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Bucnasti posted:
I remember my dad explaining the same thing as we crawwwwwled up the Grapevine at about 30-35mph in our 1971 air-cooled VW Bus. My dad would endlessly shift from second to third and back again, trying to eke another couple mph out of that poor 66hp motor. Speaking of things you don’t see anymore, the Grapevine(and many other steep inclines) used to be lined with semi trucks in extremely low gears going 15-20mph blasting out huge clouds of black smoke. Like ‘coal-burning steam locomotive’ levels of black smoke. Nowadays, even fully loaded trucks can generally hold fifth or sixth gear(assuming a 10-speed gearbox) and particulate filters + ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel keep soot to a bare minimum.
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Jun 1, 2021 00:28
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I still feel guilty when I turn on the car air conditioning, even though it's been a couple of decades since using the air conditioner hurt your gas mileage.
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Jun 1, 2021 00:41
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the '80s, my Atlanta-living sister-in-law was shocked that it was possible to buy cars without air conditioning. Those models were never sold in the South. I'm from Georgia. That's why the ad was so strange to me. Ford was highlighting these trucks in an area where there has only been measurable snowfall twice in the last 50 years. Eventually, I'll upload the ads to YouTube. A lot of channels have commercials, but I figure I have some unique spots on these tapes.
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Jun 1, 2021 01:40
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I still feel guilty when I turn on the car air conditioning, even though it's been a couple of decades since using the air conditioner hurt your gas mileage. poo poo, I'm a
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Jun 1, 2021 01:46
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Gaius Marius posted:IIRC the reason AC wasn't standard in cars was a marketing stunt, you advertise the base model super cheap, and then when they get to the lot they realize the only kind they got is an added 3 grand for power steering, AC, and power windows or whatever My great grandfather had an AM radio taken out of a 62 Chevy he bought new as it was $12 and he didn't order it. Some people are that cheap.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:31
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AmbassadorofSodomy posted:poo poo, I'm a Why?
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Jun 1, 2021 03:38
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Bulgaroctonus posted:you could plug a 1/4” Jack and play through guitar amps and pedals. This is awesome-- I never had my rear end in gear enough to start a band, but once or twice I was tempted to buy a thrift store organ, run it through a bunch of fuzz and echo boxes and start my dream band (somewhere between Pizzicato Five and Hawkwind). Alterian posted:I blow a lot of people's minds when I tell them that none of my k-12 schools had air conditioning other than the library and a computer lab if it had one. Yeah, at least here in the mid-Atlantic, air conditioning wasn't all that common until the late 90s-- our high school didn't have it, my house only had it in the living room, and your average cheap student apartment certainly didn't have it.
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Jun 1, 2021 03:59
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My horrible prison high school that I've already posted about didn't have air conditioning at all, and this was the 2000's. And there were rooms with no windows. When it got too hot they had to close the library because there were some incidents of kids getting heat exhaustion in there. I think they measured 104 degrees in the library at one point.
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Jun 1, 2021 04:38
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Bucnasti posted:Oh yeah that was the other thing, they were hugely inefficient and dragged down your engine, reducing power and mpg, and causing overheating. Modern cars are so much more efficient. Todays cars are ridiculously more powerful than cars of decades past. A new minivan could smoke a seventies muscle car, and it only gets worse from there.
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Jun 1, 2021 06:38
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Platystemon posted:Todays cars are ridiculously more powerful than cars of decades past. A new minivan could smoke a seventies muscle car, and it only gets worse from there. Especially electric cars. You can get insane torque out of an electric motor, and all of it's available instantly.
