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davecrazy posted:Meh. Maserati falls into the luxury segment for FCA/Stellantis. Premium is BMW/Mercedes/Audi competition, not Bentley.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 17:57 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:22 |
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Speaking of "luxury", here's a close look at the Celestiq from less than an hour ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnkIVRSshJA I've seen photos of these things but no idea if it's an actual first time it's shown up close. I like the idea of a giant outrageous Cadillac like the V16 or something but not really loving that rear end so far. Also doesn't seem to have as much space insied as an S class or something.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 19:06 |
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I've seen one in person, going down the opposite side of I-75, in all black. It wasn't quite as ugly as the pictures imply but it was much more boring. It really does look like a modern day version of the 6000 SUX from RoboCop.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 19:08 |
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^ people keep making that comparison but the styling on the 6000SUX is actually cool. The above is a mess.
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# ? Mar 10, 2024 19:50 |
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It might well be because the one I saw was all black, but in-person the resemblance is stronger.
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# ? Mar 10, 2024 19:58 |
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"We're actually putting something unique into low volume production, what should we build" Cadillac: The homermobile Tesla: Rusty refrigerator Ford: A supercar that looks like it's based on a rental car GMC: what about something that's 10000lbs and crazy fast
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# ? Mar 10, 2024 21:55 |
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of all the cool concept cars Cadillac has come up with, its a shame the Celestiq is the one that is actually going to exist and be able to be purchased
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 00:31 |
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C8 xlr when?!?!?
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 00:32 |
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no lube so what posted:C8 xlr when?!?!? Franco Caution posted:of all the cool concept cars Cadillac has come up with, its a shame the Celestiq is the one that is actually going to exist and be able to be purchased It is a shame that we don't have ratty beat up Cadillac Sixteens everywhere right now instead of DTSes
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 00:35 |
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Powershift posted:I like it, very Niva. shame it's going to be so expensive.
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 02:30 |
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Franco Caution posted:of all the cool concept cars Cadillac has come up with, its a shame the Celestiq is the one that is actually going to exist and be able to be purchased Yeah, this kills me. I want an Elmiraj.
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 04:16 |
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:I want an Elmiraj.
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# ? Mar 11, 2024 21:22 |
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:Yeah, this kills me. I want an Elmiraj. It's ridiculous how much better this looks than that orange robot bathtub posted above it. I know the Elmiraj is a concept car but come on... I guess either way people will walk past it on their way to the Escalades
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# ? Mar 12, 2024 00:00 |
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Bugatti has developed a new V16 for the Chiron's successor. It supposedly has a 9,500 RPM redline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO4Q4xt8g9o
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# ? Mar 12, 2024 18:36 |
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Ford got busted for the fake interiors they installed in Transit Connects a decade ago to dodge taxes: https://www.autoblog.com/2024/03/12/ford-will-pay-365-million-in-transit-connect-import-tariff-evasion-case/quote:The Justice Department said Ford imported the vehicles "with sham rear seats and other temporary features to make the vans appear to be passenger vehicles. These temporary rear seats were never intended to be, and never were, used to carry passengers."
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# ? Mar 13, 2024 16:57 |
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E53 AMG wagon, I6 hybrid, 612hp. Hopefully you can order it in brown too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA6qjir7S7s ID.3 GTX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y7VdcOkxA
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# ? Mar 13, 2024 19:29 |
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Man the new Merc headlight design is so ugly. Just a weird runny bulbous mess.
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# ? Mar 13, 2024 19:41 |
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The ID.7 GTX wagon embargo also just lifted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URFoitaJOKw Sab669 posted:Man the new Merc headlight design is so ugly. Just a weird runny bulbous mess. Mr. Apollo fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Mar 13, 2024 |
# ? Mar 13, 2024 20:04 |
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MB styling continues to be a melting mess.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 01:34 |
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Twerk from Home posted:Ford got busted for the fake interiors they installed in Transit Connects a decade ago to dodge taxes: https://www.autoblog.com/2024/03/12/ford-will-pay-365-million-in-transit-connect-import-tariff-evasion-case/ "devised a scheme" lol, they never tried to hide it! They announced that's how they were doing it!
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 02:56 |
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Wild that both Ford and GM, the two companies that benefited most from the tax still tried to evade it.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 03:38 |
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Sab669 posted:Man the new Merc headlight design is so ugly. Just a weird runny bulbous mess. It looks very Nissan and I can't put my finger on why
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 05:00 |
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The mini Aceman. Bigger than the cooper, smaller than the Countryman. https://www.carscoops.com/2024/03/this-is-the-new-mini-aceman-electric-crossover/ The greenhouse looks so narrow. EV only, China only?
