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Drew Dowdell

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Everything posted by Drew Dowdell

  1. Drew Dowdell
    This is a fantastic car... if my rear seat passengers are going to bitch about a lack of an armrest, they can walk. More importantly, it's a coupe that regular adults can ride in the back seat of.
  2. Drew Dowdell
    When your $1000 car dies for good, you sell it to the scrapper for $600. My "first" car was one year older than I was. Got the white guy part right. Old is debatable. Everything else you got wrong. I grew up on what was technically a farm. It was my parent's greenhouse business, which was failing. I worked unpaid for the family business. I got my car 7 days before leaving for college by cashing every bond I ever got. I would spend five tumultuous months at "back home" over the next 4 years and would not return until Dad died and I quasi-inherited an uninhabitable property. I started with a junk toolset bought from a flea market and worked on the car in the street, parking lots, friends' houses, etc. I barely afforded housing for the next ten years... lived IN the car during a few stretches. When I was in college for 4.5 years, C's would have killed my scholarship and my college aspirations, so I had to drop some classes I couldn't finish either due to working 3 jobs or the crushing depression I suffered from. During this time, I had to buy my next $200 car and add my mother to my insurance so she didn't have to walk to work... I've done all the work on that car gratis, as well, in the street. I left school three classes shy of graduating because financial aid would not take "Parents do not have tax forms" as an answer and would not return for a decade during which I worked 60 hours a week to build a nice internet business FOR SOMEONE ELSE. Sure, I finally got on top of things and got my degree... and have spent some time making good coin... but I don't take it for granted. The only good thing for years was that I had my physical health... but otherwise, I know crap situations more that most people will ever imagine. Every GenY'r show watch Richie Parker work on cars... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIAP04cc6qc But none of what you did is out of love for cars, it was about survival, which is an entirely different motivator. This thread is about a generation who has decided they can live without a car until which point they are not limited to $800 basket cases. It is true that the price of cars, even used ones, has gone up while wages have remained stagnant.
  3. Drew Dowdell
    You sorely lack the ability to see outside of your own situation. Car sharing is great for those who live even marginally close to a city. I've had a car sharing membership going on 6 years now. I use it for two reasons: 1st, If I need to run an errand from the office during the day, it is almost always cheaper to take the bus into my office downtown and then grab a Zipcar for my errand than it is to drive in to downtown myself and pay for parking. I can get a Zipcar for $4.00 an hour and I don't even have to pay for gas. The other reason I have zipcar is for when I need a truck or a mini-van to haul things. Those cost a little more per hour, but I can also get an overnight rate for $45. Again fuel and insurance are included. I pick up the truck or van downtown after I leave work (I bussed in) and then drop it off in the same spot the next morning. I have over 2 dozen different vehicles at my disposal all with-in walking distance of my office. I can get a Honda Insight or a Focus 5-door or a Chrysler Town & Country or a Nissan Frontier or a Mercedes C-Class or.. .if I really wanted another one... a Honda CR-V. And that's just in Pittsburgh. My Zipcar account works in cities all over this country, Canada, and in England as well. No hassling with regular rental car companies (though I am a frequent user of National's Emerald Service also), no having to pay to fill up the car before returning it. I can just reserve a car from my phone and go. In area where people live that have Zipcar right in their neighborhood, I can see Zipcar completely replacing at least one vehicle in a 2 car family. Car Sharing is not some hallmark card wishful thinking, it is a multi-billion dollar industry.
  4. Drew Dowdell
    Started at 184lbs a few days before xmas. Down to 172 today on diet alone.
  5. Drew Dowdell
    Of those, only the Caprice is worth it and I'm someone who has the money. The N-Bodies can be notoriously frustrating depending on which engine they have. The Cutlass Supreme isn't bad, but at 177k miles, the "just a sensor" is also probably "just the start of other problems" I'll also note that not one of the cars you listed is younger than a 16 year old getting their license for the first time in 2014
  6. Drew Dowdell
    Fixing your car builds character. Tools cost more money. You don't have to tell me... I bought my first Toronado for $2600 and my second one for $2300.
  7. Drew Dowdell
    I think there are minimum ages for the care sharing companies.
