I was fortunate enough to take a trip to the Los Angeles area for the first time and snagged a Model 3 on Turo for the weekend. I have some thoughts...

The Turo experience itself was outstanding. The Tesla was actually cheaper than most airport rental cars, as well as nicer than most rental cars. As for the Tesla itself, I came away amazed and disappointed. The powertrain and battery tech in the car is unreal. We did probably 220 miles in the car and still showed 90 miles of range left. I loved on pedal driving once I got used to it and the instant power was intoxicating. I fully believe in the electric future after experiencing that. The rest of the car, however, was utter crap.

The biggest disappointment was ride quality. My 2014 Mazda6 with 75k miles rides better. It was shockingly unrefined, rough, and loud over any bump. Anybody who considers this a luxury car couldn't have possibly driven one. I also could not stand the center screen and lack of gauge cluster. How can a car this modern not have Android Auto and Apple Carplay? The navigation constantly took me longer routes than Google Maps was on my phone. My final gripe is with "Autopilot." It's very clunky to turn on and off in the Model 3. The adaptive cruise was alright, but the lane keep assist seemed to struggle more than my Subaru with Eyesight. Just a total disappointment of a system. I didn't feel it was any better than the rather basic system Subaru uses.

I will end my thoughts on a good note, which is that not having to really have a key or start button was really nice. The electric future is bright.

Figured I'd also share a couple favorites from the Petersen...

Delehaye 1938 Delahaye Type 145 was my personal favorite. Highly recommend reading the book about Lucy Schell and her quest to build a car to beat the Germans in the early 20th century.

After about 3 years of only periodic trips driven very carefully, I finally found a shop that knew what was wrong with my Corvette and could fix is pretty easily. After a previous shop found the front driver side brake line wasn't getting any fluid, they basically gave up trying to diagnose it.

Fortunately I moved somewhere near a Corvette shop, who knew before even looking at the car that it needed an ABS module. After a week, the car is back and driving great!

Side note, I probably need a bigger garage... Probably like 10 inches to spare between the two cars.

I had to move my wife's car to allow some junk pick up people to clear some stuff from my garage and it barely started and gave me the AFS Off light. If anyone here has owned a recent Mazda, you may know that AFS Off (which actually refers to the steering headlights) generally indicates a dying battery. The battery in the car is 3 years old now, which isn't too bad, but it doesn't like sitting for a long time. With my wife now working from home, her car hasn't moved much in the last 10 days.

Fortunately, I figured this would be an issue, so I have a trickle charger on hand that should hopefully help extend the battery another year or 2. It's also nice to have the car back in the garage after getting rid of all the junk that was filling it up.

Basically what the title of the post says. Wife was driving home from the grocery store and got rear ended while sitting at a red light. Supposedly the cop said the person that hit her was at fault.

Fortunately she's okay and the car isn't too bad, but holy cow is a car accident inconvenient. She's without a car now since my company doesn't allow her to drive my car. I filed a claim with the other person's insurance company, but I have a feeling this won't be a simple process.

I'm just lucky with all the driving I do that this is the first time I've ever had to deal with my car being hit. Wish me luck with dealing with insurance!

@carsoffortlangley Subaru offers an STI shift knob for the CVT WRX.

Wordle 215 2/6

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This one worked really well with my usual starting word. First time getting in two

@ibrad I haven't read much Jalopnik since OG Oppo was shut down, but I figured I'd venture back to read the farewell article. Torch was always one of my favorite writers on the site so I hope to see him pop up again somewhere soon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a35218197/tested-five-1992-4wd-minivans-vs-alaska/

I've been checking the Car and Driver website more frequently since they begun sharing some older stories. The one linked above really caught my attention. Taking minivans to the Arctic!? That's a wild way to test minivans and I can't imagine anyone short of the Grand Tour doing something like that these days. It's a fascinating read, not just about some old minivans, but also about what it's like to travel to such an extreme place.

I also can't believe how the Previa placed. They really didn't have many complaints about it, yet ranked it poorly. I won't spoil the story too much though. Also was amused to finally see a 0-60 time for the Previa: 12.8 Seconds. My family had a 92 Previa and I never thought it felt that slow. It's a spunky van, but still slow apparently!

That's a bit of a bummer. I'm remember him being pretty easy to dislike early on in his career when he we winning just about every race and coming off as petty and whiny. He really mellowed out and became quite likable though.

I still remember a radio message he had during his last championship season with Red Bull where he told the team to really enjoy the moment because it won't last forever. It was a message that really suck with me.

My father in law recently leased a former loaner car BMW 330i and ended up with a red car because it has the options he wanted. However the chrome grill on it is really a bit much, with the chrome also seeming out of place. There's no chrome anywhere else on the car. Fortunately a black grill from BMW is pretty cheap and surprisingly easy to install. A few plastic clips and suddenly the car looks a lot better.

I also learned BMW offers logos for the wheels that are always upright, like Rolls Royce logos.

@HFV_Junkyardin I don't care for the painted fenders, but the painted rear bumper makes a huge difference.

@ZHP-Sparky-the-5th I can attest, it's actually a pretty solid car. Just did a 600 mile round trip in one. I'm still not a big fan of the boxer exhaust note, but it's better than most cars still.

$73,000

@facw distracted driving may only make up a small percentage of traffic fatalities, with most being the result of speeding, alcohol (11k!), Or lack of seatbelt use (which isn't really a cause of the crash, just increases the likelihood of a fatal incident, but distracted driving most definitely makes up a huge portion of total traffic crashes.

I've been reading a book called Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt that was written in 2008, so pre smartphone (I found it at a used books store). In the book, the author references studies done using dash cams which found crashes in work vehicles (so not likely alcohol factored) were generally preventable just by having the driver pay closer attention to actually driving. I'd be curious to see what that study would look like now with the amount of heavily distracted driving that goes on since the proliferation of smartphones.

Anyways, my point is, distracted driving is known to make up a relatively small proportion of fatal crashes, but likely makes up a huge portion of total traffic incidents.

@davesaddiction while what happened to the Gawker sites still sucks, we got some great sites out of it in The Autopian, Defector, and the hyphen.

@WhoIsTheLeader I feel like with fuel costs, that Durango R/T is more of a status symbol than the BMWs in Germany.

@Exage03040 I'm not sure I've ever seen hood struts as a scheduled item. You'd think it be a "well they still work" kind of item

@davesaddiction I'm not a big BMW fan and really dislike how most of their current line up looks...but I still think that's the best looking sedan on sale currently. I can't believe how much worse the new one is. Wait, yes I can. They have a history of following up beautiful designs with some of the worst designs.

@Mazda616 Skyactiv continues to be reliable for me! 2014 6 with 80k miles. I just had the spark plugs replaced as called for by the maintenance schedule.

My brother's 15 in the other hand needed a tensioner replaced and has some valve cover gasket seepage.

@Highlander I can't say I've ever seen roof racks on a retractable hard top. I'm also noticing the camera for the rear view mirror is mounted on the roof, so can you not use the video mirror if the top is down?