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Drew Dowdell

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Everything posted by Drew Dowdell

  1. Drew Dowdell
    Promote from within?! That's a laugh.
  2. Drew Dowdell
    The W-Bodies in standard issue form, were majority crap. The only exceptions I can think of were the 3.8 powered Regals that had few electrical gremlins and a powertrain you could take a shotgun to and it would still run. I had a '94 Cutlass Supreme Convertible 3.4 DOHC... and as great as that car was on paper, the interior would fall apart from broken plastic pieces, etc. The engine was a nightmare to maintain... and even though it had gained 1,000 lbs over the base 4-cylinder coupe model of '88, it had the same brake pads and calipers.... 10,000 mile pad changes anyone? These are a great choice too..... I would totally have one in my fleet if only you could find one without a blown transmission.
  3. Drew Dowdell
    Well, fortunately for all of us, you happen to be wrong. There are a lot of countries that have living minimum wages and the price of a Big Mac is pretty much the same. Would there be some price increases? yes. Would they be equivalent to the raises that people get who are at the minimum? No. Furthermore, the champion of the minimum wage staunchly disagrees with you..... no offense, but I go with his advice over yours. Or
  4. Drew Dowdell
    Ehh... not if it looks like that. That looks like a Sentra with an Infiniti badge.
  5. Drew Dowdell
    A wage that if 40 hours is worked, is a living wage.
  6. Drew Dowdell
    Uhm. I don't think there was a Ford Focus GT in 1991 And if you complain about the space in mid-size SUVs these days, how in the hell were you going to fit in a Reatta??!
  7. Drew Dowdell
    What's your favorite piece of crap car? I've always liked certain iterations of the GM W-Bodies. The Cutlass Supreme Coupe with the 3.4 DOHC V-6 (available with a 5-speed Getrag). The supercharged Grand Prix Coupes. The Lacrosse with the 5.3 liter V8. They were always labors of love, but they were great in their own way.
  8. Drew Dowdell
    The biggest welfare queens all have ticker symbols on the stock exchange.... I'm all in favor of elimination of free stuff and tax breaks for them. I'm tired of taxpayers having to subsidize Walmart's payroll, they can pay their workers a fair wage and benefits or get charged for the "free" services their employees use.
  9. Drew Dowdell
    I *know* you are capable of bigger picture thinking than this. We have infrastructure that has been around since the Roosevelt Administration.... sometimes even from the first Roosevelt Administration. My grade school and high school were built during the Hoover Administration. Our infrastructure as a whole, not just roads and bridges, is way behind falling behind. A lot of this stuff is simply aging out of being useful.... some of it did that decades ago, but they'd slap another coat of paint and a few reinforcing rods on it and hope it holds another 5 years. We are barely even keeping up with the rate of failure. All of that kicking the can and refusal to do the appropriate maintenance and replacement decades ago means the bill to fix things properly keeps getting larger and larger. You can pay now or pay more later. Add to this the fact that most state governments and the federal government have refused to raise the gas tax for 20+ year AND falling revenue per wear mile caused by cars getting better fuel economy and of course things are under funded. You're a contractor... you know better than most that it is more expensive to do a cheap job multiple times than it is to do a good but expensive job once. And cheap jobs are exactly what most of these states have been doing for the past 30 years. Here in Pittsburgh, instead of replacing a crumbling bridge built in the 1920s, they built another fake bridge below it to catch the parts falling off the old bridge onto the highway below. 10 years later, they finally imploded the bridge and are in the process of building its replacement. It's insane that we had to build a bridge to catch a bridge because no one wanted to pay for a replacement that should have happened circa 1983, but that's what happened and is happening all over the country. And the longer you wait, the higher the replacement bill gets.
  10. Drew Dowdell
    Come on, you're smarter than that statement.
  11. Drew Dowdell
    Few states have not been pulling from the general fund for decades now.
  12. Drew Dowdell
    This isn't about squeezing the public again. This is about trying to address a disparity in the way the fees are levied. I'd agree with you how Indiana did it isn't the best way to go about it, but it is an issue that is going to have to be figured out. Our roads and infrastructure are in shambles... we aren't even keeping up with the maintenance on what we have today. Furthermore, the infrastructure is already being subsidized by the general tax base instead of solely on fuel taxes... to the tune of 57%.
