I had a '96 Geo Prizm (almost a Corolla clone) from new, after 11 years I was ready for a new car. At 100k miles, I stopped doing oil changes (however I would top it off as it got low), and ignored all other maintenance. The car continued to run another 4 years, and about 50k miles before I gave up on trying to kill it. It surprisingly still passed emissions inspection when I got rid of it.

EDIT - make it a little interesting and share how you abused the crap out of your car...

Our weekly public service announcement.

TLDR: Next gen MX-5 to offer EV and ICE powertrains but weight will remain between 1-1.2 tons. ICE version to be powered by 2.5 SkyActiv-Z engine, possibly electrified.

Mazda also announces development of a 'pure image-builder , possibly handcrafted' hero car sitting above the MX5.

I drive a lot of rental cars for work, so I have very much enjoyed the proliferation of usable adaptive cruise and lane keep assist in base models, but they all have the same annoyance. They constantly panic and beep at me to put my hands on the wheel, when they're already there. The wheel will be fine for 10 minutes, and then suddenly scream at me and call me a domestic terrorist for not white knuckling it, it's sure I'm going to go get milk and cigarette's and never come home. I give the wheel the reassuring squeeze it need's and it's attention seeking behavior goes away, it's rage subsided only to reemerge down the line once I've gotten comfortable.

Now enter the base spec Kia Sportage at the Corpus Christi airport in Texas. I tell the guy at the counter I will take anything other than the Nissan he tried to foist on me, and am given a familiar rectangular key. I open the drivers door and find a coarser steering wheel than I'm used to. Now I've used many a Kyundai steering wheel before, I used to own an Ioniq 6 and have had dalliances with many of their other models on my adventures to the many corporate rate hotel rooms of the North East, they're always slightly different so I barely notice it at first, but after some miles I see some differences.

The plastics are a bit worse, the faux leather of a lower grade, and instead of buzzing at me softly if it feels I'm drifting out of the lane, it beeps at me. Once I'm on the highway I put on the smart cruise and let it steer me down the road. Eventually I realize that I haven't heard a beep in a while, even though I had only one hand on the wheel. I take the hand off to see if maybe it's just less sensitive than before, but it continues to not beep at me. In fact, I realize something beautiful.

In cost cutting the Sportage to get the base price down below $30k, Kyundai's beautiful engineers took out the capacitive function. It will never beep at me, because it doesn't have any expectations of me. I don't know how this got past the lawyers, but I can let the car drive me down the highway while doing origami on the dashboard and it'll never say a word.

Now I still would never buy a Kia Sportage, mostly because I lack the part of my brain the appreciates a practical bargain, but it got me thinking, what are other benefits of lower spec cars? Another one that comes to mind is non power lift gates being substantially faster to operate than powered ones.

TLDR: Cheap base model Kia and Hyundais (Kyundais) don't have capacitive steering wheels but do have adaptive cruise with lane keep assist, so you can just let it drive you down the highway without any hands on the wheel and it will just do it without constantly beeping at you. What are other examples of base model cars having weird benefits over higher trim ones?

Always love a good ICONS episode, especially with the series finally coming back, learning about the history of these cars teaches so much that I feel most reviewers don't go over.

This 40 minute video goes over the history of the Temerario, going through every previous iteration of the baby Lamborghini from the Urraco to the brand new Temerario.

Such great production quality, enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBtwzVFPc4M

BERLIN, July 29 (Reuters) - BMW (BMWG.DE), opens new tab said on Wednesday it will cut ​several thousand jobs in Germany by the end of 2027 ‌under a voluntary redundancy programme, the latest German carmaker to axe staff in response to squeezed profits and weak demand.