631–640 of 875 posts
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I have an AC in the Netherlands. It’s in the guest room for when our American friends visit and we occasionally all pile in there for the two (non-consecutive) days to weeks of the year it is ridiculously hot.
todays 32C is not ridiculously hot?
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I currently use a (automatic) borrowed car from the shop while my (manual) car is being repaired. I mostly do city-driving. One of the biggest issues with the automatic is stop-and-go traffic. It's absolutely trash at accelerating smoothly but fast, and I have no choice but to either go very slowly forward to not make it janky, or really aggressive acceleration. With a manual car, smooth-but-fast acceleration is easy…
Audi Q3 does not have a representative modern automatic transmission. You should try a car with a CVT from the last 2-3-ish years to feel the difference.
Oh and you can downshift to engine brake and the Sport model has flappy paddles to boot.
Manual transmissions are dead. I grew up learning to drive a manual transmission car. Awesome. I loved the feeling of driving and shifting gears up the hilly, mountainous, twisty horrible roads in Jamaica. Exhilarating! But cars got better. I got older, and now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *. We're not talking about people who love driving here. We…
> now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *. Efficient in what way? I find it highly unlikely an automatic would have better fuel economy than a manual.
Traditionally (and this is from the very olden days) manuals had an extra gear over automatics, which is why they'd have better fuel economy. Also less drivetrain loss. Nowadays the reverse is true, automatics consistently have more gears to play with, and automatic clutch packs are fantastically fast & good.
Now an efficient automatic is more complicated to design & manufactur, but that's where economies of scale and advancements in engineering tools and manufacturing come into play
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> As much as modern pickup trucks have become a fashion statement Pickup trucks are the opposite of fashion. There are to cars what Crocs are to shoes.
You and I might disagree about their fashionability, but they are indeed a fashion (and political) statement for many people.
If people decide to broadcast their opinions about the world using cars, they certainly can; but I don't think that kind of behavior can be called "fashion". Ideology, maybe.
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Then don’t read American publications and get mad when they are taking about America.
I can read American publications and get mad when they are talking about America without indicating that they are talking about America . It's like me declaring that it's perfectly legal to cross the road wherever you like - unless I qualify that by saying what jurisdiction that refers to, then it's just confusing bad advice for a proportion of people reading who might not actually notice that it is. I have similar g…
They did indicate that by being an American publication. It's not like Spain publications start every article with "Here in Spain, ." That'd be absurd.
Manual transmissions are dead. I grew up learning to drive a manual transmission car. Awesome. I loved the feeling of driving and shifting gears up the hilly, mountainous, twisty horrible roads in Jamaica. Exhilarating! But cars got better. I got older, and now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *. We're not talking about people who love driving here. We…
Automatic transmission is very rare in Europe.
https://fordauthority.com/2020/07/automatic-transmissions-ga...
Specifically, automatics accounted for around 10 percent of Ford Europe sales volume in 2017. That figure has climbed to over 31 percent in the first month of the 2020 calendar year.
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I don't understand this comment. SUVs are classified as passenger vehicles. They're also getting larger (and more dangerous for pedestrians), but to nowhere near the same degree that pickup trucks have. The danger posed by pickup trucks is chiefly a function of the absence of regulation: the US has decided that you can role-play as a farmer and get treated as one for safety purposes, without actually demonstrating a…
It's complicated because the SUV label is arbitrarily used by manufacturers and consumers, but many/most SUVs are classified as light trucks for safety and emissions purposes. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-726-may-7-2012-suv...
Far be it from me to defend truck-style SUVs!
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/electric-vehicles-manual-transm...
As gas cars are headed to deprecation in California with others likely to follow, EV designers are creating manual transmission designs. Currently only a couple of $100K+ models (Porsche and Audi) have it. Toyota and Jeep are working on more. https://www.motorbiscuit.com/electric-vehicles-manual-transm...
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You and I might disagree about their fashionability, but they are indeed a fashion (and political) statement for many people.
Well no... that's my point! A political statement is not fashion. If one plants a political flag in their garden in support of a presidential candidate, that's not fashion, that's politics. If people decide to broadcast their opinions about the world using cars, they certainly can; but I don't think that kind of behavior can be called "fashion". Ideology, maybe.
I happen to think that most modern trucks look incredibly stupid, but that's because their design language isn't intended for me. It's intended for people who have different fashion tastes, tastes that approximate political positions that I don't hold. In other words: the truck itself isn't a direct political statement, ordinarily; it's an efficient means for signaling politics through fashion.