If it makes you feel any better, I was in college during Nixon's first term, so as you might imagine, I followed his Presidency rather closely what with Viet Nam and all... graduated a coupla years before he resigned.
You're just a kid! I can't help with your exercise regimen nor your legitimacy, but you've still got a way to go until you reach the "age of dirt!"
Rick
There's a reason for that: weight savings. A good example of this is the fact that the BMW M3 CSL has a trunk with a cardboard base. Do you consider one of the fastest cars in the world to be poorly constructed? There's a reason for all this. Cars in the 70s didn't do 0-60 in 4.6 seconds, run the quarter mile in the 12s, and handle around curves better than 99.999+% of all other vehicles on the road.
You've already answered your own question: the STi is $48K CAD, brand new. That's only a few K over the luxury tax line. Knock of a few K from the price and you have a car that is no longer considered a luxury purchase.
$40K twenty years ago, adjusted for inflation is.. what? $75K or so? That's up in the M3 range. Your concept of quality is a bit.. off, and certainly unrealistic given the intent of the car manufacturers.
The STi is NOT the spiritual descendent of your MB. I consider it to be more the spiritual descendent of the Roadrunner, which provided no frills: just pure road-destroying power. This is what you buy when you purchase an STi: a car which is concentrated solely on providing superior handling, speed, and torque, with nothing but an inperceptible nod to creature comforts. They've read their market demographic with great adeptness, and *you* are most certainly not part of it.
So I guess the question becomes: why do you care whether the STi is your kind of car or not? Something about it must have piqued your interest, otherwise you wouldn't even be wasting your time thinking about it. I'll tell you which cars *you* should be looking at: The BMW M3; the Carrera 4S; the Mercedes SLK class. Leave the STi to people who don't need a car to wipe their ass and talc their bum. Leave the STi to people who find creature comforts almost distasteful; who find the idea of a car that caters to the driver's whims and talks to its passengers in a sexy voice somehow wrong--somehow against what a car was meant to be.
Then look elsewhere and stop expecting Subaru to manufacture your dream vehicle. Go bug Saab. Go pester Audi. Test drive a BMW. If your old-school age-"refined" sensibilities play tricks on you and make you think that thick, heavyweight materials are equated with quality, that's really not Subaru's problem now is it? It's a question of a realistic outlook on the whole car manufacturing industry, to be blunt. Most people think that all car manufacturers are somehow charging double, triple, or quadruple what the cars actually cost to build and if they just charged what we think is a "reasonable" price for their vehicles, we'd be paying a tiny fraction of what cars are currently priced at. Wake-up call: the conspiracy theorists would welcome you into their fold.
So.. uh.. you want the STi's performance in a heavier, thicker vehicle, or one that uses rare, advanced materials that cost vast amounts of money and expensive elements to produce, at the STi's price point? Shya, dream on.
Have considered, but I doesn't look like I'll have that kind of dough. We'll see as the year progresses. Garage space also becomes a problem with the 1 fun + 1 practical solution.
my only comment is that *every* single audi owner i know has been sorry! apart from the marketing hype, and the "image", they are overpriced and unreliable. and they depreciate like a lead balloon.
i've known half-a-dozen audi owners, and the only one that bought another audi only did so because that was the only economical way to offload the stupid thing - the cost of repairing the little sucker (just out of warranty) was about the same as its trade-in!
you should have your head examined if you pick up a used audi for the same bucks as a new subaru.
at least in my humble opinion...
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