Huh, but I could see the emissions regulation thing happening, and the Prado being a more "suitable" alternative.
The new 8-Series coupe has been finally released, now in production form. (Technically a M8, as seen with the badge on the rear) Thoughts so far?
So, they are claiming its a proper sports car... But part of me thinks its probably another grand tourer for 2. Since it is huge, and probably perfect for eating up motorway miles, and filled with all the tech to make it a great GT car. It would be nice to see BMW make another attempt at an upmarket MX5 competitor, with a nicer interior and one of their great V6's. While keeping similar dimensions to an MX5.
But it's a fullsize truck with a passenger car body. If you want a wagon, you could put up with a 4,8 m long SUV with rear independent suspension - but not with a truck. *insert an unfunny joke about obese American families*
Atleast it's a actual coupe, like the original 8-Series, and not a "Gran Coupe" like a few others. But, I do think that it could work well as a grand tourer.
Give it time, it's BMW, if they can find a way to add a new model to their range using an existing platform, consider it done.
I wonder if it could also give tributes to the M1 as well (as the old 8-Series seems to be it's spiritual successor or brother vehicle). Atleast the 8-Series already has a racing counterpart previous to this release of the production vehicle.
That could also be it's successor, but it doesn't have a race counterpart, and is electric. This new 8-Series could be the other kind of a M1 successor, and a new generation for the 8-Series.
The benefits of living in ME... Older gen Prado coupes and base model land cruisers with V6s starting at $59K Alnother ME weirdness, a Caprice SS instead of the Impala..
Apparently Germany has raided the house of, and detained the CEO of Audi over the whole Diesel scandal thing. Nice to see some accountability for the people who steer the direction that companies follow. No charges yet, but at the very least it should make other CEO's take note of the fact that they are not above the law, even if no further action was taken.
Yum, fake black plastic intakes :/ This trend reminds me of when the cheap models of cars all had black plastic trim rather than body coloured or chrome trim. I feel like I am seeing a bit of Hyundai I30N and Veloster in that Audi design, which is not something I was expecting to be saying several years ago.
It also seems to take some inspiration from the A6, both in the same year... except with more sportiness and "aggressiveness".
Looks a little like an A3. I know you're all probably tired of hearing about this, but I have at least tried to write down the problems I have with car culture in the current day in a more coherent fashion. Because I do think there are problems; not just "differences" but actual problems that could genuinely cause the death of car culture. I say this as someone right on the borderline between the Millennials and Gen Z. I've ranted a lot about modern car enthusiasts being unpatriotic, but I now believe that an even bigger problem is that they/we tend to live in a continuous present, with no respect for the past (unless it involves Japan in some way) and no sense of what the future might hold, or what it should hold, except in terms of airy, vaguely left-wing platitudes about safety and the environment. People just plain can not look ahead to save their lives, so they glom onto EVs and AVs as though they're the best thing since sliced bread, never bothering to ask the relevant questions. They don't realize that widespread EV adoption will murder the power grid at the neighborhood level, and if you say autonomous cars will be abused by power-hungry government, they'll just call paranoia. They can't see the effect that EVs and boring, over-optimized ICE cars will have on the secondhand availability of suitable project-car base material, or the possibility of liquid-burners or even all types of manual-drive cars being legislated off the road once their "replacements" have achieved enough dominance. Some even say they'd welcome this as long as they still got to race manual-drive cars at the track. In a thread about AVs on this forum, I posted my own version of Niemoller's Poem - it started, "First they came for the street racers..." I can't really condone street racing, but I can absolutely go after people's inability (or perhaps unwillingness) to look behind, and then ahead, to see which way things are going. My point with posting that was that the inevitable braying about safety, about how we can cut traffic accidents to zero by taking away the steering wheel, about whatever else, are not happening in a vacuum - they are part of a continuum whose beginning is difficult to pinpoint, but which started long before most members of this forum, including myself, were even born. Someone will always have a point to make about safety, or the environment, or who knows what else, it will always sound good, and it's not even restricted to cars - one of the things that makes the left wing infuriating to deal with in general is that no matter how awful their ideas or track record, they still win elections by twisting the discussion to make it sound like you're an unrepentant kitten kicker if you don't agree with them. This is where the continuous present comes in again. People see a discussion about autonomous cars and attempt to consider it as a single question, in a vacuum, from the assumption that those promoting autonomous cars are