IMBoring25

If they were arguing gas mileage, which I'm sure they were, that's hilarious, because some models of the Super Duty get BETTER mileage than the Ridgeline.

I'm convinced the Goat failed (Don't know if GM would call it that) because of its price tag. You can have a V8 Mustang, with gotta-have-it styling, or you can have a GTO, with unobjectionable styling, for...6000 more dollars? And then have to put Premium gas in it? Lemme think...

That grille: 1) Would look more at home on a 2009 Pontiac Tempest. 2) Has absolutely no coherence with any other Lincoln design I can recall. 3) Isn't even consistent internally. You have a break-line in the middle of the grille, yet you go about a third of the way up to the top of the grille from there to find the bottom of the headlights, and neither of those lines is continued anywhere else on the car. Huh? 4) Is going to give me nightmares tonight. ANYTHING else they could have done with that grille would have looked better. The rest...Uhhh...Isn't bad.

When I think "Automakers," I think Daihatsu and Hino... :rolleyes: It'll happen soon enough...There's no need to pad the stats.

I understand supercapacitors are coming along (Not ready for prime time yet, but coming along). Then there are always gravity storage, flywheels, hydraulic storage, et al... Perhaps a suitably creative application could incorporate all of those concepts into a cohesive unit that would provide more power than they are perceived to alone.

You're right. Toyota's impact at this plant is overblown. But nickel isn't the nasty part of battery manufacture and disposal.

The state of patent law is such that, when you discover that something you have developed, even if you developed it completely alone and with no outside input, resembles something that someone else has patented, it is often cheaper to license their patent (Be it through an exchange of licenses, a lump-sum payment, or royalties) than to pay the lawyers to battle it out. As viciously as the two companies fought over T-150 and LS-8, I don't see that particular battle being to either company's advantage.

That's the beauty of dual-fuel. It doesn't require a network. Just sporadic stations. When you can fuel on your preferred fuel, you do. When you can't, you burn gas. Simple. Get enough dual-fuel vehicles on the road, and the network will follow.

Three letters...HLA.

I'll bet you're right...

Sounds as though Bill's forecast was [gasp] conservative. Just a few years early.

I remember a Ford recall involving some 12-year-old vehicles. My car was covered. It was also an ignition switch.

Both.

Yes. Only 60% of Panthers are yellow.

It might make up for the vehicles sold at a loss if Ford was the entity making the money...They're not.

There's a certain amount of responsibility for a manufacturing company to produce a product that not only performs correctly when procedure is performed correctly, but also has consequences of fairly similar magnitude to competitive products if procedure is performed incorrectly. After years of practice, shops are fairly comfortable with the idea that a double-gasket means an irate customer on the side of the road, possibly with a locked-up engine. And the amount of care they take to avoid it reflects that. Let's face it, it's a crummy and expensive deal, but it's no Honda flambe... While you are correct that, when procedure is followed, nothing bad happens, Honda has succeeded in producing a vehicle for which the criticality of correctly doing the job is substantially higher. Which is, at best, irresponsible.

I'm eager to learn, but I don't remember any of the Explorer delaminations involving a vehicle on which the tires were even up to the manual pressure. I remember a lot of quotes of 18 and 19 psi being involved. Further, given reasonably competent driving, a tire failure should be a non-issue. I've experienced four of them as the driver, none of which significantly affected vehicle handling. Of course, I wasn't doing 80 mph, high, overloaded, underinflated, or towing a trailer. It occurs to me that they've all been rear tires, but so were the bulk of Explorer rollovers I've heard of. Conversely, if A TECHNICIAN messes up your oil filter (Let's face it, most people don't change their own), once the smoke starts billowing out from under your hood, you have little hope of salvaging a satisfactory result from the situation.

Remember the T-150 and LS6 debacles? Toy can't possibly expect this to stick. I consider it a preemptive strike for the next time Ford comes up with a name they don't like.

I don't know what it is, but the Chevy aspect of the parking light between the high and low beam headlights (Yes, I know it's a chrome bar on the Chevy) pokes me in the eye much more on that 'Shop than it does on the original truck.

This rears its ugly head again. It looks like you're trying to come up with some configuration that spends all the money you've budgeted. If you're going to look at the 'vert, the 'vert is obviously worth something to you. Keep in mind that you're comparing a 'vert to a plethora of coupes. If the 'vert's not worth that much to you, acknowledge that you COULD buy the coupe and the question becomes your gimmicks or $5-6000 in your pocket. You are under no obligation to spend all the money you've budgeted. If the convertible has intrinsic value to you, acknowledge that intrinsic value. If it does not, forget it and compare the coupes on equal footing.

Suppose I put the Super Duty kink in the beltline? Standing on the shoulders of giants here, I'll admit, but... And to show you how critical these lines become, I tried taking out the beltline kickup, but it made the overall too Mitsubishi-Raider for my taste. Despite the fact that some competitors have used a kickup, I think this truck looks better with it than without it.

What are you people whining about? It's a PICKUP TRUCK. That fixes some very important lines that can be used to differentiate sedans. As trucks go, there is practically no resemblance between the Frontier and the PhotoShop, and the resemblance to the Tacoma, while it's there, is not exceptional. If you're scared to do anything that resembles something a competitor has done, you'll never do anything. Straight beltline only goes so far, and you can't exactly kick the beltline DOWN at the back...