What's a reasonable number of times to be asked to give a jump start?

[Skipweasel]

At least that had the excuse of being from the 70s.

[Dave]

Dave

[Steve Firth]

there are much worse crimes against design in the USA. It does seem that they have a spectacular inability to look at a car and think "my that's ugly". The Ford Scorpio with the startled frog front end and the rear buttocks that draped the floor was apparently considered to be just fine by the US management team.

[Skipweasel]

Only the other day I was thinking how long it'd been since I last saw one of them, when round the corner came a 105e and a Renault 16.

Still no Frogface Scorpio though.

[John MacLeod]

Oh, I don't know. I can't say any of the vehicles I've had in recent years have been things of beauty. At least I can say for my LandRover

110CSW -- 23 years old -- that it's got a functional attractiveness. And a Suburban has something of the same sort of attractiveness. My current Honda Accord -- the latest of a series of Accords I've owned is a satisfactory car, but not a thing of beauty and no more beautiful than the US-market Accords. I once had a leased Pontiac Ventura -- for a multitude of reasons one of the ugliest and least functional vehicles I've ever had the misfortune to drive. But on the other hand, a pair of Plymouth Furies from the early 1970s were both very attractive cars -- a Fury III coup=E9 (upmarket model)and a Fury I (downmarket trim, but with a 440 cubic inch (7.2 litre)blueprinted police-specification engine) was one of the most robust, well-designed cars I've ever had. And that gently-understated Coke-bottle shape looked good even without any of the fancy trimmings of the III.

American design is often brash. It is at its worst on smaller vehicles.But there are most certainly times when they've got it right.

Car design worldwide seems at the moment to be largely ugly. Blobby- car saloons, deliberately-ugly crossover vehicles and actual and putative Chelsea tractors form the vast bulk of the cars on the road.

John

[Dave]

You wouldn't believe how many drivers think the lower focused lamps are driving lights and not fog lamps, because they are not tinted yellow.

Dave

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] (Steve Firth) saying something like:

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Andy Champ writes

That one, and aggressive tailgating, seems to have migrated to Audi drivers now.