SoonerLS

I love to watch the piston-powered warbirds make their low passes at air shows. The jets are impressive in performance, but there's nothing like the sound of Whistling Death's Double Wasp or the Flying Fort's Cyclones. Somewhere I have a series of pictures I took at an airshow in the '90s, when I was standing maybe 50 yards ahead of a B17 as the crew was firing up her engines...that was an awesome experience...

They're lightweights, just like Fringe with the Ford and Nissan placements (at least switching to Nissans served to advance a plot thread--it helped underline how much things had changed). The producers of the aforementioned new Hawaii 5-0 are absolutely shameless whores--at least they were. Their in-your-face plugs finally got to be too shameless, so I quit watching and cancelled the DVR schedule for it. I could understand the Chebbie beauty shots, but the Windows Phone "just Bing it" and Subway "sweet onion teriyaki" inline ads were just too much...

FWIW, the Blue Oval wasn't always blue--it was red, if it was colored at all, on the tractors (which were predominantly red in color 'til the '60s)--but it always had the Ford script inside the oval.

I'm not overly fond of either, but the XLT grille looks awful, IMHO--the three bars would have been OK, but the toilet seat surround is too damned much chrome. I don't want bling on my truck. Actually, I don't want bling on any of my vehicles...

I'm fairly certain that's an '87-'91 F150. It sure looks like the dashboard in my '91 (although mine has a nice Alpine head unit instead of an empty hole, and it's more of a gray color).

I wouldn't take bets on a sales guy being more of a gearhead than an engineer who's made his name and fortune at companies that design and build transportation. Whether he's a gearhead or not is really beside the point--Mulally has to be a pragmatist; he simply cannot green light projects that don't stand a reasonable chance of turning a profit. Bob Lutz can afford to be a gearhead; Mulally cannot. Which of the two would you rather have sitting at the head of Ford? Austerity may or may not rule for his successor; if it doesn't it will only be because of the Mulally years...

:yup: My dad put 120K miles on a car in four years primarily due to his daily commute because his office was in Oklahoma City, but he and my mother wanted to raise their family in a smaller town. As a systems engineer for a computer company with large installations scattered throughout the OKC metro, it wasn't unusual for him to put over 100 miles on the clock in a day just from the site visits. It's all about what's important to you.

Funny--I was just going to tell you two to get a room already...

Alas, using an iPad to post messages is most assuredly not painless--between autocowrecks and the keyboard not registering key presses, it can be quite painful...

Not long after my boss got his '10(?) Camaro SS, it got a door ding in the crease that runs along the side about halfway up (all I can say is that the Camaro's doorskins appear to be made of tracing paper...). Fortunately, he bought the no-deductible dent repair insurance, so they sent a paintless dent repairman, and he did an amazing job--not quite two years later, and you still can't tell that anything ever happened.

I don't think they got their own marketing department, per se, but Ford did hire a firm that'll exclusively handle Lincoln advertising.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived. -- General George S. Patton, Jr.

My younger brother will swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that when I was a teenager my mother and I had an argument in the car while we were driving up the interstate, and she pulled over to the side of the road and put my radio out on the side of the road. I don't doubt my brother's veracity, but I don't remember that incident at all (and I have an outstanding memory). Likewise, my boss came to this job from another department, and he told me that there was someone who worked with him there that had it in for me for something I'd said or done, but I have no recollection of ever saying or doing anything to or about him that should elicit any such reaction. To this day, I don't have a clue as to what I did; obviously, that incident, whatever it was, was important to him, but not to me. If Romney says he doesn't remember that incident, I have no reason to doubt him. People do lots of stupid things when they're young (and eighteen is still young and stupid); if we remembered each and every one of them, how in the world would we ever be able to move forward in our lives?

What I notice is that the person who took the picture played with the zoom on the camera, making the groups in the bus and bicycle pictures look smaller and the open areas look bigger. And, assuming they have the same number of people in each group, it looks like they're assuming one person per car; I didn't count them all, but it looks like they have close to fifty cars in the picture (though they way they've framed it, it's impossible to tell how many there really are). In other words, it's a useless graphical demonstration of the bias of the person who created it.

That's what I'm thinking, too. The current base price on the MKZ is $34,755; it would take a hell of a lot of added content to move it up over $5K (or roughly 15%).

