Cars, Trucks, and other vehicles.

Yeah, I think a lot of people would be interested in a 1/4ton Jeep pickup, though I don't think it should be surprising that they've taken so long to clue in, it took them forever to figure out that people would buy a 4-door Jeep with a longer wheelbase, and now I hear the Wrangler Unlimited sells better than the 2-door Wranglers.

I was going to ask what North American manufacturers even make 1/4ton pickups any more, but then I vaguely remembered the Colorado and Canyon, the problem I guess is that I just never see Colorados on the road, and the Canyon looks almost identical to the Sierra 1500, just slightly smaller.

My old man used to have an S-10, that thing got horrible mileage, I borrowed it a few times and I'd burn a quarter tank every day driving to and from work, almost all of that highway driving. I can't imagine these new full-sized trucks with small engines get fantastic mileage either, not if they're using an underpowered engine in a heavy-ass truck.


I actually see quite a few 4-doors around here that are done up for serious offroading, not as many as the 2-doors of course, but still quite a few.

I don't really care too much how fast they go (unless we're talking about the acceleration of a Citroen 2CV, which go 0-60 in about 40 seconds), I like trucks, and things that are Jeeps, and things that aren't Jeeps but are like Jeeps.

That being said, the new Jeeps go pretty fast. And I used to borrow my buddy's 78 Ford, which seemed to top out at around 155km/h; I didn't mean to go that fast, and it felt like death at that speed, but it did it.

I'm doing a little research on a story I'm doing that takes place in mythical world that has similarities to mid 19th century America.  Much of the story deals with a Transcontinental Railroad type adventure across the continent.  Part of the difficulties of the adventure (admittedly, a small part) deals with toilet facilities on the vehicle.  Online research is turning up shit on shit.  Mostly just folks talking in forums that seem to be talking out their collective asses.  I've seen several people say "do it on the shovel and toss it into the engine" but that seems, well, stupid.  For one if you're talking about the engineer only.  It's highly unlikely that the passengers had that option.  For two I'm sure that would have been frowned on by the train company.  Others said that the train simply stopped and people would "do it in the bushes", but a train has a schedule to keep.  They wouldn't stop for everyone that needed to take a shit.  Some say that there were no facilities and you had to wait until the train stopped every few hours for water and coal.  Still, you're talking a vehicle that took entire families across the continent.  Kids don't always time their pooping schedule like that.  Not to mention that motion sickness would have been a huge issue on these early trains.  Another one said "they just did it over the side", but you could hardly expect a woman wearing the restrictive clothing of the time to do that.  Another option was a bucket that they simply dumped overboard.  But for one, the bucket would get pretty nasty pretty quickly, and for two, who wants to be the one to dump it with the combined motion of the vehicle and whatever wind is present?  One said they did it in a bag in a bucket and the bag was tied off, but that would have been later when plastics would have been available.  A paper bag wouldn't be worth a damn for that, even if the bag was waxed. 

What I suspect, even though I can't find any instances.  Is that there was a small privy room in some of the cars that basically had a hole in the bottom of the train and they went right onto the tracks.  Environmental concerns wouldn't have even been an issue at the time. 

If that was the case the transcontinental railroad was just this long line of sewage from one coast to the other. 

Eww. 

The guys that didn't know what they were doing in the first place are gonna fix it?

It's too bad there aren't more old 4x4 military cars, I stumbled across photos of these things, the Volvo TP21 "Terrain Sow";



Less than 1000 were built, the Swedes used them for radio and command cars. They had a 224 inline 6, and a curb weight of something 3.5tons, so they're not fast at all, but they look like they're built to drive through walls.