  8. Drew Dowdell
    I'm not sure you're missing anything with the Malibu not being available in a coupe. It's not all that spectacular as a sedan.
  9. Drew Dowdell
    I asked our 18 year old nephew about this specific question, what he and his fellow classmates thought about cars and if he felt people his age didn't care about cars anymore. He said that for the most part, everyone wants a car but that unless their parents buy them one, it feels like something impossible to get. He pointed out that there is no way for a kid, if he starts working part time at 16, will have enough money to buy a decent car and be able to insure it and fuel it at 18. And he's got a point. If you figure no more than 18 hours a week during the school year, and maybe 30 hours a week over the summer, a kid is going to be lucky to net $5,000 in a year. And they also seem to realize that $5,000 will only get you a vehicle with over 100k miles these days which means a greater potential for expensive repairs.
  10. Drew Dowdell
    That's strange. VNC is working for me, and this is just a visual update, no change to the underlying program.
  11. Drew Dowdell
    If that's the case, how does Toyota manage to move 350,000 copies of the Corolla every year?
  12. Drew Dowdell
    They're breedin like crazy around here. I see them regularly now.
  13. Drew Dowdell
    Putting the 3.6TT from the CTS V-Sport into an ATS V-Sport would be ideal.... with V8s to follow.
  14. Drew Dowdell
    Standard plan: Free Ads Number of seconds between searches = 30 seconds. Edit post time restriction = 15 minutes. Limited to 100 messages in PM system. Add/Edit signature after 200 posts. CheersandGears.com Premium Subscription: $15 / annually Number Ads reduced by at least 95%* Everything currently available to a standard member: Number of seconds between searches reduced from 30 seconds to 10 seconds. Can view post reputation statistics. Edit post time restriction removed. 500 message limit in Private Message system. Change your display name up to once per day. Upload your own avatar. Customize your user profile. Add/Edit signature immediately. Access to the "Rated R" forum upon request. Access to the "C&G Council" where Admins will take up issues for a vote that a larger number of C&Gers should have a say in. Ability to request free upgrade to the "Politics and Social issues" forum. *We will from time to time show advertisements for offers directly from CheersandGears.com and select direct advertisement of 3rd party product specials made available to our members. ** You will be billed by OmniOrbis, LLC ------------------------ If you are currently on the Premium Plan, your plan will not automatically renew. You must recreate the transaction and it will automatically renew in the future.
  15. Drew Dowdell
    Need another hint?
  16. Drew Dowdell
    I'm not so sure GM needs the Karma platform, but the Atlantic platform could be very compelling.
  17. Drew Dowdell
    Hard to tell..they could be starting with Dynacorn '67 Mustang shells, then modifying them heavily. That is, if they actually have a running prototype..most of the pics posted above could all just be photoshopped images.. This was at the show.
  18. Drew Dowdell
    even if the overflow tank was empty, you could have opened the radiator cap to check the level if you noticed it immediately.
  19. Drew Dowdell
    They'd probably bring on a new name or reuse an existing one for the mainstream model
  20. Drew Dowdell
    I hope you are all enjoying the new look of the website. As I mentioned in the other thread, there will be another major update just ahead of the Chicago Auto Show. This update will change the structure of the site's article pages with the aim of making our news easier to find and modernizing our front page. One part of this change will go into effect as early as today - Currently, when we post an article, a topic is automatically created that contains the article as the first post plus the comments on that article. This is bad practice as far as the search engines are concerned as it creates duplicate content in two places on the same website. The change that I will be making ASAP is as follows - When an article posts, only the title, picture, and small teaser clip will be displayed in the forum with the comments following after. To read the full article, there will be a "Click here to read more" link.
  21. Drew Dowdell
    And here I was told only electric vehicles caught fire..... Sad... one less Oldsmobile on the road.
  22. Drew Dowdell
    not enough of a change
  23. Drew Dowdell
    Cool thanks... probably easier to search through too right?
  24. Drew Dowdell
    perhaps this diesel is back from 2008? They had that VM 2.9 diesel V6 they were going to use in the CTS also?
  25. Drew Dowdell
    Are they static images or can you manipulate them to see the parts in different ways?
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