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 05:28 |
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dissss posted:Wild that both Ford and GM, the two companies that benefited most from the tax still tried to evade it. I wouldn’t put it as “tried to evade it.” Let an ex trade lawyer tell you a story. Customs law is very clear that the state of a good at importation is normally* determinative of the tariff classification of the good. And as a result of some shenanigans over frozen chicken in the sixties, there’s two customs headings right next to each other in the tariff schedules: “motor vehicles for the transport of goods” are subject to a 25% tariff rate, while those “principally designed for the transport of persons” are only tariffed at 2.5%. These type of customs classifications are called eo nomine headings, because lawyers think we’re fancy and like to use Latin instead of just saying “what the thing is when imported governs.” And for decades, the vans were imported with seats and seatbelts and floor mats installed. Which was good enough for customs classification purposes, since the vans, in the condition they were imported in, were therefore suitable for the transport of persons and not suitable for the transport of goods. It was wholly immaterial from the point of view of these two eo nomine headings that the seats were cheap and the floor mats barely stuck down and the window was part of one obvious square panel and all would be removed inside the United States, because, again, what happens after importation does not matter for classification. Returning to that pesky “normally,” there’s a small number of tariff classifications that are called either “principal use” or “actual use” provisions. The difference between the two is bureaucratic and not important here, but the point is that whether or not one of of these types of headings applies does depend on evidence of use after importation, which is evaluated under one of the worst multi-factor tests a court has ever saw fit to create, an eight-factor monstrosity from a case United States v. Carborundum Co. And the types of headings are mutually exclusive: a heading is either an eo nomine heading or a use heading. So how do you tell if you’re dealing with a use heading ? Simple: it has the word “use” in it. For example, HTSUS 9817.00.50 gives a tariff discount to “machinery used for agricultural or horticultural purposes”, because if you’re a large agricultural conglomerate, boy does the government have free money for you. Now go back to our two headings: motor vehicles “for the transport of goods” or “principally designed for the transport of persons.” Note that neither of these have the word “use” in them. (Since you’ll ask, the phrase “principally designed” appears often in tariff headings, often when you have a sort of binary choice of two classifications like you do here and serves as a tiebreaker - a good that’s about 50/50 usually goes under the one heading of the pair without the phrase - and, important for our purposes, has never been interpreted as equivalent to the word “use”). So ever since the sixties the laws were clear and what you had to do to import a van and get the 2.5% rate was clear: it had to have seats and rear windows and stuff, and it didn’t matter that they were cheap and would be ripped out at a plant a few miles from the port so long as they met the federal safety standards for what makes a passenger seat, seatbelt, etc. (the Ford vans at issue even had the child car seat latches). And global supply lines, manufacturing plant locations, shipping schedules, etc. were all set over decades knowing that that was the rule. Is it tax evasion? No, no more than a hedge fund manager getting carry taxed at cap gains rate rather than as income rate. It’s a corporation taking advantage of the rules as written, and the issue is the rules suck. And then, in 2011, Customs threw a fit and insisted that the 25% rate for goods-carrying vehicles applied to a shipment of Ford vans. It gets murky as to exactly what happened: Ford’s telling has some Customs agents taking a look at a batch of post-processing vans and noted they no longer had seats or windows or such, the government’s story is that Ford had a separate line of VIN’s for these vans, different seats, floors, etc than the Transit passenger vans and so they noticed that way. Anyways, Ford appealed to the Court of International Trade, which is a Borg Cube in New York City where a handful of trade lawyers get to be federal judges specialising in this not at all dry and persnickety field of law. The CIT ruled for Ford, in an opinion full of phrases like “well-settled tenet of law” and that what happens after importation is “immaterial” and that Customs’ position is “paradoxical”, which are all lawyerly ways of telling the US Government to stop trying to pull this transparent bullshit which goes against fifty years of how things were done. However, decisions of the CIT are appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is problematic in two ways: 1) it’s not in a Borg Cube in NYC, but an ugly red brick carbuncle in Washington DC, so post-hearing drink options are worse, and 2) it’s full of judges that are patent lawyers who wish all the non-patent cases they have to deal with would up and go away so they can go back to their fun arguments about whatever the hell “a person of ordinary skill in the art” would or wouldn’t have known. So when they get their hands on a trade issue (or a veteran’s healthcare rights issue or contract with the U.S. government as buyer issue) poo poo can get weird. So these three patent lawyers, faced with precedent making it clear that “use” headings have the word “use” in them and non-use headings are determined at time of import, up and invent a fourth type of heading: “an eo nomine heading that ‘inherently suggests a type of use’”. And it just so happens that inventing this new type of heading means that these evil foreigners of Ford Corporation now owe Customs a few hundred million dollars. Never mind that this fourth type of heading conflates the two types of headings that are mutually exclusive - “never the twain shall meet” has gone and had a kid. Or that the test for it is