I agree with you that common sense would indicate that there should necessarily be differences between truck and car transmissions (even if the car has much more power and torque on tap), but I've studied enough science and engineering to know that the numbers don't always support what common sense tells you. The kicker is when you look at what Ford did 20 years ago when presented with the same question; the numbers are certainly bigger now, but the percentages aren't--IIRC, my F150's 302 makes around 220ft-lbs, but my T-Bird SC made around 315ft-lbs, and both used the same Mazda 5-speed. I'm just wondering if there's something more substantial than "I think" or "the logical conclusion is" to back up the notion that the Mustang (or another car) tranny couldn't handle life in an F150. Even if it can't, the F150 guys seem to like the ZF manuals better than the Tremecs, anyway; I'm sure ZF would be happy to sell them to Ford if the Mustang's trannies aren't suitable.

I can't find the Owner's Guide for my '91, but the figures I've been able to find put the '91 F150's tow rating at up to 7500lbs. Yes, the new ones can go up to 11K lbs, but how many people will actually tow anything with an F150, let alone come close to its tow rating? I'd bet the latter group is even smaller than the group who'd buy an F150 with a stick, and hell, if you need (or want) the max tow rating, you can buy the slushbox. And F-Series owners have ALWAYS demanded longevity of the trucks, at least here in truck country. I can't speak for florists up north. But that doesn't answer my question--why can't the Tremec in the GT500 handle duty in an F150? I'm not talking about business cases--I'm willing to assume that Ford isn't suffering from a cranio-rectal inversion on this. I just want to know why a transmission designed to handle ~650ft-lbs of torque (with a safety margin) can't handle duty on a mill that won't even hit 2/3rds of that figure. I've heard lots of "it just can't" accompanied by hand-waving, but I've not yet heard the answer to this question: What, technically, disqualifies a Mustang's transmission from use in an F150?

Then 'splain something to me. In 1991, Ford thought it was perfectly fine to use the exact same transmission to handle the torque of the 3.8SC and the towing of a V8 F150. Why is that no longer accurate?

Why not? It wouldn't be the first time it had been done--my '89 T-Bird SC had the same Mazda 5-speed stick as my '91 F150 4x4. (Why, yes, it has a 302, manual crank windows, rubber floor mats, and no head liner (from the factory), thanks for asking. ) They would likely have to change some of the gear ratios to deal with the different torque curves for the trucks, but there's no way the F-150's V8s (or even the EB35) are going to touch the torque of the GT500. There would still be the cost of Federalizing the thing, but I don't think the transmission itself is that much of a stumbling block.

Oh no you don't. If I go down, I'm taking you with me, you manual transmission hater, you!

We also had half the population we have now...

I didn't include them, but I didn't forget them. They just don't count You couldn't prove it by the 5R55S in my LS. Despite the best efforts of our mutual friend in its calibration, it's still a sow's ear. I never said that most buyers want what I want; I just think there are enough to justify putting a manual transmission in the F-Series. Maybe I'm entirely wrong on that; Lord knows it wouldn't be the first time.

They don't change the sales data, but how they interpreted it is highly suspect, given some of their other patently stupid decisions. As noted above, there could have been other reasons for the decline in manual transmission sales (low profit packages that dealers wouldn't order on a bet, stupid packages that included things that buyers didn't want, etc), but ten years down the road from that, we don't have any reliable data one way or the other. That's what I think separates this from, say, the decision to kill the Ranger. For that, we have current, hard data--we know that market has continued to shrink even as the full-size market started swinging back up; for this, the only evidence we have is that nobdy's making them... The only three truck makers of note are Ford, GM, and, occasionally, Chrysler, and we know that all three of them were afflicted with idiotic management, and only Ford has apparently rectified that situation. Hell, maybe they don't offer a manual because they didn't have enough money in the program, or maybe it costs to much to get them through the Federal red tape, or maybe it's just because American drivers are too stupid and lazy to be bothered with a clutch and there really is no market for them. Whichever it is, it still galls me that I can't go buy a new real pickup, whether there's a business case for it or not.

If Congress can torture the Commerce Clause to allow it to meddle in affairs that are entirely intra-state (a power denied to them by the 10th Amendment), why can't they use a far more vaguely-worded clause to support the interstate system, or at least the main parts that are truly inter-state (and thus directly affected by the Commerce Clause) or involved in national defense? Given that road building and maintenance are fundamental functions of government, at least as far back as the Roman Republic, it should be covered by the general taxation, just like public education, law enforcement, and defense. (Yes, I'm mixing local, state, and Federal, but there are roles for all three to play.) Of course, that would require fiscal discipline on the part of politicrits at all levels, and that is sorely lacking these days.

Hardly--road building and maintenance are among the fundamental duties of government. It's even in the Constitution--one of the powers of Congress is the establishment of post roads. I'm saying if they stopped doing the crap they aren't supposed to be doing, funding the building and maintenance of roads and bridges wouldn't be an issue because the money would be there to do so.