SAmadei

Its not tremendously thicker, as least on the retrofits I've seen. OEM setups might use heavier to be on the safe side. LEDs, in theory should need less wiring than incandescent... but considering how much heat some LEDs give off, they are not all created equally. Your car uses Romex? ;-) That would be interesting. The weight of the electrical is not just in the copper... but also the covering... lighter gauge wires use comparably thick coverings. Also motors/speakers/etc. have miles of wire spooled up in coils and magnets are heavy, as well. I can't see that being worthwhile. Aluminum wiring in a home is such a PITA, its easiest to rip it out. Its worth the weight/hassle ratio in a aircraft... the only way I see it worth doing it in a car is if the price of copper spikes again. Which it may, I might add... we have a severe worldwide copper shortage.

Well, I don't believe just anything I read. Cold Fusion has lots written about it for decades now. Anyway, the article doesn't specify where exactly the bacteria are coming from? Us? I realize we have 'friendly bacteria' internally, but I doubt we are losing them in any massive amounts. I'm still thinking the excrement is gathering them after being excreted. Fermented. Maybe this is why we're getting so many E. Coli contamination problems... too many food fields downstream of top secret Excrement Reclaimation plants. Of course, if they are harvesting theses proteins from bacteria, why not step back a step and harvest them from something a little less nasty... like maggots. Then you can feed the maggots excrement to their heart's content, and people can understand better that they are not technically making steak from excrement. Will people eat maggot burgers? I don't know. We eat mechanically recovered meat (Well, I don't anymore)... its about as nasty a process as you can get. Call maggot meat "Diptera Beef".

I don't know where this source is, but I think this is mostly BS. To the best of my knowledge, we are not just spewing out spare proteins. I suppose someone who eats lots of hard to digest plant matter may, as we have a relatively short digestive tract due to being meat eaters. In fact, proteins in one's urine are a sign of kidney failure. If the body is hoarding proteins, I'm sure it is not only doing it in one type of waste. That said, I note in the video that they mention sewage mud... which makes me think that the excrement is being eat to some sort of microbe... perhaps this microbe is the source of edible proteins. I think this is somebodies idea of a April fools video. In other news, synthetic meats are coming... grown in pans or forms with nothing but nutrients washed over them. The problem has been that the resultant meat is too uniform... it fails the "real test" in the same way the "uncanny valley" does. I look forward to this technology because I don't like fatty, grisly meat... and I like the idea of slaughter-free meat.

And nowhere in there did I directly say that the CTS was too small for my particular group of ex-Cadillac owners... only that it is not large and that people I know in RL have not found it particularly comfortable. Those ex-Cadillac owners? Surprise, I'm not riddling them with questions about their tastes, or what they are test driving. Its inappropriate to bring up during the rare times I see them, usually when there is a casket in the room. Should I make a Venn diagram for you? People I know who have test driven the CTS and found it uncomfortable would be in one circle. Ex-Cadillac owners is in another circle that does not intersect the first circle. Apparently you do. You have a real hard on for misreading between the lines, and it just continues. I NEVER said the CTS is too small for Cadillac. Its too small to be Cadillac's only sedan. Even Lincoln's awful product portfolio still has a relatively large car in the MKS... too bad the boat has already sailed for Lincoln. Mercedes hasn't been making cars that are any bigger than Cadillacs? ...I'm not going to make you an exhaustive list or exterior and interior dimensions... when in June of 2011 the largest Cadillac car in production is 191.6 inches. The shortest E-class is 191.7... and the S-class is bigger. Christ, Hyundai is making THREE carlines that are bigger than the CTS. Shall we wait for 2022 for a true flagship? How about 2065? Last time I checked, time was money... and Cadillac is wasting time.

Maybe in AZ... in NJ, most GTs and Kadetts didn't make it out of the '70s.

And this is where you need GPS. Did I say that here: Or here? Better go back and reread the thread so you know what you are talking about. To clarify, they left Cadillac because of size and other Cadillac misfires... they are not coming back because the are happy where they are at. Also its mostly Benz loving family, not friends, unless bosses are automagically friends. I prefer to think of them as associates. Anyway, they moved to the big Mercedes' years ago... when Cadillac was busy pushing a bunch of tiny Eldos, Sevilles and Cimmarrons... the big Mercs influenced some of their children and grandchildren drive... hence 1 or 2 E classes. They ain't moving back because Merc still makes a flagship and the biggest Cadillac is the size of a medium Buick. Having a flagship that exudes some class, instead of looking like it belongs in a rap video, helps elevate the lesser car lines. Your arguing. I was sharing anecdotal evidence. The current planned bigger flagship is a Buick wannabe. Your new assertion that "Cadillac makes big enough cars" is completely absurd now that the STS and DTS are gone. A Cadillac should be at least large enough to take 3 people to the airport with all of their luggage. Or 4 tall execs to a lunch meeting that doesn't require them getting out of a clown car in their suits. I can't imagine forcing my hypothetical family of four in a CTS, once the children were past 10.

