General car talk

My 2000 Suburban is the same size as 2025 Toyota Tacoma, the smaller of the Toyota pickups. The Tacoma is wider and taller, but the Surbuban is a bit longer. Just making cars bigger seems to be the automakers’ primary way of updating cars.

I think this is the primary reason the value of the GMT800 based trucks have gone up. They’re modern enough that you can put a cheap OBDII scanner on them and find out what is wrong, but old enough that you don’t need a dealership computer to program any parts you do replace.

Mechanical parts are readily available, though less so for trim pieces, and there is a big aftermarket if you want to customize or add go fast parts.

As the owner of a 4th generation MX-5/Miata, I will observe a moment of silence for Tom Matano.

These high tech new cars can have some big problems:

Jeep just pushed a software update that bricked all the 2024 Wrangler 4xe models, including my Willys. The future is going great.

This is chilling (from https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/2024-4xe-loss…):

> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.

If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.

Not surprising, but we have bought two cars in the past 2 years, one new, one 2 years old, both for just over $30000 so it is possible.

Huh? stickers over 50K have been common for decades. Not on cheapos, but on higher end cars.

Reading the article, they meant, but did not say, that average stickers are now exceeding $50K. Crappy writing.