doing so with good intentions. So they just think "Will autonomous cars increase road safety Y/N?" and go no further. They don't think about all the other insidious or onerous things that have snuck in under the cover of "You don't want people to die, do you?". They don't think about the loss of personal freedom and/or personal enjoyment versus a manual-drive car, let alone about the loss of personal freedom (or again, enjoyment) with current gadgetized cars versus the older, lighter, more tunable, and also more secure models, double let alone about the same loss from the current obsession with safety versus the older ways of thinking where, just as an example, the police wouldn't throw their full weight at you unless you were actually hurting someone. Neither do they try to look ahead and see where this whole trend is going - indeed, any prediction not made entirely of sunshine and happiness gets written off as paranoid. Put it all together, and you get people acting like this is the first time they've seen the safety (i.e. fear and/or guilt) angle used to hype a change which is actually far more nuanced. Some even find ways to justify an AV takeover as being good for the enthusiast, somehow. Furthermore, modern car enthusiasts are very shallow, very surface-level. They display this trait even when it comes to Japan, despite their apparent ability to focus like a laser on that country. It's all about C1, Wangan, Mt. Akina (which is actually called Haruna), and the best-known tuner cars (R32/3/4/5, A70/80, E80, FC, FD, NA, NB, S13/4/5, Z32/3, and any NSX, Evo, or STi). If someone's into drifting, add some famous drift tracks (that I myself couldn't be bothered to find out about, but then I didn't claim to be an expert or even interested in JDM) and a few extra "basic drift cars" to their knowledge base; if they've played certain video games maybe add a Chaser, Altezza, or (Mitsubishi) GTO to same. Occasionally they'll pick up a new model from Speedhunters or something. No one knows any mountain pass roads that weren't already in a cartoon, or highways that weren't already in a video game. I myself don't know any drift tracks other than Ebisu or Yamanashi, though again I'm not all that interested in JDM. Other car cultures get roughly the same treatment - plenty of people know the highlights, few even care about the details. The Forza Horizon series is a perfect example here - I'm happy there hasn't been a Japanese one yet, but in the end, it doesn't even really matter where it's set because it always ends up being just another pretty background for the same old globalized show. Sure, maybe Horizon Japan would have an old Japanese sports car instead of an MGB GT, or an old sedan beloved by drifters instead of a London black cab, but aside from those very few cars heavily associated with one place or another, the car list, and probably everything else, would have come out exactly the same. The sad part is, people will defend this to the end and outright wonder why Horizon Australia should have bothered with low-end VE Commodores, just as an example, when they already had the hi-po special, even while admitting themselves that just from a list of noteworthy high-performance Australian cars, FH3 missed quite a few. (The even sadder part is, I'm not much better here - even with USDM car culture I'm sure there are plenty of things that I don't even realize that I don't know.) Just as bad is the overwhelming passivity of modern car culture. Car enthusiasts seem to believe that, because most drivers aren't enthusiasts, most cars should be boring or should even drive themselves. Others hold the belief that car guys themselves are uncool. We think that, because of our small numbers or mysterious inherent uncoolness, we shouldn't have a voice. Guided by these beliefs, we sit passively and accept shovelfuls of lowest-common-denominator dreck pushed at us by the manufacturers, with genuine driving enjoyment being left only for dedicated (and often expensive) enthusiast cars. When safety/environmental/whatever crusaders start saying & doing things detrimental to our hobby, we just lay down, roll over, admit they have a point, and continue our retreat into racetracks (no longer safe zones themselves) and increasingly-fanciful video games. Yeah, there's SEMA Action Network, but they're active only in the United States, and from what I've seen of them, their activities mainly concern speed parts manufacturers, big-buck custom street rods, and active participants in sanctioned racing, with little relevance to Joe Average in Neverhadanairqualityproblemville who just wants to upgrade his exhaust without getting charged with a federal felony because he replaced his catalytic converter in the process. There are other things, too. Like the people who go off the rails chasing numbers and end up saying things like "why would you want a manual transmission when the DCT is 0.2 seconds faster to 60 MPH and also more convenient in traffic?" I have to assume that a lot of these are the same people who, as children, adopted the Bugatti Veyron as their favorite car as soon as they heard of it (full disclosure: I was one of those Veyron kids too). EV hype men who like to post in comment sections about how electric cars will soon be able to outrun anything liquid-powered in any situation seem to be a subspecies of this type.
I would like to apologize sincerely and wholefully for having different opinions, and different preferences to you. Clearly you are the one and only true car enthusiast.
