bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

ROFL - post of the day.

I recently drove 250 miles of interstate (twice) and I passed a few Priuses, each going VERY SLOW on the EMPTY interstate. Guess they have nothing better to do than drive all day and be proud of their baby-sized carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, I've got stuff to do...

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

Impressive, but there's trade-offs. Subarus are pretty noisy vehicles - the lightness comes from little sound-deadening material plus an inherently noisy engine design. Don't get me wrong though, I love Subarus - wife had a Legacy wagon in the 90s. I loved doing donuts in snow-covered parking lots. When we moved to Atlanta though we found it too slow when merging on the 'death race' highways in and around the city. We traded up to an RX300 which really is one of the best vehicles ever made.

RON430

Not much of a thread starter here but you know you have hit one of the keys that is going to happen for higher mileage that I doubt most people here are aware of. Cars are going to get lighter. They are going to get smaller as well but that is just a side effect of getting lighter. You don't need a supercomputer and nanotechnology to drag more mileage out of a car when you just make the thing smaller and lighter.

My wife and I have been agonizing about replacing one of the GSs this summer but have decided to hang on for a while. But once you get to be an old fart, the quietness of the car gets important. Neither of our 2GS have ever been what you would call quiet and it only gets worse as the tires wear. Thinner glass (although I can't imagine how they could get it much thinner) and even less sound deadening isn't going to help. I was pretty shocked when I replaced the speakers in the GS that the doors have no sound deadening other than the inner interior panel. After market sound deadening helped a bit but not much. So the conclusion that we got around to is that we will pay with worse mileage for comfort and quiet. Now if the car makers will make some decently quiet large vehicles with maybe around 300hp I will be ready to buy. A Prius just isn't in my future unless the Lexus model in a couple of years makes better tradeoffs.

SLegacy99

Hmm, you're the first I've heard complain about a Subaru being noisy. I drop it into 5th and its fine.

RX300 is a nice vehicle, despite being way under powered and having a poor turning radius. As we found out, the latest generation of RX fixed everything that the first gen. lacked. What I never understood about our RX300 was that it got 18 mpg in the city, good for the time period, but only 20 on the highway. Yeuck.

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

Agreed on the turning radius, but as far as being underpowered, it was MUCH less scary merging onto I285 around Atlanta compared to the anemic Legacy wagon we had. I know your Legacy is a stick, and maybe the slushbox on the Legacy was what made ours such a poke.