Drew Dowdell
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Everything posted by Drew Dowdell
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Motor1's clickbait headline aside... no the Tundra will not be a world beater no matter how good it is. No it won't take over Ford, GM, and Ram. Toyota simply doesn't have the manufacturing capacity to do so. They'll remain the distance 5 place brand. They can make 100,000 Tundras a year... that's all the the plant can handle. Ford can build over 900,000 F-150s.
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Horrible selection bias, that study shows nothing of value. 2014 - 2017 the only BEVs available were Teslas, a few Bolts, the Nissan Leaf, the very and a few compliance cars with too short ranges. I don't think anyone here needs a study to know that if you buy a vehicle with a 100 mile range, you're not going to be driving it as far as a gasoline vehicle or your lifestyle even with a gasoline vehicle doesn't involve driving long distances. It's a fairly big "duh!" The Bolt wasn't even available nationwide until August of 2017. Originally it was only sold in Metro areas of California and Oregon. These days we have a number of longer range EVs with a whole bunch more hitting the market in the next 24 months. Show me a 2021 - 2025 study and get back to me. So you can round file that study. -
There's a reason that GM and Ford no longer make vehicles that cheap anymore... they don't make money doing it. Taking away the Spark which no one buys anyway, the cheapest vehicle at GM right now is the $19,995 Trailblazer which you and I both know is unobtainium at that price and most of them are sold as LT AWDs with an MSRP of $26,695. The best selling GM that isn't a truck are the Equinox/Terrain twins. Average MSRP of $30k for those. The days of the $14k Sonic LT 5-door are over. As of this time last year, the average new car price was $37,867 and with production shortages, that price had to have climbed. The Industry average is right above the Bolt EV's base price.
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4 hydro-electric dams to be dismantled
Drew Dowdell replied to balthazar's topic in Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. At my old job we put in loads of load monitors in manufacturing plants. In one plant they had a number of those cyclone dust collector things. We put a load meter on each one. We were able to tell the plant owner that one of their cyclones was on its way to failure because it was using 4 times the electricity of the rest of them. Not only did it save the plant owner from an unplanned outage, it reduced the electricity usage of the cyclones dramatically. That is an outlier of an example, but we were able to provide recommendations to plant owners to adjust shifts to save money among other insights. -
4 hydro-electric dams to be dismantled
Drew Dowdell replied to balthazar's topic in Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels
You don't know what Managed Demand is, do you? -
The Alpha platform is superbly weighted and balanced, one of the absolute best balanced platforms in the industry. The FWD based CLA does not have that. The Alpha platform does everything that the enthusiast crowd loved about BMWs from 2003 before BMWs got heavy and lost their steering feel. But Pole movers like SMK pulled up the goal and decided that flabby 3-series were the new ideal.
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Not for a Serp belt on a BMW X1 it's not. It's just a FWD 2.0 liter 4-cylinder. If it's taking you 2 hours of labor to install the Serp belt on such an engine (not timing or anything like that) just a regular old Serp belt... then it's a bad design. Even on the old GM B-bodies equipped with the towing package, it required removing the first belt, removing the mechanical fan mount, and then removing the second belt, I can do that in under an hour. If it takes more than one wrench to replace the belt, it was designed badly. I can do all 4 V-belts on my Olds with a single adjustable wrench.
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They actually make special Serp belt wrenches. $15 at Harbor Freight and they work great so you don't need baby hands.
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You don't notice it until it's gone.... I'm talking about the 8 horsepower I gain for running E-85. By all accounts I should never notice that difference in power or the few lb-ft I also get. But I use E-85 almost exclusively. This past week however, I had a big build up of fuel points from my local grocery chain and they don't offer E-85, so I just filled up with regular and got my $1.00 a gallon off. What I'm noticing is that while 0-60 is still irrelevant as before, the truck feels less lively and even a bit sluggish off the line. I got another coupon for $10 off a $20 fill-up, but also that station doesn't have E-85... so I'll just live with it for now.
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Why is any serp belt replacement EVER $541?? If it takes you more than 20 minutes to replace the belt, it is a bad design.
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I borrow my best friend's dog pretty often, but I might get a photocopy sometime in the summer. Waiting for his Pup Cup at Starbucks...
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Gosh how could I have missed him!? I did meet @A Horse With No Name also many years ago
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I'd be happy to buy you a coffee! And I forgot @Z-06 / Michael. I used to stay with him and his wife for Detroit Auto shows in the early days.
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Oh! I know who I missed! @GMTruckGuy74 That's a great idea! Would others be interested in this?
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I love those seats! The Recaros that came on the second gen CTS were sublime! All they have to do is match that and they're perfect.
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@balthazar @Cory Wolfe @Chris_Doane @ocnblu @Flybrian @Camino LS6 @caddycruiser @knightfan26917 @HoLottaBuicks @William Maley I feel like I'm forgetting someone from the meetup at Camino's way back when.
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She drove one of those 4WD Nissan Sentra Wagon things
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CT5-V and CT4-V BLACKWING -- Return to Big Power
Drew Dowdell replied to dwightlooi's topic in Cadillac
He doesn't seem to keep his cars long enough to require major repairs... and with that mileage, it maybe was a CPO. -
CT5-V and CT4-V BLACKWING -- Return to Big Power
Drew Dowdell replied to dwightlooi's topic in Cadillac
That sounds like a sweet deal on the A8L! -
I had that image on a t-shirt and I got screamed at by my high school bitch of an English teacher. Everyone hated her.
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@mkaresh has done the research on this. There is no industry standard for measuring interior room. Ford manipulated theirs to the point that he had to just automatically subtract 2 inches from leg room measurements to get something accurate.
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Numbers lie... even Cadillac numbers. The CT5 does not feel as roomy inside as a 5-series. All of this aside here's what Cadillac is doing. I can get into a CT5-V (not Blackwing) for $47,695. With that I get a 350 HP V6 and a nice leather interior while over at Benz I'm stuck in a C300 with plastic seats, measly 255hp turbo 4 for the same price. That is a very easy decision to make.
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As @balthazar likes to point out, people don't go shopping with their tape measures. All it has to do is meet or beat the expected roominess for the price. People pick a price range first and then see what vehicles they can find in that range, they don't pick a wheelbase and work backwards. There's not going to be much, if any, 5-series/CT5 cross shopping with a $20k spread in base price.
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Outside length doesn't tell the whole story. The CT5 doesn't feel as roomy inside as a 5-series and that's intentional. Cadillac is positioning the CT5 more against the 3-series / C-Class and it feels like it inside. It's base price is $36,895 while the base 3-series is $41,250, so think of the CT5 as a much roomier 3-series competitor which can get a V8 while the 3-series can't. The CT4 competes with the A-Class/CLA and 2-series Grand Coupe (stupid stoooopid name) . (Cadillac - $32,995 / A-Class - $37,435 / 2-Series GC - $35,700) and is easily the roomiest and most powerful of all of them. Sadly, Cadillac isn't making a sedan in the 5-series size any longer. They should have kept the CT6 in production.
