Leaderboard

C&G's 25th birthday is coming up in August of this year and I wanted to give you some updates. I haven't been posting as much lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not here. I am working on a massive overhaul of the site ahead of our 25th birthday. Background: The Invision Community software we are on is V4. Support for V4 is tapering off rapidly as V5 was released over a year ago. V5 is a major change to how the software operates and as a result many of the plug-in authors who wrote software that I purchased for us have abandoned their projects. This has put me in the position of holding off on V5 until I can get certain things built or replaced. In the meantime, I'm also making a lot of changes in the background that will translate over to V5 seamlessly. What's done: The Garage has been completely replaced. The author of the Garage plug-in abandoned it years ago. His site is still active but loaded with spam posts. I used Claude Code to reverse engineer his plug-in into an IPS.Pages app (the app that runs our Articles system and comes with the main software). My primary goal here was to get all of your vehicle profiles transferred into the new system and preserved prior to a V5 upgrade. I will make the Garage prettier once we move. Fixed an issue where Google treated the comments forum of an article as duplicate content. This watered down our search results significantly, hindering people from finding the site. It will take Google months to figure all this out and fix it, but it will improve things going foward. Fixed an issue where Google was only able to read 500 of our Albums. What's in progress: Albums are getting massive search engine optimization overhaul. I'm using AI to read every single one of our nearly 2000 albums to properly optimize them for search results. For albums, the AI downloads the thumbnails, analyzes the pictures, adds meaningful descriptions, and special tags that help the search engines. It then finds the article that album is associated with and creates links to each other. Instead of Image01.jpg the search engine now sees "2027 Nissan Z NISMO front three-quarter view at dusk". This process is very resource intensive and the AI can only do about 50 a day. Articles are getting optimized as well. We have almost 7,000. You will probably have noticed this in the latest articles from @G. David Felt and myself. When one of us posts, the article is held hidden until I run the optimization process on it. It adds Headings, image tags, and meta tags for the search engines. It will do minor grammar and spelling checks, but the AI has very strict instructions not to change the tone, voice, and feel of the article. What you are reading is by us even if it gets a little punctuation and grammar polish after. In addition to SEO changes, older article sometimes use formatting that no longer works in the current software. There's frequently broken image links, pagination that doesn't work properly, and more. The AI is fixing it all. New fields have been added to Articles that you can't see. It allows us authors to classify the article based on news, opinion, new car release, historical, and more. Also make, model, model year, size, class, and others. What this will allow me to do is build Hub pages. We will have an EV hub for example. The current Auto Show categories will go away and be replaced with Auto Show Hubs. Major brands that get a lot of search traffic will get their own hubs, so we'll likely have a GMC hub and Mercedes-Benz hub. These hubs will consolidate content from Articles, Albums, and Forums into one space. Want to look at all content for GMC from 2018 - 2020? You'll be able to filter on that. The AI is also going to back fill this data to all of our old articles. I completed the first test run of 50 articles this morning. Only 6,950 to go! Our weekly newsletter is about to resume. You can manage your Subscription preferences in your Account Settings. We have officially opened the doors to welcoming AI Crawlers and instructed them to cite us correctly if they use our information. We now have a published AI Crawling Policy and the background site instructions for the crawlers to follow. Roadmap - There's a lot to do still before our birthday! V5 Upgrade - I am planning for this to happen in June of this year, possibly earlier if I can get the hubs pages built faster. There will be a significant update to the look and feel of the website when this happens. Our current theme vendor also quit now that V4 is done. Dedicated App - We already have the progressive web app, but for August I am planning on releasing native iOS and Android apps in the app stores. Automatic distribution to Social Media - draw in more traffic to our articles. We will have a slight tweaking of our branding. If you get the site update e-mails, you'll see the beginnings of it already. We'll have some updated graphics for Pride month and for our Birthday coming out mid-summer. What Else? I've been elected to the board of the Washington Auto Press Association (WAPA) for 2026. It will give me better access to content making opportunities. I'm actively developing another app of my own for your homes that you will all be invited to the Beta for. I'll make another post on that later today. Assuming that app takes off, I will be quitting my other consulting gigs that I've been working at full time for over a year with and focus on Cheers & Gears plus my other app called Apartmatic.

I know the Site News forum doesn't get a lot of traffic....

Most of that is old stuff. M5 processor is out now and six of those devices are M3s, one is an M2 iPad. The iPhone 15 Pro an Pro Max were not some of Apple's best work and we're on 17 now. I just can't with 4-cylinder turbos on premium aiming products. No one has really fixed the NVH of these engines and they all sound terrible. I'd really rather a small displacement 6 cylinder, say 2.5 liters with a turbo for premium stuff. Buick to Benz, they all sound bad.

