Here’s a thought, get a car made in the same decade. Your experience on budget automatic from 2001 doesn’t represent modern cars.
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2006? One of the last good years, for sure, but about two decades past the peak.
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Our car is an automatic which is pretty recent and it’s great.
newer cars are hard to find without proprietry spyware
I don’t have a problem with convenience features, but the laws that allow manufacturers to spy on me can fuck off
Love my automatic!
1995 Ford F150 5 speed manual. I have no complaints.
Bullshit, you definitely complain about gas prices.
Don’t we all though?
Not if you drive a normal car
Nope. I drive a modern vehicle that gets ~28mpg. I haven’t even noticed gas prices in ages.
No - EV Driver
You might not, but anyone who has to breathe around it will.
Maybe I’m kidding myself but I feel like even if I won the lottery I still wouldn’t replace my -07 Nissan Pickup. I’d probably have the thing entirely rebuilt but it’s basically my dream car as it is so other than customizing it even more there’s nothing newer trucks have that I wish mine did too. The only downside to older vehicles is the increased need for maintenance though I’m much rather fixing a 15 year old truck today than 2023 truck in 2038.
04 Nissan Frontier over here. I specifically bought it because it has a manual transmission which is hard to find in the US. I drove all the way up to Seattle from Portland to get it. There are maintenance issues given its age, but I still love it. Apart from the bullshit bells and whistles, it’s still every bit as capable as any new pickup in its class. I’ve doctored it up a bit over the years, so it’s not fully stock anymore.
Yeah I ignored all the automatics aswell. Mine has a 6 speed manual, 4x4, low range and a rear diff lock.
They’re called Navara here in Europe. I’m not sure how different it’s from Frontier except that it has a 2.5 litre turbo diesel rather than petrol engine. I think it’s a damn nice looking truck despite its age and with modifications it can be made to look even better. Mine is all murdered out.
Nice! Mine is a 3.2 liter V6 6 speed manual but w/o the turbo. It has a shitload of torque in 1st and 2nd, but isn’t very fast or powerful once it’s in third, 4th or 5th gear, which is fine with me.
It also has an extended bed and a canopy with flip-up windows on the sides. I’ve installed a roof-rack and have lifted the truck 2 inches together with aftermarket shocks and a new set of leaf springs. I’ve also installed “bullhorns” on the front together with “brush racks” to protect my old headlights.
All in all she’s a pretty mean truck. I’ve taken her out with friends who are hardcore Jeep aficionados, and she’s more than acquitted herself.
i have an 08 cobalt and its been more reliable than any other car ive owned. only once has it not started but thats because the design is horrible for winter and shorted some shit needed to start the car
handbrake starts are useless if you live literally anywhere with significant hills/slopes and traffic lol
You gotta learn to just give the proper gas to clutch ratio, otherwise you’ll be holding up traffic anytime you want to move forward
That’s an American problem. In Europe nearly everyone knows how to drive manually.
Another thing America got right 😎
Oh yeah just like your guns, healthcare, abortion rights, politicians…
Guns are a problem? I love shooting
We know, we see the headlines coming out of US schools every week.
Are you calling me a killer? That’s not very nice of you
Only in the same way you call someone who voted for Hitler a Nazi. You know what’s less nice than mean words? Dead kids.
PS. I also enjoy shooting, I have friends who own guns, my favourite is a .30-30 Marlin Lever-action 5 shot breakdown rifle that is absolutely superb for hunting roos and pigs. We just have rules that make sure you’re responsible.
What does that have to do with liking guns? You’re weird
Yes 😎💪
Do not forget all the freedom they get
Which politicians have europeans gotten right?
Also unironic answer for Czech(oslovak) Repubic: Václav Havel, Dubček, Tomáš Masaryk. So far General Pavel seems much better than Zeman.
The ones who keep healthcare for everyone, have guns under control and keep most companies privacy policy in check. We don’t point at one politician to do the job for us, it’s at least a hundred.
Thatcher ♥️ Reagan
Boris ♥️ Trump
The two power couple special relationships
Yeah, but they aren’t part of Europe anymore
Fair, they should become the 51st state.
That’d be a coup, though if any country should incorporate them, it should be Canada because they didn’t even have to fight for their independence.