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Jun 1, 2021 06:45
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Hybrids are basically “what if we take advantage of increases in engine performance for efficiency rather than power”? Instead of giving the minivan an engine that could directly compete with a muscle car from the driver’s childhood, they give it one that can merely maintain speed going up an eight percent grade at seventy miles per hour, while fully laden and blasting the air conditioner. You can’t actually sell a car that is that underpowered versus its contemporaries, so you throw in an electric motor that gives it a little extra torque to tap to not just maintain speed up the mountain, but accelerate to pass. Now that you have that electric motor and the battery to power it aboard, you can do some nice things like regenerative braking, start/stop of the ICE while stopped or at low speed, and an electric compressor for air conditioning, but it’s mostly the “undersized” ICE that is responsible for efficiency gains. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 07:02
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Platystemon posted:Todays cars are ridiculously more powerful than cars of decades past. A new minivan could smoke a seventies muscle car, and it only gets worse from there. Power figures for old cars were literally complete lies. It was ridiculously easy to rig the tests and get whatever power figure the marketing dept asked for. Manufacturers would install the exact same engine in three models and claim one had 250hp, one 300hp, and one 350hp. Then in 1972 the US switched to the same power measurement standards as the rest of the world and suddenly all those "300hp" muscle cars turned out to have 200 if they were lucky. Sweevo fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 11:26
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:My horrible prison high school that I've already posted about didn't have air conditioning at all, and this was the 2000's. And there were rooms with no windows. When it got too hot they had to close the library because there were some incidents of kids getting heat exhaustion in there. I think they measured 104 degrees in the library at one point. Texas summer often ends up being less lovely than french summer for this reason. Toulouse is significantly cooler than the desert but any time I had to be indoors in my several-hundred-years-old apartment was miserable compared to being in a city that's mostly post-1980 and everything can blast air around the house. Eastern Canada was halfway between the two.
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Jun 1, 2021 14:06
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Cracker King posted:Scott single ply is the worst and the bane of my childhood. The CEO of American Motors put in single sheet/single ply TP dispensers in the company bathrooms to save money. That worked out great, yes?
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Jun 1, 2021 15:36
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VideoGameVet posted:The CEO of American Motors put in single sheet/single ply TP dispensers in the company bathrooms to save money.
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Jun 1, 2021 15:51
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Arsenic Lupin posted:In the '80s, my Atlanta-living sister-in-law was shocked that it was possible to buy cars without air conditioning. Those models were never sold in the South. I've lived my whole life in Texas and this thread is the first time I've ever heard of a car being sold without air conditioning, barring a used car where it was broken.
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Jun 1, 2021 19:03
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pairofdimes posted:There are still signs on the Grapevine telling drivers to turn off their AC to prevent overheating. I distinctly remember my dad blasting the heater in the middle of a southern california summer in order to help keep his car from overheating. A college buddy of mine in a really lovely old camero had to blast his heater to manage heat while going up a mountain in winter, and we still had to pull over to let the car cool down even while surrounded by snow. I kind of just assumed needing to turn off the AC / turn on the heater to prevent overheating was mostly something that lovely cars had to do, rather than something that just isn't really A Thing anymore.
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Jun 1, 2021 20:21
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Texas summer often ends up being less lovely than french summer for this reason. Toulouse is significantly cooler than the desert but any time I had to be indoors in my several-hundred-years-old apartment was miserable compared to being in a city that's mostly post-1980 and everything can blast air around the house. Eastern Canada was halfway between the two. I had this same experience when moving from the mojave desert to the pacific northwest. The first several apartments I looked at didn't have AC, instead just boasting "well you get a great cross-breeze if you open the windows!" and I thought they were insane. Eventually I realized that no apartments there had AC. Coworkers / friends assured me that it's not needed, but they can go gently caress themselves as I spent god knows how many nights failing to sleep because my mattress was soaked with sweat.
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Jun 1, 2021 20:28
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CodfishCartographer posted:I had this same experience when moving from the mojave desert to the pacific northwest. The first several apartments I looked at didn't have AC, instead just boasting "well you get a great cross-breeze if you open the windows!" and I thought they were insane. Eventually I realized that no apartments there had AC. Coworkers / friends assured me that it's not needed, but they can go gently caress themselves as I spent god knows how many nights failing to sleep because my mattress was soaked with sweat.
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Jun 1, 2021 21:25
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One reference I didn't understand growing up in the '80s is when people would refer to Barbie being a consort to GI Joe.. I did not know that in the '60s and '70s GI Joe was a 12-in figure and not the 3 and 3/4-in figure of the '80s.
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Jun 1, 2021 21:26
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PeterCat posted:One reference I didn't understand growing up in the '80s is when people would refer to Barbie being a consort to GI Joe.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGMI_mWmb7g
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Jun 1, 2021 22:31
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PeterCat posted:One reference I didn't understand growing up in the '80s is when people would refer to Barbie being a consort to GI Joe..
