Drew Dowdell

Thanks for notifying me. I know the solution, I just can't do it from my phone.

Initially?

Overall I think they are... but they aren't keeping pace with the market, especially considering they're 90% crossovers.

*It will look like....

I haven't attended a concert in person in years. Tomorrow I get to go see a performer I've admired for years. Classical organ music may not be everyone's cup of tea, but this guy is a virtuoso. He can re-write Bach in his head on the fly.

It's a Forester that someone put on the photocopier and hit "Enlarge 150%"

I'm not arguing build quality... the Traverse is a disaster in that regard.

HVAC controls and other switchgear... yeah.. it is. The Traverse has really nice dials, metal ring with rubber grips and electroluminescent numbers for the HVAC. The Atlas has flat silver plastic and they don't have a solid feel to them. The Atlas has hard plastic on the lower dash, fine, so does the Traverse... but then VW also covered the entire inner door panel with the same stuff. The Traverse, at least for the front seats, has a padded foam material for the upper part of the door and then the hard plastic only at the map pockets at the bottom. The Traverse upper dash pad is hard plastic, but then the face of it is stitched material... the Atlas is all plastic face and dash upper (though I think you can get a stitched dash cover on upper trims)

That was my experience years ago with the local VW dealer. A beautiful Apple Store of a place, modern, airy. Techs that couldn't fix worth a damn and management that couldn't care less about it. And they were the Phaeton certified dealership for the area.... I pity the Phaeton owners who took their cars there.

Here's another lineup I wouldn't mind.

Cadillac has a very inconsistent dealership network, that is certainly true. I've seen a Cadillac / Rolls dealer that would blow you away, yet others are how you described... more interested in volume sales of Equinoxes......

I would have no problem with the Citroen DS lineup coming to the US. Edit: In that video when the narrator pauses and says "The New Generation" my mind immediately finished the sentence with "Of Olds!"

Incredibly off topic, but when they first came out, the Daewoos looked great on paper. The transverse inline-6 in the Leganza wasn't a MPG queen, but who cared, gas was 89 cents a gallon. The engine was one of the best things about that car because it was Lexus smooth and the interiors could fool you into thinking they were a Lexus from the pictures. Not too bad for a car that was $4,000 cheaper than an equivalent Accord or $5,000 less than a Camry. They had their reliability issues, but what really killed them was their horrendous sales process. They tried to use a combination of college kids doing multi-level marketing and buy-here-pay-here lots, while service was to be taken care of at K-Mart (if memory serves on that last point). Not confidence inspiring. Tyinging this to Alfa. We have a single Alfa-Romeo dealer here in Pittsburgh at an Automotive Group I've never even heard of. From the architecture in the pictures, they look like they're an old Chrysler-Plymouth Dealer who now covers Chrysler-Dodge-Ram-Jeep-Fiat-Alfa Romeo. When Lexus came to this country, they had purpose built showrooms, so this shoving a couple cars in the back corner of an ex-Plymouth showroom doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me. In this particular case, the dealership is also 25 miles outside of the city and the next closest one is 70 miles away in Ohio.. so they better have a Tesla like pickup/drop-off service for people who are coming from BMW or Benz and used to having a dealership near downtown. Edit to add: You literally have to drive past BMW (twice), Mercedes, Jaguar, Land Rover, Cadillac, Lexus (up to twice), Lincoln, Volvo, Audi, and possibly even Maserati just to get to the only Alfa dealership here. Vehicle issues aside, the dealership network could be the thing that makes or breaks Alfa in the US. It's largely what killed Daewoo.

I don't think we need global names. Then we end up with Alpha-Numerics on everything because there are very few names that translate well everywhere.

Does anyone have anything about the Giulia? Maybe questions for @Anthony Fongaro?

But I do.... you've had your rebuttal... now let it go.

Back to your corners guys.... @surreal1272 we won't put any Alfa Romeo on your sandwich okay? You don't have to have any.

I've lived in Pittsburgh since 1998 and I still cannot stand Primanti Brothers. I thought of another idea for Kirkland Signature Motors: It would be a good way for PSA to finally get a foothold in the US. Their vehicles are largely conventional by today's standards, yet different enough that they won't be mistaken for someone else's badge engineered product. This new Peugeot 3008 crossover would be the perfect intro product.

new hashtag? #MAGA - Make an AWD Galant Again....... might get it to go viral.

Ah, so VW is going to be making Trax to the US.

We use something called a VPS which is a containered server that shares hardware with other containered servers, all on one really big server. I buy a container of a certain size (CPU, RAM, Hard Drive) and that amount of capacity is sectioned off for me. For Ram and CPU, that works well... we always get what we're paying for. Disk space is a little more tricky, because while they can guarantee the amount of space we get, they cannot guarantee the performance of that disk. And that's where our problem on the old server started. The performance of the old server was being degraded by being on platter disks on a busy server. When you went to load the webpage, the server would have to wait till the disks caught up. Someone else on the same server container was having so much disk activity that it was causing long wait times for us. Moving to SSD drives speed that process up. The wait times I'm seeing on the disks now are literally a fraction of a percent of what they were on the old server. Some of that could be better neighbors, but I expect a lot of it is faster drives. Since moving servers is a big process, I decided to take the time to upgrade the OS, add ram, and processor. The nice thing is that even with these upgrades, the monthly cost stays the same. Yes, a couple of posts could have gone astray. I did shut down the site to public access last night before I started the move, but certain users have the ability to bypass that block and still post.

But it should be worth it... We're now on the newest version of Linux server OS. I've doubled the amount of ram. I've doubled the number of processors and we've moved a couple generations newer. We're now on Solid State Disk rather than spinning disk. I haven't tuned the software to it's new roomier digs yet, so hopefully there is even more performance to be gained once I do.