I feel that there are many parallels between the things that “keyboard people” care about and the things that “car people” care about. Both hobbies involve a ton of components to customize and tune for better performance, feel, and sound. There is also definitely something to be said for that connection between man (or woman) and machine which is shared among the two interests!
Here is my 2004 Honda S2000 (with another one photobombing it in the background!). I love rowing the gears on this thing and winding out the engine on the backroads. Maybe when my GMK Serika set ships, I’ll have something that matches it too
I never bothered to get a drivers license so I don’t know anything about cars.
My dream car would probably be a Honda Element though since it’s got so much utility and looks hella cool.
My least favorite cars are probably Teslas because you can’t hear them coming up behind you on a bike and a seemingly disproportionate number of them are driven by people who drive like assholes in my experience.
My other least favorite car is most cars that aren’t Tesla or electric because they are destroying the planet and for some reason we built our whole society (at least here in most of the US) around them.
Great thread, I’m a huge car nerd (a lot more so compared to keyboards).
My favourite car would have to be the Lancia Delta HF integrale “Evoluzione II” because Lancia and Rally just go together. I wouldn’t daily drive it though.
For a more reasonable option, I’d go with with the Hyundai i30 N or the Toyota GR Yaris as those are drivable and more ‘livable’ in today’s world.
S2K is one of my dream machines, and I think yellow is my favorite color they came in - noice. Not that I’ve ever seen a dirty one, but she’s lookin’ clean.
I drove a 6th gen Civic for 18 years, and I still miss its steering and gearbox. (My current Suzuki SX4 is basically a modern Wagovan, minus the intuitive handling feedback.)
The dream machine I keep coming back to, though, is this:
Caterham 7 - essentially a continuation of an ancient Lotus design, and apparently loads of fun.
With its livery, license plate, and older style fenders, this particular one is an homage to KAR 120C; the 7 belonging to “Number Six” - protagonist of the BBC’s first miniseries, The Prisoner.
I would have to go with the Tofu (possibly a Pok3r if we were talking a few years ago)! It’s an accessible compact board for enthusiasts, more on the mainstream side and with headroom for mods/tuning. The design is also easily recognizable with nothing overly fancy in its construction.
Ah, interesting! I see that you’re based in South Bay - is the combination of cycling and public transit generally sufficient to get places?
It’s funny that we have to deal with bad drivers having too much power in self-driving cars before we can get to the point where self-driving cars negate the effect of bad drivers.
Fair enough! From what I understand, the massive reliance on cars (especially ICE vehicles) in our society is due to substantial lobbying from large corporations. On a related note, the automotive industry does supply a significant chunk of the jobs in the United States, so it looks like this is a part of the infrastructure that will stick around for the foreseeable future.
Glad to find the other car enthusiasts in here! I know of a guy in my region of California who owns an Integrale Evo 1 (Petrolicious did a feature on his car recently). I can only imagine how much fun it is to drive!
Definitely can’t go wrong with a hot hatch to do double duty! I’m partial to the Golf R, but we’ll have to see if that changes when the GR Corolla arrives stateside (the US isn’t getting the GR Yaris, unfortunately).
Thank you! Took me a while to find this one, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to pick it up!
If I ever come across a clean Midori Green EK, I will be very tempted to pull the trigger (the car in the article is actually owned by a friend of mine).
I hope I have the opportunity to take one of these for a spin some day! Have you seen the recent Grand Tour episode in which James May off-roads a Caterham?
what?!?!? No GR Yaris in the US? So it really is true that you guys don’t get some of the wanted hot hatches. Then again, the market over there is so big on the SUV and pickup truck segment. The Ford Raptop is pretty cool too own I guess, that or an old SVT Lightning, since we don’t have those over here (thanks to small European roads).
Haha, South Bay is probably the most challenging place I’ve lived for not driving (Seattle and Boston previously), but I’ve found that it is actually pretty doable. The roads are actually quite bike friendly as long as you avoid a few of them (including one google maps likes to route you on). Somewhat counterintuitively the light rail is kind of a joke, but the bus is actually pretty serviceable, which is a shame because they are usually empty (or were pre-pandemic, I don’t really go anywhere now, I do see ones that say “full” now that they have a small capacity limit). Caltrain is great too.
Yeah, but hopefully it can give us a jumping off point as traditional manufacturers begin to make electric cars, and maybe someday we could dream of converting gas stations to car charging or something
Yup, no GR Yaris! We don’t get any of the cool small cars over here because everyone just buys crossovers and SUVs nowadays (even the bestsellers from exotic brands are in that space). They’re speculating a GR Corolla will be the model we finally do get because that’s the smallest “viable” size for Americans.
Interesting, I do enjoy riding my fixie for recreation, but it’s a whole other matter if I were to use it as a full-time mode of transport! Not to derail this thread, but what sort of gear ratio are you running?
As I was surfing through the Toyota US website, I see that you guys have the Avalon TRD…which makes very little sense, now I’m thinking if they’ll make a TRD Sienna lol