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Jun 1, 2021 22:47
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King of the Hill had an episode where Hank used the heat to prevent overheating his POS truck. oh god is KotH old media now?
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Jun 2, 2021 04:10
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PhazonLink posted:King of the Hill had an episode where Hank used the heat to prevent overheating his POS truck. I remember the first car I ever owned that I could drive up the I15 from LA to Vegas, AC blasting in the over 100ºF heat, without the temp gauge ever going into the red. A new 1995 Nissan 240SX. Before that, sometimes there were issues.
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Jun 2, 2021 04:16
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Some newer cars still have that problem. The PT Cruiser is notorious for having "exactly enough" cooling, which often turns out to not actually be enough.
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Jun 2, 2021 04:23
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The PT Cruiser is probably the shittiest car produced in the last 20 years.
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Jun 2, 2021 04:43
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The best thing about this ad is that the car it was advertising was actually no longer being made, so if you saw this ad, and went to your Nissan dealer to get a 300zx, they would shrug, and try to get you to buy another model. This was the start of the era when Nissan started going down the tube, and ended up being rescued from bankruptcy by Renault a few years later.
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Jun 2, 2021 05:34
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RCarr posted:The PT Cruiser is probably the shittiest car produced in the last 20 years. If you're tall, the front windshield distorts your view. It's a POS
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Jun 2, 2021 06:04
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Toupee Groupie posted:The best thing about this ad is that the car it was advertising was actually no longer being made, so if you saw this ad, and went to your Nissan dealer to get a 300zx, they would shrug, and try to get you to buy another model. This was the start of the era when Nissan started going down the tube, and ended up being rescued from bankruptcy by Renault a few years later. Now they just have CVT"s that self destruct.
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Jun 2, 2021 06:04
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RCarr posted:The PT Cruiser is probably the shittiest car produced in the last 20 years. I don’t know anything about cars but I got linked to this YouTube channel recently and I thought their idea of where the PT Cruiser fit culturally and market-wise was interesting and insightful https://youtu.be/hoxqtnI4I4c
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Jun 2, 2021 08:08
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quote:In the second hour, the participants were asked to sit down on the floor, like children, and use scissors and a pile of magazines to cut out collages of words they thought described the vehicle. At that point their chief concern about the prototype became clearer: It looked insubstantial and unsafe. http://web.archive.org/web/20160531...imlerchrysler/2
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Jun 2, 2021 08:14
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America...have you tried to talk about these feelings to someone?
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Jun 2, 2021 10:27
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Fish of hemp posted:America...have you tried to talk about these feelings to someone? I can assure you we have not.
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Jun 2, 2021 12:47
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Fish of hemp posted:America...have you tried to talk about these feelings to someone?
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Jun 2, 2021 12:53
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Jesus, I feel like someone did find/replace with J.G. Ballard's Why I want to gently caress Ronald Reagan. Weird. (Just a warning if you google that, but it's proto-Crash.)
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Jun 2, 2021 15:39
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Arivia posted:I don’t know anything about cars but I got linked to this YouTube channel recently and I thought their idea of where the PT Cruiser fit culturally and market-wise was interesting and insightful https://youtu.be/hoxqtnI4I4c Regular Car Reviews is one of my all-time favorite things on youtube and I'm not even a car guy.
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Jun 2, 2021 15:44
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Powered Descent posted:Regular Car Reviews is one of my all-time favorite things on youtube and I'm not even a car guy. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it and i am not a car person. Is this review a shitpost or is it gonna be a philosophy lesson?
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Jun 2, 2021 15:54
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Arivia posted:Yeah, I'm really enjoying it and i am not a car person. Is this review a shitpost or is it gonna be a philosophy lesson? They're all like that -- they do cover the car itself of course, but it's largely a portrait of the kind of person who drives/drove it, and they're usually spot-on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uH_X-9fjfI
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Jun 2, 2021 17:30
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It gets a little old, or maybe he just covered every car I cared about, but it was a favorite of mine for a long, long time, so any new viewer is in for a treat.
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Jun 2, 2021 17:39
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Jesus Christ do I hate the modern marketing obsession with emotion over substance
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Jun 2, 2021 17:48
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