OT: Talking Cars Tuesday - your questions!
Based on our advice thread from last week we've got lots of knowledgeable car folks on the board here. Do you have car-related questions? These could be things from "What's a car" to "We're having another kid and thinking of a bigger vehicle, anyone on the board drive X/Y/ or Z?" or things like "What kind of mileage do drivers of X get in the real world?" or "Do i need to use premium?"
I can't promise you'll get good answers, I can't promise the answers will be funny, but maybe we'll get a few of both?
I totally get that your passion is to rebuild classic cars. That's fine. But to go out of your way to make sure you take that car for your date instead of the perfectly good 2 year old sedan just to impress some girl? Really think you might need to reassess your pick up skills.
Revving engines aren't a turn on? I mean, dick behavior is just that.
However, maybe if a guy is picking you up in a classic he's saying "I work with my hands, I have this hobby, and if this works out I'm going to spend a lot of time and money on this hobby. Hope that's OK!".
Is it that different from taking you to his favorite punk band? or some other hobby?
I wouldn't want to go to a punk show for a first date, either, even though I enjoy punk music.
Pretty sure it depends on the girl. My wife sure loves her Austin Healey Sprite.
"Do guys honestly think that driving a classic car that barely works and has no AC is going to convince a girl to sleep with them?" -- YES.
"But to go out of your way to make sure you take that car for your date instead of the perfectly good 2 year old sedan just to impress some girl?" -- Most people understand that it costs $$$ to keep up with a classic car. Most guys flash money at girls they are interested in even if it means overcharging their credit cards. Why? Because it works.
If it didn't, all those fabulously wealthy yet horrendously ugly jerks with little to no personality would not be constantly seen with the most beautiful women on the planet.
No, having $$$ doesn't work with many women (my wife included, she is the least materialistic person I have ever met). But it works with a majority of them which is why people do it all the time.
Cool cars are good at attracting one thing and that's dudes who like cars.
Why do I vaguely remember my grandfather having to physically get out of the vehicle and do something with the hubs in order to engage (or disengage) 4WD? What the hell was he doing?
You had to lock the hubs on older 4 wheel drive systems. Had to do that in my 99 Cherokee.
I grew up with an '84 Ford Bronco and had to lock the hubs whenever 4WD was necessary. If you saw the issue coming that was fine, if you got yourself into trouble and belatedly realized you needed 4WD, say on a steep hill out in the Nevada backcountry in a snowstowm, it was a huge pain in the ass to have to lock hubs.
Locking hubs. Basically in most 4WD vehicles the engine is always driving the rear wheels, and you can "engage" the front wheels. Where that disengagement happens is key. In some vehicles it's the hubs (mostly older). In some it's an electronic dial on the dash.
My Jeeps had physical t-case levers that looked like another stick shift.
(Note - 4WD used to mean "either 2 or locked 4 wheel drive", AWD meant "always in 4WD, with a center differential". Marketing has ruined the meaning of these. Most new 4WD vehicles (like an Escape, or Cherokee) are really just front-wheel drive vehicles that engage a clutch to drive the rear wheels if slip is detected.)
Thank google images
Thanks Hatter and Jeep. Mystery solved. My car knowledge is a tad deficient. Thanks also for the AWD versus 4WD marketing confusion info.
So the old school locks on the early Bronco my dad had were the get out and twist kind. Those were lockers, and when you unlocked them you had to back up 10 feet to fully disengage.
The transfer case 2WD, to 4WH to 4WL was a different lever inside the Bronco on the tunnel. (The shifter was a three on the tree.)
Most new 4WD vehicles do not come with lockers and are just push button between modes or have a lever like on my Jeep JK. Some (like my Rubicon) have electronic bush button lockers - others are retrofitted with either old school manuals (Warn) or air activated (ARB or Detroit Locker).
The advantage of lockers are all four wheels are turning all the time. Your turning radius is much reduced, but if one wheel starts slipping, the others keep going which is really useful in mud, sand or snow. Without lockers, unless you have good traction control, the slipping wheel just spins.
it was full-time 4wd, and all the shifter did was make the front axle go to posi-traction.
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I know - and I'm all of 5'5" tall! I really don't get how taller people (ie: most people) sit comfortably in a sedan. I have a 2014 Fusion, and I'm comfortable in it. But the entire passenger compartment feels tight, and my wife agrees (she's all of 5' tall). I love the car, but I don't get how bigger people feel comfy in them. And they must - Ford sells a boatload of Fusions!
I take issue with your premise, I pretty frequently fill up the back of my truck or the available space in the mini-van. Plus when you have kids, etc. having a larger vehicle is handy. If you can afford it, why not?
There's also the fact that driving with a trailer is a huge pain in the ass, I've done it a bunch and I hate it every time, so if I have the choice between hauling a trailer and not hauling a trailer I am going to choose option B.
Because there's plenty of aftermarket support for that. Every car in the US is rated to tow stuff, you can buy a tow hitch for any car for a couple hundred bucks off the internet.