I'm not saying the Chinese are taking over next Thursday, but they are coming. In the meantime, you are assuming we maintain our lofty riches and continue to be able to afford cars with heated horn buttons, rose colored window washer fluid and baby seal interior fabric. Unless our country takes evasive maneuvers, we're going to crash. When we join our 3rd world brothers as part of the race to the bottom, whos going to be affording anything?

This is why the Chinese are primed to finish off the domestics. 80% of the copycat car for 50% of the money. Why do I say domestics? Simple... they are the ones currently trying to elevate the brand image with higher prices. If truck sales collapse and higher priced small cars don't take off, I predict the collapse will be fast. GM needs to be able to sell all cars at a reasonable profit... even low content ones.

Nice. Although, even if GM gave that car to me for free, I still wouldn't drive it. And of course, if GM gave me a Sonic for free, I'd not be able to fit in it to drive it, unless I take a Sawzall to it.

A Park Avenue aimed at Lexus and Acura 20 years ago? . That would make no sense now with the recently departed Lucerne. Now at least the current LaCrosse can safely (and correctly) be cross-shopped with an ES350 and a TL, maybe an RL. Only thing GM successfully aimed and and hit 20 years ago was a sharp stick in the eye.

Meh. Audi will have something like HiPer soon enough, if they deem it necessary. What kills me is that every GM FWD fanboy has been talking about how torque steer was a thing of the past. Then HiPer Strut shows up.... and now the line is the same... torque steer is a thing of the past. Well, the former wasn't the case if GM felt the need to make HiPer, why should I believe the latter? Until HiPer allows me to steer with the throttle and keeps the TC from kicking in and killing the engine's power at anything more than 66%, I'm not impressed. Physics is physics.

Yeah, and they both have four tires. BFD. You have left Relevanttown well behind. Oh, well, you're preaching to the choir there, my friend. That's why my 35 years of heavy GM loyalty turns to bitterness everyday that passes. GM has decided to forsake us.

I don't blame the safety regs on cars too much. Sure they have driven up the weights in some areas, but IMHO, its weight well spent. The use of more HS steel is fine from a weight perspective... as its not radically heavier than the standard steel used before. Z's note about higher strength/lighter weight materials coming down in price to get wide acceptance is true, but most of those materials aren't getting cheaper anytime soon. There are good reasons why they are pricy. I partially blame the electronics in cars... as Balthy already noted, you can only trim wiring down so far. With every car having miles of wire in place, it gets heavy quick... so I blame electrical. Pull apart many modern cars and the wiring is so outrageous that it barely fits in the spaces allocated to it. Its getting to the point where the pathways the wiring runs are getting to take up a larger and larger percentage of the interior volume. Now note, I am not for dumbing down cars completely... most smartphones are more powerful than the CPUs in cars, and smartphones are quite light. The problem is being smarter about laying out where sensors, resistive elements, etc. need to be to maximize needed features with weight. I also believe a big contributor of weight is sound deadening. Everybody today expects their little econobox to sound like a tank when shutting doors... well, thats done by pumping a bunch of heavy tar-like material into the doors... making them very heavy. I'd love to know how much sound deadening modern cars have, weightwise, compared to cars of years past. Even in the '70s and '80s when using tar-like materials were being used sparingly, the hot rodders would go at the body with a torch to get rid of that weight... a thin coating ended up being 100-200 pounds. That's a .1 to .2 second 1/4 mile improvement. Today, nobody bothers when you an get 700hp streetable engines. I wouldn't doubt if some new cars have 500+ pounds of sound deadener in them. Finally, I think the plastics are adding a ton of weight. Plastics are lighter than steel, but plastic piles up weight quickly, as well. Modern plastic parts are much more robust than parts in the past... to make them more rigid, unbreakable and to also absorb unwanted sounds. Look no further than the racers gutting cars of all that crap to save weight. As far as the CAFE versus the NHTSA fighting things out, I foresee both continuing their respective missions... CAFE will require lighter cars... NHTSA will require denser cars. The problem is producing functional vehicles is not part of either mission. So the result of the rule of unintentional results is obvious... eventually the only cars legally built will be tailor made for midgets... er, uh, "little people". And all will claim victory!