If it weren’t for America, BMW and Mercedes wouldn’t be selling a single manual transmission vehicle anymore.
lmao
Instead of laughing, perhaps you’d like to see how many manual transmission models are sold under those two brands in Europe. Now do the same for the US.
It’s because only the rich in Europe buy new cars, buying a new car is a very rare thing.
In addition to that BMW and Mercedes are known as luxury brands and by far not common in Europe.
Totally made up claim, the average passenger car age is 12.2 years in the US, and 12 years in Europe. BMW market share is 2.4% in the U.S., 6.7% in Europe. Similar figures for Mercedes are 2.5% U.S. vs. 5% Europe.
You’re joking right? I’m in the UK and every bugger going has a Merc or a BMW.
Other than the UK I guess, and the business vans are usually sold as manual too.
What manual Mercedes is for sale in the USA? I’ve never seen one, that could be a whole lot of fun!
As someone studying tech, yes please, give me the dummest most rudimentary car with no computer or servos. I don’t want general motors to gather my biometrics or a script kiddy to disable my steering. Dumb technology is best always. Fuck that android auto bs or whatever abomination the manufacturer adds. Just want a speaker with an aux cord so I can listen to my flacs
YES, YOU GET IT
I love the idea of a sound system that is just an aux cord to a speaker
If I ever win the lottery, I’m hiring a 50 people like you to build an incredibly basic production car together. Make it barely or technically meet the modern technology standards to be road legal in all 50 states, but use the simplest mechanical solution to everything a car needs to do. I assume a lot of systems would have to be installed as a “backup” to the electrical version, but I’d want to build it to be able to function perfectly with all the computers disconnected. Probably ship it with instructions phrased as warnings of what not to do.
As long as the price reflects that absolutely. I feel like one of the reasons cars are getting so pricy is because we are filling them with so much bloat. Ex. Heated seats, power windows, tablets. Like, what happened to a base model car?
Yes, I would want the price to reflect the simplicity, and lack of extras should help with that. Let the aftermarket companies do heated seats and fancy stereos.
Open source car? Lol. Design it as easy to aftermarket as possible. Let aftermarket companies sell full seats and ECT. Use only standard connections and hardware
Surely there is an open source car by now. Some sort of street legal kit?
I do think open source car is the best label to describe what I’m dreaming of. But factory built to take advantage of bulk order pricing for the parts and because people who are actually willing and able to put their own car together are rare.
Nope, at least afaik. Prototyping and building cars by hand (without a whole factory set up to build it) is hard. Not to mention extremely expensive. And you have to build multiple (identical) copies of the prototype to get it street legal, because of crash testing. And you have to be able to guarantee that what people build with your kit remains identical to your prototype. Or everyone assembling such a kit would have to build multiple copies of the car and go through the certification process individually.
And of course there are very few people that would want to assemble their own car, so you wouldn’t be able to make a business out of it.
I’ve seen a few builds from scratch online. All of them say it turned out to be far FAR more difficult than they ever imagined. Once the thing works properly, it’s up to what state/ country the builder is in to determine how hard or easy it is to get it legal to drive on the road.
Why do I feel it would look like the Homer?
It might look like an economy car of yesteryear, but not like the Homer
I would also join this endeavor. This country needs a small, light pickup truck again that a guy can fix in his driveway with basic tools.
Yes! Something the size of a 90s ranger, or even a little smaller. Built with flat glass and a bench seat if we can get away with it.
This exists in the motorcycle world, actually. You can buy a 2023 Suzuki DR650. It will have a speedometer, an air cooled 650cc single cylinder engine, and that’s it. No ECU, no LED lights, no ABS, nothing. It doesn’t even have fuel injection.
In the automotove world there is/was something sort of close to what you’re describing. It’s called a Mitsubishi Mirage. 3 cylinders making a furious 78 horsepower, gets great mileage, and is absurdly easy to maintain and repair. And ever since they started making the current Mirage in 2014, it has been given so much hate because it’s a no-frills economy car. People literally bitch about how you can see a couple of screw heads when you open the door, and cry that it’s slower than a Mustang and less luxurious than a Lexus.
So be prepared to hear that when designing a basic car. There are automotive writers and reviewers who are very out of touch, and can’t understand that a basic cheap car is a good thing.