Automakers are constantly scrounging for ways to remove a couple bucks per part. Engineers are given large pats on the back for figuring out how to take $10 off the price of, say, a transmission. Planning a new model is a never-ending decision-making process of choosing between options that cost two bucks per unit less or more than another. This seems like penny pinching but it adds up big-time considering the thousands of parts that go into a car and the number of chances to shave the price of a complex thing like a trans.
So even if a couple hundred dollars could be brought down to as little as $50 through economies of scale, the decision not to do that is hardly even a decision. Not when such a small percentage of people would want it. "Let's do this that costs $200 more per car" would get you thrown out of the room unless you can show a pretty massive positive effect on sales.
It's all about saving weight to increase MPG (and to save money). Using thinner steel and plastics make the vehicle cheaper to produce.
I do miss cars having proper bumpers. Those plastic pieces of crap they have now crack way too easily and cost $1k to replace.
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THis is just ignorant. Plastic bumpers are there to A. to make it more dent reistant than steel bumpers and B because you dont want to fascia to be the crash structure. Modern cars are also infinitely safer and the crash structures are ugly so you put on a plastic bumper to allow it to crash properly.
In terms of paint; this is just false. The paint on modern cars is MUCH more durable and chip resistant than it was on older cars.
Also bodies are certainly not worse than they were before. the materials are "thinner" because they're more intelligently designed so you don't have dead weight in a part of the body that sees no load. Also cars are MUCH heavier today than they were in the past because the crash structures are much more sophisticated.
Also before you were lucky to have your car see 100k miles, now the usable lifetime of a car is engineered to 150k with a modern car easily being able to last 3 times that long if you take care of it.
Your information is outdated and based on emotion rather than fact.
However, if I stand on the hood of any of my cars, that shit is going to be dented. Two people could stand, sit, and fuck on the good of my 70 Olds without doing any damage.
Your olds hood would kill a person if you hit them. Also also, your olds all in weighed tons more, and got worse mileage/polluted a lot more because of it.
ding ding ding!
also your hood is an aerodynamic surface, not a load bearing one, so it just needs to maintain it's shape at Vmax, not withstand someone standing on it.
PLUS with new pedpro laws, your hood needs to dent in the event of a pedestrian impact to cushion them a little.
of pedpro laws. Stay out of the fucking street.
Look at survivability metrics over the past 30 years. Modern cars are much, MUCH safer. They also weigh more relative to their physical size because they have more metal in them to make them safer.
compare the weight of a 1985 F150 to a modern F150.
Also your point about having to fix a bumper if somoene taps it when in the past you didn't doesn't really hold water. If an impact is forceful enough to cause a flexible bumper on a modern car to crack, then it would cause a metal bumper to deform. If the metal bumper is strong enough to maintain it's shape at an impact of that force then all that energy is transfered through the car to the driver and would really fuck up your day.
Also, the reason cars look really messed up in crashes today when in the past they'd remain solid is because today we mandate crumple zones. Crumple zones absorb the energy of an impact so once the driver receives less of it by the time it reaches them, allowing them to survive a crash with fewer injuries.
I worked in active safety systems for a few years, what are your credentials to make your claims?
Do you think this is normal???? I see multiple cars like this every day. Metal bumpers would not do this.
Why do people put eyelashes on their headlights, dangling balls on their hitch, etc? It makes me sad all day.
Oh come on, those dangling balls are hilarious. I choose not to have them on my vehicle, but I do chuckle everytime I see them.
Because if your truck has testicles behind it then your truck is a penis? That's about all I've got.
were homemade. Two baseballs in beige nylons. Looked very realistic. And classy.
people do this shit . . . they think "that is gonna be awesome" but they're wrong.
Wife and I are looking to buy a car (moving out of NYC back to MI). Ideally we'd like a 4WD hybrid that's either a big sedan or small SUV, but can't seem to find any that aren't more expensive than we'd like to spend. We're thinkiong that a Subaru, either Outback or Forester, might end up being the way to go.
Thoughts or other recommendations for cars with good mileage that hold up in MI winters?
You're really limiting your options if you want a hybrid with AWD. Also, the AWD is going to eat a bit into your gas mileage on any car.
Hyrbid is not a necessity, but want good gas mileage for both cost and environmental reasons. AWD definitely takes priority.
Hybrid or 4WD? Also, why Hybrid? If it's just for mileage make sure you do the math (along with the type of driving you do, etc. A hybrid may cost $4,000 extra, which is a lot of gallons of gas...). Think about it if you'll do mostly city driving. Otherwise the math might not work out.
I've mentioned before that I like Car and Driver's suggestions for buying guides. They like the Mazda CX-5 as a small SUV (good mileage, dynamic). If you go to C&D and search "Ford Escape" you'll get this: http://www.caranddriver.com/ford/escape a nice breakdown, rank in segment, and explanation of why.