incoherent and unclear - nobody knows when it applies, or whether evidence of post-importation use is more or less important than state at time of importation. This upsets, well, everyone. Not that we’re weeping for Ford, they’ll be fine with their infinite money. It’s more that nobody knows how to handle this combination of things that should not be combined, when it applies, or how it applies when it does. Which is important for things like global supply chains, which parts of processing to put in what factories where, etc. Honestly, the substance of the law is less important than its certainty and consistency in terms of supply chain investment, and the Federal Circuit has just gone and made the law less certain and less consistent. And in fact that probably hurts US manufacturing, because since the US does very little raw materials processing anymore, you’re going to have a factory elsewhere making a predecessor good which is then further processed, and if it’s unclear if post-importation processing in the U.S. will or won’t get you a cheaper tariff rate, you’re going to put the factory where it’s cheaper and price the tariff in. So yeah, that’s what happened with chicken tax vans. Jean-Paul Shartre fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Mar 14, 2024 |
# ? Mar 14, 2024 08:33 |
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drat that is a good post edit: It's also not like Ford is the only OEM to do this, Subaru famously had those cool little rear facing seats in the bed of the Brat to try to get around the rule. I suppose they stayed installed to the customer, though.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 14:13 |
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Did the Supreme Court not review it ? Sorry if you said and I missed it
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 14:25 |
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euphronius posted:Did the Supreme Court not review it ? I didn’t mention it. Ford petitioned for cert (https://www.supremecourt.gov/Docket...0Certiorari.pdf if you want to read, it’s where they’re alleging Customs trainees looked at post-processing vans) but it was denied.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 15:05 |
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Failson posted:The mini Aceman. Bigger than the cooper, smaller than the Countryman. It's specifically an EV platform, so yes EV only. Its production will start in China for most of the worlds markets but it should be expanded to the Oxford plant in the UK in 2026 along with the 2dr Cooper SE which will allow it to be imported to the US.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 16:49 |
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I'd get another of those yellow 's' on the back and swap out the CE so I could have a Mini Assman.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 16:52 |
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wow that is not an attractive car
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 16:52 |
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^ I was just about to edit my comment to say it looks very frumpy.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 16:53 |
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i'm sure it doesn't help that its on some base spec ugly wheels
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 17:10 |
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kill me now posted:i'm sure it doesn't help that its on some base spec ugly wheels This is another conversation entirely: OEM wheels look like poo poo. There's maybe a handful of genuinely good looking OEM rims on cars these days. The diamond cut poo poo is so tired and comes on base spec stuff as well as high end cars, the only difference is in the sizing.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 18:28 |
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I’m honestly pretty happy with the current gloss black Mazda split 5-spoke design that they’re using on the MZ3, CX-30, et cetera but they’re only 7 inches wide when they should really be 7.5 to allow more variety in tire options.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 18:47 |
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Jean-Paul Shartre posted:I wouldn’t put it as “tried to evade it.” Let an ex trade lawyer tell you a story. Goddamn, that was a good post.
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 19:46 |
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Olympic Mathlete posted:This is another conversation entirely: OEM wheels look like poo poo. There's maybe a handful of genuinely good looking OEM rims on cars these days. The diamond cut poo poo is so tired and comes on base spec stuff as well as high end cars, the only difference is in the sizing. Do Alpina wheels count? Because they get my vote but lol. Also the Miata RF Club BBS wheels are good but that is sort of cheating. Miata once again always the answer TheBacon fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Mar 14, 2024 |
# ? Mar 14, 2024 23:08 |
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The modern Alfa Romeo 5-hole was an amazing update on a classic design but they had to go gently caress it up with the cut bare metal on the newer ones. Glad mine has the older ones.
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# ? Mar 15, 2024 00:47 |
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Failson posted:The mini Aceman. Bigger than the cooper, smaller than the Countryman. I can't unsee the Toyota Probox
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# ? Mar 17, 2024 23:34 |
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The Probox is good though??
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# ? Mar 18, 2024 00:48 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:22 |
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BuckyDoneGun posted:
Yeah my brain went immediately to “current genetic Toyota.” TheBacon posted:Do Alpina wheels count? Because they get my vote but lol. Alpina’s classic design remains classic, but nah, not for this discussion.
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# ? Mar 18, 2024 00:59 |