Oh absolutely, I’d expect this imaginary car would be an ugly thing, and constantly panned by reviewers. People would be outraged that some nobody burned hundreds of millions in lottery money on a trash looking car. Meanwhile, every mechanic constantly recommends it for a daily driver because it just works and is super easy to fix.
Interesting about the Mirage. Next time I’m looking for a commuter car, I’ll have to look for one of those.
There are two basic kinds of Mirage. There is a hatchback and a sedan. The sedan has a huge trunk (My wife is 5’-9", I’m 6’-0", and we can both fit in the trunk) and a decent amount of rear legroom.
My wife and I have a 2017 “G4” Mirage, which is the sedan. Ours is a 5 speed manual, the only “option” we got is bluetooth which we never use. It does have power windows and locks standard. It has a steel oil pan, not an aluminum one, so it doesn’t strip out as easily. The only problem we have had with ours is a gas guage that started acting up last month. Other than that it’s a solid car that gets us 45+ mpg highway.
Is it light enough that the car can get out of its own way, despite the low horsepower engine?
It’s actually frustrating to drive with it’s 78 horsepower and 2,000 pounds. But not for the reason you might think.
The problem is, most of the time, It’s the fastest car on the road. Every time we drive it somewhere, our 78 horsepower car is unable to go more than 30 miles per hour, because there is someome with a twin-turbo F150, or a Hemi Challenger, or literally any car that should be faster, and they are in the way. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve followed some allegedly much faster vehicle down an onramp at 40 mph, wishing they would go faster so I (and those behind me) could merge. The 1.2 liter under the hood hasn’t ever been an impediment. It is always held back by another car that should be faster.
The only car I have had that was worse about this was an old Metro. (1 liter 3 cylinder, 55 hp, 1600-ish pounds) The problem with that car was people knew what it was, and they would blow their engines or cause an accident trying to get in front of it just so they could pull their phone out and scroll facebook while going under the speed limit. I noticed a bridge I used to drive over always had a speed trap. I also noticed that the easiest type of vehicle to “trigger” were the fancy lifted diesel 4x4 trucks. So I started to bait them near that bridge, so they could show me how their big expensive truck was faster than a car I literally rebuilt in my driveway, and they woukd inevitably blow by a cop at 60+ in a 45.
Haha, baiting people into a speeding ticket when they try to prove something must be very satisfying.
The only car I’ve had that was just too slow was a 2006 Hyundai Elantra. Cheap to buy, cheap to fix, cheap little tires. But so so slow. Whenever I’d borrow another car, I would inevitably chirp the tires trying to accelerate normally.
“script kiddy”… Says everything I need to know.
Remember the kia challenge, that was literally kids running scripts they found online to steal cars
ok.
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No wonder you’re just studying. I’ve met plenty of people like you. Just because YOU can’t do a good job or understand it, doesn’t make it bad.
Sincerely, Engineer with 13 years of experience.
But I thought technology bad :(
I understand it and that’s why I hate it. I don’t want to hack my car to fix it like farmers are forced to do with their Jhon deere equipment. This whole inserting tech into everything is invasive and anti consumer
I drive manual, it’s great for my ADHD haha keeps me from fucking around inside my car in traffic.
That being said, the person who made this needs to calm down. It’s not that serious.
Love my 7MT and the risk of a high speed 1-2-1.
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Corvette, not many know that!
Car enthusiast?
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Right between the 3 and 4. The weight or pressure to keep the shifter there is much higher than any other car, I think so we don’t get confused by feel where the shifter is because the middle is in no man’s land. And the pressure when I try to slide over to 7 is abruptly more to let me feel I’ve gone past 5 and 6.
At only a day or two I knew where the shifter was without looking.
My only gripe is GMs “you just shift into 4th from 1st” when starting off slower. I don’t always want that and when trying to teach my wife how to drive it is really confusing for her.
She still doesn’t know how to drive it, maybe next year?
Could also be a 4x4 with a crawling gear (e.g., Ford Bronco), but I’m not sure if that counts
Someone bring this sniveling fool to me! I grew up on a farm and when I learned to drive, I started with a 5x3 manual double stick and then “graduated” to a 15 speed. I will have this fool crying in his pablum within a mile.