  13. Drew Dowdell
    Eventually they're going to have to address that too. There's even revenue being lost when Explorers and Durangos are getting 25mpg now verse the 18 mpg they got 15 years ago. The vehicles weigh the same or more yet are traveling further on the same gallon of gas, thus the tax per wear mile is lower today than it was 15 years ago.
  14. Drew Dowdell
    I'm not sure that Indiana's solution is a good long term one, but it's probably the best they can do at the moment.
  15. Drew Dowdell
    Why should a pot user who doesn't own a car pay for the roads? The gasoline tax was instituted because fuel use is a direct correlation with both distance traveled and weight of a vehicle. All 4+ wheel vehicles put wear on roads, but a million Ford Fiestas do a lot less wear and tear on the road over time than a million F-250s. So a Ford Fiesta should pay less tax for that wear... and it does so by using less fuel and being more efficient. Conversely, an F-250 that only travels 5,000 miles in a year uses the roads a lot less than a Fiesta doing 50,000 miles in a year, and pays less tax by using less fuel. Unless we went to a yearly tax based entirely on distance X weight, the fuel tax is the fairest way to apply the tax. EVs and Hybrids messed up that equation by not using as much fuel or not using fuel at all. A Chevy Volt can go 20,000 miles in a year and only fill up 4 times. I'm not against full review of spending projects at all, that could even mean a reduction in gasoline taxes..... But the tax paid should be levied fairly. Why should EV drivers get a free ride?
  16. Drew Dowdell
    Bentley has always been known for torque.... so having an EV like torque curve fits that
  17. Drew Dowdell
    Well all that does is push the vehicle way far out. I'm betting they wanted to make it big enough to make short and long versions to run the gamut all the way from base Tahoe up to Escalade ESV Platinum.
  18. Drew Dowdell
    How else do you want the roads paid for? Toll everything?
  19. Drew Dowdell
    Well that doesn't seem to be working so well. VW is up to about $19 billion in fines so far just in the US. I haven't kept track of what they're doing in the EU.How many engine programs is $19 billion? And if GM can engineer it right, why can't VW who was supposed to be the diesel king? If you can't do it... just don't release it.
  20. Drew Dowdell
    The low hanging fruit for curbing pollution is really the shipping (as in the seas) industry. Even the railroads are getting on board with lowering diesel pollution.
  21. Drew Dowdell
    I'm not sure what the new administration can even do. If the companies broke the law, they broke the law. If the administration tells the EPA or DOJ to back off without a significant and transparent explanation, there could be serious legal ramifications across the industry.
  22. Drew Dowdell
    There was a story here a while back. GM participated in real world testing from the EPA rather than just the standard testing procedure and GM got a certificate of compliance for the 2.8 Duramax from the EPA. It would be more egg on the the EPA's face than GM's if they did an about-face on that one. Edit: I'm guessing by your comment that you're unaware of how a lot of this certification works. Most things with the NHTSA and EPA are self-certified by the manufacturers and those agencies take the manufacturer's word. Manufacturers' motivation to not falsify things is that if they do, they get giant scandals and fines like what we've been seeing with VW. So when the EPA or NHTSA "change their mind", it is more likely that they discovered something that wasn't disclosed by the manufacturer or wasn't tested for by the manufacturer. (think of the Grand Cherokee gas tank rupture recall as an example)
  23. Drew Dowdell
    The first gen Cruze Diesel was a VM motor design also, though in that case was built by GM. Irony of ironies, the new GM 1.6 diesel is actually a product of GM's partnership with Fiat. It was developed in Turin Italy. However as part of the breakup between GM and FIAT, they do not get access to this engine. It is supposed to be very clean for a diesel and GM has a whole bunch of patents just on the emissions controls.
  24. Drew Dowdell
    Also, I wonder how long it will take before FCA denies designing this engine.... it is actually designed and built by a 3rd party called VM Motori...so I wonder how long before Serg throws VM under a diesel powered bus.
  25. Drew Dowdell
    Indeed. GM went through extra certification tests on the 2.8 Duramax before they even released it. To be clear, what VW did and what FCA did in this case are (so far) quite different. FCA didn't disclose the entire design of the emissions control system which is indeed a violation of the law, but that is not the same as VW taking direct actions to try and cheat the test.
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