She looks like a fake plastic surgery disaster bimbo...no substance there. Just a wannabe Kardashian...

There was no money in it and except for Tesla, there's still no money in it. Even the Chinese EV manufacturers are being propped up by their government or by income from other lines of business (BYD is a huge leader in heavy trucks, buses, and construction equipment). And I'm having serious doubts about Tesla now too. Tesla is alive on hype alone. Less then 10 years prior all three of the domestics were facing annihilation unless the government stepped in. It was, and still is, cheaper to just pay for clean energy credits from somewhere else than it is to spin up an entire EV platform. Even a gasoline platform can take a billion dollars to start, that's how much Sergio spent on the Giorgio Platform to get two Alfas, two Jeeps, and the Maserati Grecale. That's what Benz spends on the S-Class platform. In the era after 2008, none of them were willing to take chances on unprofitable product. GM and Hyundai should really get a lot more credit for what they've done with their EVs. GM's EVs don't make the headlines as much as everyone else's but the flexibility of their platform is unmatched by even Tesla. Ford should get a lot more credit with the Lightning and Mach-E. The Lightning may not have been the absolute best solution, but it was a fantastic result for the incredibly short development time it had. People look at the Lighning as a failure today, but look how fast Ford got that to market and, aside from some product mix mishaps, it's a perfectly capable truck for family duty.

Sorta true sorta not. It implies that Tesla had some sort of magic but what it really was was funding from the legacies. For many of the early years of Tesla, the only way they made money was buy selling clean energy credits to the legacy makers. Big gas trucks literally funded Tesla's growth. The legacies didn't get tax dollars for EVs until later. The Bolt was developed with GM knowing it would lose money on it because GM would never be able to sell the clean energy credits like Tesla did. The big tax incentives same later after 2020 during the Biden administration and it was the only way the legacies didn't lose their shirt on EVs. But if you think about it. Ford, GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Volkswagen, and Subaru can't even make a profitable mid-size sedan right now, much less make money on EVs.

The auto industry also has the ability to just "do the right thing" on their own, right? i get that the president is a POS and he makes bad decision after bad decision, but this also needs to be put onto the auto manufacturers. They had 15 years to get to the point of building affordable BEVs with adequate range, but they sat on their hands until like 2019 or so, while getting our tax dollars. Now that they aren't getting our extra tax dollars they just decide to cancel them? That sounds exactly like the "corporate greed" that all of us regular people are sick and tired of. The fact that it is something oh so earily broken. They're unnecessarily funky to operate. Oh, and we get ice here in the Midwest and I can guarantee they are, at the very least, finicky when it's 0 degrees F and there's ice on the vehicle. The fact that there's even discussions on a door handle and how it operates, means it's been over-thought. These stupid flush door handles very likely would not stop me from buying something with them, but that doesn't mean I have to like that function.

Things not looking good on the world stage.

The second sad video, I swear I live in the rectal orifice of the United States sometimes....Even though Ohio has a LOT going for it...

I know. When I was talking about USC, I then went over to Mossimo and Lori Loughlin. They participated in the bribed admissions snafu at USC for their daughters and did time. I rechecked and those two are separated instead of divorced. As for Bezos and his arm candy, only time will tell what that will look like.

$45k for an appliance FWD CUV w/ a 4cyl in white w/ a gray interior is pretty depressing to imagine. My Jeep was in that price range 12 years ago, much nicer design inside and out and well equipped w/ a V6 and AWD...and with inflation, the equivalent spec to that on a 2025 is about $53k..same engine and transmission, AWD, same color scheme, trim level and options. My sister's '23 Chevy Equinox LT was $34k out the door new at the end of 2022. She got $15k in trade on her 2015 Trax and paid cash for the difference.

Yeah, given Stellantis' quality/reliability issues, a 5000lb SUV w/ a 2.0 turbo 4 just seems like asking for trouble. I just find the current market pretty boring and uninspired. The only vehicles I have any interest in are $75k to over $100k. Which I can afford but really can't justify the spend.. Better to invest in upgrades to my house and maybe purchase a winter home as I approach retirement in the next decade (which I'm having a hard time admitting to myself), keep my current vehicles going indefinitely...

Yeah, and if you’re a dumb dumb, like I expect that user was they left the key fob inside the car

There is also Genesis with their 3 sedans (G70, G80, G90) and Lexus still has the IS, ES, and LS.