talkswithwind

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Cars (again)
  Greg, please do not feed the troll....
• scentofviolets commented on Cars (again)
  @ 364: This is a complex debate, and I don't want to get into all the vagaries of it here, since I already have them written on my own web site, but I tend to take the approach that people will do what they want, not what they "should," and can only be redirected mildly by city planners. And even though we might hope to design cities the way we "could" design them, for now we have what we have and we can only tweak it slightly. I didn't want to go there since anyone can look at your web...
• bellinghman commented on Cars (again)
  worthless clunkers at 70k miles. Whereas I note that Vauxhall (the British division of GM) now provide a 100k mile warranty. I broke my first car (an ancient Vauxhall Chevette as it happens) at 98k....
• bellinghman commented on Cars (again)
  Indeed so. But it would been fully used up by my wife's last car, which she ran from new till she realised that last year's scrappage scheme valued it at twice its residual value. (Or it would have covered it if she'd not decided she hated the Vectra, and bought a Primera instead.) As for my last car, I traded it in at 140K. I'd driven it for 80K after being side impacted by a BMW 520 which wrote itself off in the process. (I really appreciated Audi's engineering after that. Rebuilding the driver's side wasn't cheap, mind, and it...
• bellinghman commented on Cars (again)
  Yes, the warranty isn't an unlimited one, and yes, a lot of private owners currently do swap their car at 3 years. But historically, they're swapping because that's the point when warranties would have run out, MoTs became required, and suddenly maintenance costs became unpredictable. If their warranty actually holds till the car is 10 years old instead, then one of the drivers to change the vehicle suddenly goes away. (Not all reasons, of course - there's still fashion, or changing requirements, or general unwarrantied shabbiness.)...