Drew Dowdell

The CrossClimates will be the next set on the Chrysler. Albert blew out the right rear on his set of Blizzaks on Thursday and it was unrepairable, so the whole set is getting covered by the road hazard warranty. BUT I also have summer tires, so I ran back home, got those, and had those put on. Albert is at 25k miles a year lately and though that will calm down eventually, it's going to pick up for the next 6 months, so I expect him to burn through the summers by the time October rolls around. I'll trade both sets in (they gave me back 3 of the Blizzaks) and get a credit towards the CrossClimates. They'll be the last set of tires I put on it because we'll trade out of it around 130k - 140k once Mopar will no longer warranty it. I don't feel like buying two more sets of tires for it. I hear great reviews about them. Sure, but in the end the EV comes out ahead. Also, random bombings in the middle east don't significantly shift the monthly family budget.

What's the tire situation?

32,000 miles at 20 mpg average (Kia Telluride AWD combined average) is 1,600 gallons. At $3.50 a gallon, that would be $5,600

I got an Insta360 camera. It has a built in AI that removes the selfie stick from the image since it can see around it.

yes exactly. And if you think about it, because the highlander and grand highlander are now about the same size, this is effectively the only model that can be had in EV, Hybrid, or just gasoline.

"For 2027, if customers would like battery electric, we have the Highlander, and if they prefer gas, hybrid or hybrid Max, we have the Grand Highlander," a Toyota spokesperson confirmed at an event in Ojai, California, on Tuesday.

The Heated Rivalry series has buried deep into my brain. The music causes feelings because I associate it with scenes in the show. This playlist has been on repeat for basically 2 months.

My understanding is the Grand will continue for a while as the gas powered option. That said, I kinda like this based on pics, but it depends on the interior quality which has been lacking in Toyotas lately. It's got the range required.

www.NotGonnaHappen.com Maybe eventually but certainly not in 18 months. I’m seeing a lot of resistance to AI due to the costs involved. Plus, corporate data is so messy. Feeding messy data to AI is just asking for bad results. It will take years to clean up the data and maybe AI can help with that, but unless you’re starting a company today and building it with AI from the start and actually have AI super experts running things, it’s likely your data is too messy to use in AI right now. One of my clients is in a conversion away from paper and struggling with it. They’re not going to AI anytime soon. We won’t even be done the paper conversion until early 2028.

You're talking about homogalation:

I don't think you'll be getting them this year as nice as the option sounds. It takes time to set up a distribution channel and dealership network even if they're manufacturer owned stores. Genesis has been building a new dealership near me for nearly a year, at the moment they live in an old VW dealer.

Isn't it sad? You now have as many mid-size family sedan choices as you have minivan choices (not counting EV sedans). Camry - Accord - Sonata - K5 Sienna - Odyssey - Pacifica - Carnival

I feel like they've finally fixed their design language with this, though its almost a new round of neo-retro like we had in the early 2000s with the PT Cruiser, Neu Beetle, HHR, etc.

Thank you! At least it was the right brand.

Hey guys, see if you can figure this one out. Cannonically this is supposed to be to be a Range Rover in the story. It’s clearly not a Range Rover. I looked at Pathfinder, Armada, some Fords and can’t figure out what it is. Should be something circa 2015 or earlier. The hazard button is in an odd place right under the screen and it looks like it has a speaker above the screen. There’s also clearly a CD player.

What’s up? Need help?

It's also an old money / new money thing. New money goes for bling. Old money is fine with an older Benz e-class wagon, or a Toyota Land Cruiser. But even celebrities often have blend-in cars, basic old Prius or something to go out in under cover.

It looks like they're scraper bots. They don't seem to be doing anything except crawling the whole site.

This is really annoying. I noticed yesterday that traffic on the site was exponentially high. Turns out we were getting crawled by apparently all of China. I had to use Cloudfare to block the entire country because there was no pattern of repeats in the IP addresses. You can see where I installed the rule. That's 80k hits in about 18 hours. Before discovering this, we were getting 500k hits per day, super high for this site. There are still some getting through from Hong Kong, but not nearly the same volume. Def something going on as the other countries surrounding China are also hitting.

It's probably a bit late, but there is a $0.99 plug-in on the Windows Store from Microsoft that lets your computer read HEIC files and do any conversions locally on your computer. I bought it a few years back to avoid that kind of hassle. Once you have that, I have used Irfanview for 25 years to do batch photo conversions and with the Windows plug-in, should be able to convert HEIC files to jpeg for you.

Sure has been a while. We're about to head into our 25th year!

They may be functional, but they still look silly. The ones on the one @G. David Felt posted look better.

I almost posted that first, but we only got the cross country here unless you special ordered one

yeah, but I could totally get into one of those as a wagon. (minus the silly wing and hood scoops)