist yet when your last car was built. Eventually, customers started to demand more than 100K miles of service life from a car, and the manufacturing technology to make it happen became available. So cars started to last longer, without immediately becoming inscrutable black boxes that cost ridiculous amounts of money to repair. The average age of a car in active daily-driver use started to increase. But even then, there were still reasons to buy new cars; they were still making major leaps in terms of performance and (useful) features. The long recovery from the Automotive Dark Ages of 1973-1986 probably helped here. Now, though, we've reached the saturation point. Cars from the Second Golden Age of 1987-2007 are still widely available, relatively cheap to keep going, and are perfectly adequate, in terms of performance, livability, and features, for the average driver. They are also more enthusiast- and DIY-friendly due to less-complex computer systems. Some vehicle types which could still be useful, such as true S10-size compact pickup trucks, are no longer available on the new car market at all. Sure, performance and comfort advances are still forthcoming, and even a Toyota Camry is a shockingly rapid car now, but we've reached a point where the non-enthusiast driver won't really be able to tell the difference, and the enthusiast driver won't be able to use the extra capability without running foul of The Law or over a member of the I Have a Right Brigade. The days of having to floor it and shift at redline just to get to 60 in less than 12 seconds are long gone, but so are the days of being able to floor it and shift at redline without getting dragged out of your car and beat, tased, or shot by an out-of-control cop while modern internet "car enthusiasts" cheer. On top of which, the regulations have gone mad in the last 10 years especially. New cars, even low-end cars, come loaded with garbage which is expensive, complex, and expensive to repair once the warranty runs out, sometimes because it's mandatory, and sometimes because anything else which could set a car apart from its competitors is either practically or explicitly illegal. At this point, the running Rube Goldberg contest is pretty much the only form of product differentiation still allowed, and most people end up not using most of that stuff even once they have it. One of Buick's new crossovers has, for its in-car infotainment system, an available app which... lets you order pizza (from a specific chain only, as far as I know). You can't order a pizza delivered to the car's location, which I could see being sort of useful-ish in certain extremely specific situations, just to a specific address... kind of like when ordering pizza any other way. I'm not really sure what the point is when the probability that someone can afford a $50,000 SUV but does not have access to a telephone of some kind approaches zero. The Car & Driver staff, after struggling for an hour to make the stupid thing work, eventually gave up and ordered a pizza by cell phone, which is probably how the majority of Buick SUV owners will continue to do it. That leads into the other reason new car sales are falling, which is, all this stuff is expensive - both at first, when you buy the car, and later, when it breaks. Yeah, sure, new cars are faster, and safer, and marginally more fuel-efficient than their predecessors, but is it really worth the price of entry? That keeps going up, but people's wages, well, not so much. Do you need a 150MPH family sedan when your commute is plagued by bored cops who pull for 68 in a 65? Is the extra safety really a benefit if you never crash, or if it's so hideously mis-programmed/mis-engineered that it actually causes harm? How long will it take to break even on fuel savings when the car itself costs $35,000-$40,000? Some people will burden themselves with 5- and 6-year loans to buy a new car. More people obviously don't think it's worth it.
How was that to drive? I've always thought the Durangos were pretty cool at least for an SUV. Lately though I've been obsessed with 2011-14 AWD R/T Chargers. AWD and a V8 just seems cool to me especially when it's super easy to turn the AWD off and have some fun.
I'm not the biggest fan of the Durango as a whole. The interior and exterior styling don't do much for me. It's pretty well outdated at this point as well. I'll give it to them that they're fun to drive purely based on being V8/RWD. But beyond that they're kind of big and fat and heavy. The engine is definitely the highlight. Its not fast, really, but it sounds amazing. I like that the 5.7 in the Durango R/T has a quieter exhaust system than the 5.7 in the R/T Charger. It's a nice balance between intake and exhaust noise. I was somewhat underwhelmed when driving a Charger R/T for the first time, I just kind of expected more from it. It makes way too much noise for how fast it is. Test drive one and see what you think of it. The 5.7 in the police charger has an exhaust system more similar to the Durango R/T. I love the way those sound. I'll pick one up at an auction someday.
There was a 5.7 AWD police Charger on Craigslist a while back, really bummed I didn't go look at it in time. Although the luxury models hold their value so poorly that it's really not to bad to pick up a nice low mileage one owner car. If I could afford it I'd probably put a procharger on it, then the louder exhaust would be justified. Edit: There's another police Charger. You have a lot more experience with retired government vehicles than I do, its this one worth it? Edit #2: Just realized it's not actually AWD like I was after, still a cool car but not nearly as practical for around here.
A non-white retired police car is usually a good sign. That Charger doesn't look like its seen too many pit maneuvers. I also notice it doesn't have a spot light on the driver's a pillar which could mean it wasn't a patrol car. I wouldn't pay $9k for a retired police car with almost 140,000 miles. Auctions are where you find the deals. That guy probably bought that Charger for $4k then spit shined it and listed it on craigslist. I'm not sure where you're located but AWD Chargers will be much more plentiful in colder climates. All you can do is educate yourself on common problems and keep an eye out for them. I don't know much about chargers but I can tell you the 5.7 has top end issues and loves to flatten cam lobes and drop valves. You have a good point in that there's not much point in buying a police model if the civilian ones depreciate similarly.
Can we talk about how the F-150 is currently rated at 8,000 pounds towing? And so was the Cadillac Fleetwood of 1996?
Not something you see every day. --- Post updated --- Is that standard F150 vs tow package Fleetwood? Because I think this is the case.
Is that standard F150 vs There absolutely was a tow package Fleetwood, and it had a much higher rating than the normal one.