I’m all for automatics. What transmission you drive does not lessen the driving experience.
Manual transmission is also a great anti-theft device, since most kids don’t know how to drive it.
Funny, when I was in the military all the Gen X’ers couldn’t drive stick when we got rentals in Europe. I could because I rode a motorcycle, so I just always drove.
My own purely anecdotal observation is that there are still far more of us Xers who know how to drive a manual transmission. One good thing about it, for my wife and I at least, is that our gen Z kids never asked to borrow our cars and just bought their own automatics or borrowed from their grandparents.
My wife’s car has an especially fiendish hydraulic clutch that will stall out if you even look at it funny, so that helped too.
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I love my manual xB.
Surely the volume knob isn’t a real gear stick, right?
Correct; it’s not a stick, as it is a knob.
I’ve driven multiple vehicles with gear selection knobs.
It is.
2019 Ford Edge
but… it gets worse!
2023 GMC Terrain
Oh damn I wasn’t expecting to see a 2023 car with an AUX port
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That is genuinely awful.
You think that’s bad?
May I present the manual transmission on the Ford Edsel:
Yes. Those are transmission buttons on the steering wheel. There’s also only two of them when you’re actually driving that matter so it might as well be automatic.
is there an airbag?
No.
That automatic transmission control is really dreamed up by someone utterly deranged.
It’s the freemasons
Range Rovers, unfortunate cars that they are.
I’m still perplexed by my grandfather driving around in a manual with a beer and a cigarette. Did the WWII generation have a third hand?
Or the car will be like “You’re creeping forward with your driver’s door open? I’m going to slam in to park without even asking first then all my dash lights will be going full xmas mode while I beep incessantly. Because fuck you, that’s why.”
“Oh no a slight bump in the road. Better shout about it and slam the brakes lmao”
If I’m at a t-intersection with a car parked on the side of the road in front, I’ll start turning, car thinks I’m about to t-bone someone, red lights and alarms everywhere. Scares the fucking shit out of me. The first time it happened I slammed the brakes on and fortunately didn’t get rear-ended.
That system has never done anything but cause me to almost have an accident and to turn it off is buried away in the settings each time I start the car. And the lane keeping assist is so dumb at understanding how people take an apex on corners, or dealing with the faded lines. “Give me the fucking wheel back!” tug LURCH “Fuck!”
It’s like learning to drive with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat all over again, flipping out and unexpectedly trying to intervine over nothing she thought was something.
And “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” Applied corrective steering to prevent a collision
When you follow the curve of a road with an edge barrier just a little later than it would have (Tesla)
Which make and model is this?
MY22 Subaru WRX tS
I’ve experienced the atrocious lane following behavior in multiple models of Jeep and Chevrolet vehicles.
Sounds great tbh
I’m so glad to see I’m not the only one with issues with those “driver nanny” systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I’m “supposed” to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn’t an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn’t help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can’t it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn’t hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn’t trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - “WHAT IS THAT NOISE?” Salesman: “Oh it’s just the driver seat belt alarm.” “Oh.” Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It’s to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we’re going out of town, I will take the pickup. It’s more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn’t have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won’t have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we’d buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years…which may indicate those safety features aren’t helping, or maybe they’re making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
Some of it must be regulatory… car chimes when you open the door and stuff I know is NA-only, even brand new cars in Europe know to STFU unless they have something actually meaningful to say. In my experience even the seat belt alarm doesn’t turn on under a certain speed (somewhere around 10-15 km/h on my car I think, at least it shuts the fuck up when maneuvering in a parking lot).
False alarms on the nannies is highly brand dependent. On my 2018 VW I’ve had it freak out maybe 10 times over 60k km, it’s rare and almost every time it was understandable why it would freak out (and never did it actually hit the brakes for me for a false alarm). So I’ve never felt the need to disable the nannies.
I don’t mind the alarms for things that are actually issues - open the door and the keys are in the ignition, or I left the lights on, or even the seat belt reminder when I start the car. But when I’m rolling along and everything is fine, a loud screeching alarm out of nowhere is extremely disturbing…and doubly so when I realize that there was actually nothing I was doing wrong. It really is like having a backseat driver screaming at me, and it pisses me off. I have screamed at the car to shut the fuck up on a few occasions. God I hate it.