Nothing from GM has impressed me since the G8 GT. I'd like to love the Camaro, but I still can't get past the ergonomic nightmare it is, compared to the packaging efficiency of the smaller 1st gen it was based on.

It is good for them. I am building more character of being part of the 'black sheep' not-so-wealthy side of the family. I didn't just say S-classes... but there are enough of them... some E-classes. Most also own some sort of giant SUV, as well. An H1 was owned, not sure if it still is. $40-45,000 Devilles and Fleetwoods? Oh, as if they stuck with GM that late. After GM misfired the first couple times, they were long gone. Lets see... $13500 new '77 Seville... about 4x a '77 Nova. Today the Cruze is where the Nova was positioned in '77. $21000x4 gets you into high E-class, low S-class territory. So their taste in cars has only slightly leveled up over the years. I also recall a '82 Seville... rode in that to South Carolina and back twice. I can't believe that was $23K in '82 dollars. Of course, you are mixing two parts of my post here... I stated they don't have CTS's... but larger Mercedes (Its not hard to find a Merc larger than a CTS). My point about large, RWD cars is not necessarily about them... I feel the old luxobarge drivers are sitting in big SUVs ($35K~$55K) right now fretting over gas and the fact that there is nothing to downsize into without seriously compromising the space they need, with the handling and features they have gotten used to in these highly optioned SUVs. They have the mistaken idea that a luxobarge needs to drive like 1976, because its the bulk of what GM, Ford and Mopar have built.

Maybe this is the sub $15K Chevy Chevy needs... I actually like the rear and character line better than the Sonic. Sonic's nose wins, though.

Yeah, and? What if you can't afford $15K... GM has effectively said goodbye to a bunch of potential customers... unless, of course, the Spark comes here. IMHO, there still needs to be a cheaper option... remember the MUCH larger Jetta is reaching below this price point.

Its hard to tell from the photos of the deck and the engine parts... I was assuming the belt was set up to ride on a surface above the deck, but after looking closer at the photos, I'm no longer sure. I'm assuming that the broken part with the vanes is where the blade bolts to the engine, and therefore lives below the deck... in the photos, it appears it has a slight belt wear mark on the outside edge. Or course, you would have a better view of these parts, I'm just surmising. And always felt broken lawnmowers where like coat hangers... they seem to multiply spontaneously. In any case, cool... I hope you have all the parts to get it together...

Thank god.

Interesting...so which of those adjectives don't fit the CTS? It's certainly styled to be noticed, my experience in them has always been extremely comfortable, their engines are pretty powerful, and they are on the large side of their class (by price). The CTS is not large, and reviews from people I know feel it is not particularly comfortable. Surprisingly, NONE of the ex-Cadillac owners I know own a CTS. They all own Mercedes now. The CTS is fine (IMHO) as a 3 series competitor, but it is not where Cadillac's breadwinner should be. The luxobarge market dried up because the "big three" didn't change them with the times, giving people the wrong ideas about how a modern luxobarge could be. GM has spend the last 30 years, over a generation and a half, building first underpowered luxobarges, them converting all of them to FWD and the whole time, virtually none of them (by production numbers) where given decent handling to keep up with the sportier contemporary smaller sedans. People still want large vehicles... they were willing to move to truck platforms so they could have powerful engines, RWD and less floaty suspension. Now, with fuel prices up, where do these buyers go, since the large sedan market has been destroyed.

3rd edition. Must need a fourth.

Get Xzibit and his crew to go wild? ;-) Maybe not. Calling George Barris... ;-) Oddly the Grand Sports really never thrilled me outside of being unobtainium.

I could have sworn Cadillac did something similar in the later '90s... had to do with full throttle. But I can't find that, so I might be getting the problems somewhat mixed up.

I know the difference between open loop and closed loop, this was not the problem. This occurred while the system was in closed loop... it was essentially an emission defeating feature... http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/November95/596.txt.html Only link I can find on short notice.

Actually, the problem with these was not reliability, but driveability problems stemming from failing emissions components. Cadillac had similar problems in the late '90s when the EPA discovered that under certain conditions (full throttle) the computer would ignore emissions concerns completely. The EPA required recalls that booted them out of the country... but then UN sanctions killed their export business completely. Later, aerial bombing killed much of their homeland business. I give Zastava credit for still existing today. If you were to put the Yugo up against the original GM Diesel, 8-6-4 and Vega 2300, the Yugo would probably win in long term reliability. I believe if Zastava came back to the US with a newer $8000 car, people would be tripping over themselves to get it.