The only weight that is valid when talking about vehicle weight is the curb weight. Anything else is just jerking off. Of course, this is modern journalism we're talking about...

once they HAVE a car, they will use it because it is simply faster and more convenient than mass transit can ever be.

It's interesting that you believe that mass transit necessarily is slower and less convenient for people, yet still want it any way.

Why do you hate people?

I understand that time is the one asset that is truly finite for all of us, and indeed, we never know how much of it we have left.

Who will say, on their deathbed, "I'm glad I spent an hour a day riding a bus" ?

Busses are a poor form of mass transit because they usually take the same roads that private cars do. A bus will never be faster than a private car unless you factor in the car's time to find a parking spot, and the city in question is terribly congested.

Subways, or any other transit system that is disjoint from the road system, can be MUCH faster than a private car. And I've chosen to use them even when I had a private car available to me.

People will and should use mass transit when it makes their life better -- when it saves them time and lets them do more fulfilling things with their life.

In places like Munich, Germany, it is possible to get most places in the city via very fast u-bahn lines. We lived there for about 2 weeks and didn't have a car. When we did have to go somewhere that u-bahn didn't reach, dealing with the bus system was jarringly bad in comparison. Suddenly we had to become aware of times, schedules, etc.

The Ubahn system is great because it's difficult to get on the wrong train, and you don't need to memorize a schedule... the next train will always be coming in a few moments.

When we toured Germany outside of Munich later on, we had a hired car, but we did not take it into urban core areas (like Berlin). We would park at a free park and-ride on the outside of town -- which were ajoined to s-bahn lines. Then we would take the s-bahn line to the hauptbanhof (centrail rail station) at the city core, and from there we'd take ubahn lines as appropriate to our various destinations.

For areas with high urban density, disjoint mass transit (like subways) is a great option, and having a personal car in the city core is usually a liability because parking it is so frustrating, and ultimately, expensive in terms of dollars and human time.

I love driving and have many days of race track time to my credit. I also built my own RV out of an old school bus and we take long family trips in it. In my family, we like driving and private cars.

However, when there is advantageous public transit available to me, I use it.

It is possible to build transit systems that work with the reality of how people live instead of some central planners idea of how she wishes people lived. Good systems can and will prosper.

Systems that don't improve the lives of their users should simply disappear so that better choices can come about.

They didn't just pull this battery chemistry out of their assholes, you know. And the suspension isn't based on new principles either, which is my point. They know that rubber bushings will fail. They also know that polyurethane bushings won't (unless subjected to the kind of abuse that would certainly obliterate a rubber bush) and that's why they don't use them. And by "they" I mean automakers, not Nissan.

The cars are designed to be cheap to build, easy to put together, difficult to service (small and inexpensive changes would make service vastly easier on most vehicles) and guaranteed to disintegrate. Cars are just made to fail, and they're made that way on purpose. We have better designs and/or materials for pretty much everything which does typically fail, which simply aren't used. EPDM breather hoses crack and fail, silicone will last damned near forever anywhere but on the sleeve directly connected to my turbocharger. There's a plastic coolant tube between the engine block an the oil cooler on the A8, about two inches long, which always breaks. There's just no reason for it not to be made of Aluminum. Thousand dollar service job to have the oil cooler pulled out. None of this is by accident.

No, but you do have to pay your yearly contract fee to Tesla if you want to maintain your warranty.

You've caught him red-handed. You have plenty of evidence to show that he was in fact actively aiding the enemy. Take a picture before you shoot him, for fuck's sake. Indeed, your gun should do that automatically. What fucking year is it?

Well, how do you know it's an Al Qaeda camp? Seems like while all this intelligence-gathering has been going on, you could engage in some legal process.

It's supposed to be difficult and expensive to kill people. Ideally, you come up with some other solution to your problems. You're supposed to think, hmm, war is hell, so I don't want to actually come to that pass. How can I avoid getting there? Instead, it has become due process is expensive, so how can I avoid it?

As an anonymous coward, there is no "you", and so "you" don't get to ask for citations, because you don't exist. You do, however, get to provide your own citations which contradict any and all of their points, and then it's up to them to provide citations which contradict theirs. Simply saying "citation needed" when you don't even have the courage of convictions needed to associate your demand with an identity is, for lack of a more accurate term, a complete bitch move.

Well, I for one was vocal about Bush, and I was vocal about his father, and I am vocal about Obama. I'm just not as vocal as some of these guys.

What I'm frankly tired of is people who act like the president is the problem. He's just one little piece of the problem. Just one man. He reads from the script like everyone else.

If you're going to claim to be thinking bigger than some "idiots", why not really think big and justify the epithet?

Yes, but he also said that his Baker Electric is his absolute favorite. And it's an EV with similar-era styling to the POS discussed in this article.

WTF?

Have you seen any without sides?

They had to resort to taking advantage of naive young women and locking them naked in cages on public streetcorners to remain relevant, so I consider them to be broadly considered to be a lunatic fringe group. Slashdot just likes to mention PETA because froth.

Or they're slaughtered by Mexicans living right here in the US of A. They seem to be willing to mob up and buy property together. We've got several such settlements in my neighborhood. All clean and orderly, no problems. The biggest messes and the most visits from code enforcement are from/to an old entitled white guy who's the scion of one of the old families here.

That's only because economic recovery is a dirty lie, and there's simply free horses available. There was a veritable torrent of free horses a couple years back. I live in the country, so I see these things... And there's still no shortage of free horses.

In fact, there aren't. All the ones that wanted one already got one in the great horse apocalypse. It's still going on to a degree now, but it's not like it was at its peak a couple years ago when I drove past a trailer store and they had their sign configured to say "FREE HORSE WITH EVERY TRAILER". Some idiots still think their horse shits gold and that they will recoup their investment, but in general you can still get horses for free if you're not too picky.

However, there's lots of immigrants who don't have the same cultural compunctions about eating horse meat that we do, so a lot of those free horses are not going to loving homes. Welcoming, yes. Loving, not so much.

It's too bad you don't have a yard in the country, so that you would know what goes on in them. Deer lie down in mine all the time. Well, they did before the coyotes moved into the neighborhood in force.

No, no in fact, it does not. A plain old passenger van starts out at 5,224 pounds. That right there is probably the most popular passenger van in history, that ol' E-150. The E-Series was supposed to be dead by this year, but too many crotchety old fuckers screamed about it for that to happen, so it's still around.

My 1992 F250 Super Cab 4x4 XLT 7.3 with a turbo kit weighs someplace around 6800 wet. 9000 pounds is in fact a staggeringly heavy vehicle.