And, I promise, I’m not driving aggressively or anything like that to trigger this shit. I’m really not. I’m a pretty careful driver; our other car is from 1999 - I bought it new and still own it and drive it, so I must be doing something correctly. I’m not saying I never make mistakes, either. I just try to keep them small enough to not have huge consequences.
Yes, one time I did get a little close to the vehicle in front of me that was turning and triggered the BRAKE alarm (not the actual brakes, just the alarm)…okay, I don’t do that any more. But I think that might be the ONLY time it has actually alerted me somewhat correctly…and even then things were well under control and I wasn’t going to hit them; it was just closer than it liked. The rest of the time…it’s like “I know more than you.”
I understand some people are busy doing other things instead of driving and need that stuff. Fine, they can have it. But why do I have to pay to have it in my car? And any minor crash is going to cost that much more to repair, too.
Yeah I have screamed at the car a few times as well for backseat driving (and I’m also someone who disables the satnav voice because I hate being interrupted by someone yelling at me), but at least with VW it’s extremely infrequent despite having driven quite aggressively for a couple years before I stopped commuting by car.
It just take one time of it slamming the brakes for one pedestrian to make up for it 100 times over, so I’m fine with it.
(Also specifically the minor crashes will not break the emergency braking systems thankfully, AFAIK it’s made up of a battery of sensors on top of the windshield, a computer, and hooks into the braking system alongside the ABS/ESP)
You might be right about the sensors. All I know was that we were in an extremely heavy rainstorm - a time when it would have been nice to have the lane assist - and the system was like, “Ha. I’m useless here and shutting down. You’re on your own!” I was assuming some sensors in the bumper or whatever were overwhelmed, but a camera-based system might explain that, too.
A close friend of mine also hates her new Mazda for all the “helping” it tries to do! It sounds like they really botched that. I’d be demanding a refund for an undrivable car.
It’s extremely irritating. I didn’t get into the frustration with the adaptive cruise (at least they fixed the nauseating issues it had originally) and other irritations I have with that car.
But, I will say: When I turn things off in the Mazda, like the thing that steers the car back toward the center of the lane, it fucking stays off. I’ve heard a lot of other vehicles turn that shit back on every time you start the car. Christ.
This really is a bad trend of half-baked half-measures between human drivers and fully autonomous vehicles. There isn’t a lot of room for “semi-autonomous” operation - humans generally expect to either be fully in control of the situation, or to relinquish all control to another (ignoring backseat drivers). Anything else can be annoying and unexpected unless done very subtly, carefully, and correctly.
My new VW has all of these sensors and safety features, but manages to not freak out until something is truly imminent, obviously properly accounting for speed and trajectory, and with only gentle nudges when the situation is less dire (e.g., lane drift), but more aggressively in the face of real danger (backing up into incoming traffic).
Yeah. I’m reminded of a story out of Reagan National Airport 10-15 years ago, when the single controller in the tower fell asleep overnight. Sounds bad, right? Except that they cannot take a book or music or anything else. They’re alone at night because traffic is so light. Basically, they’re supposed to sit there all night, alone, on alert, doing nothing other than waiting for an occasional plane to arrive. It’s insane to think anyone could be able to do that without falling asleep sooner or later.
For cars, yeah - when I’m driving, my attention is fully on the car and my environment. If the car is driving, my attention is going to wander, and if it needs me to pop back into driving mode, that switch is going to take a moment or two. This is just human nature.
Oh and you know what’s even better? Because we’re all relying on our cars to do the driving most of the time, we’ll all get worse at actually driving, so when we are called upon in that emergency…it might not go very well, even if we do mode switch successfully instantly.
Driving a modern car has opened my eyes to how far off truly autonomous cars really are.
One of the main reasons I still like older cars. I consider it harassment when I get ding donged to death for not wearing the seatbelt for a two minute drive down the road, if this shit ever happened to me the car is getting fuckin sold ASAP
Wear your seatbelt, you ding dong.
ever needed to put something heavy in the passengers seat ? ever needed to move the car a short distance slowly ?
In both cases, wear your seatbelt, you ding dong.
am i required to also put the seatbelt down for the heavy object ? seems a bit unnecessary in both cases :/
