Is it true that brass tire valves last the life of the vehicle?

I missed seeing the "tubeless" part of rbowman's reply. :-(

I was meaning the gimmicky sensor-based things, such as "lane assist", which is utterly hopeless where road marking are faded or non-existant (and can be damn dangerous in cars where it keeps trying to steer iteslf back into teh "lane").

In sunny Florida, a car sitting in the sun can be 140 inside in a short time. In CT it was below zero some days. Not so stupid in the extremes.

I've had plenty of used cars, I've done plenty of work on them too. They are more complex and expensive to fix so I prefer to trade in by end of warranty. Too many fixes that can be very expensive and I like a nice car.

Clearly not, or they wouldn't sell so many of them. I remember reading about a drive-up teller window in Texas that had a hose to blow cold air into the customer's car while he was making a transaction.

My mom's Caddy was the first "nice" car I ever had. POS. I spent way too much trying to solve the throttle problem (I have witnesses to show that my foot was NOT on the gas pedal when it suddenly maximized acceleration all by itself) and sent it to the knackers with a brand-new brake system. This was a car with under 90K miles. I'll trade "nice" for "reliable" and "trouble-free" any day of the week.I/we always fixed our cars and motorcycles ourselves except for things that actually required a hoist. BUT I've done that long enough and don't want to do it any more, which is why I bought the Corolla to replace my mom's murderous Caddy.

We had a rental car that beeped when we got too close to the line. Fortunately there was an owner's manual included. What kind of idiot would tolerate that? A friend loves his backup camera, and I can see how that would be nice; it's harder and harder to see out of the car windows (styling choice by ALL the designers), especially for short people, and our necks NEVER want to do more twisting than they have to.

I don't think I'll live long enough to trust auto-drive.

My last GM car was a 2001 Buick. Seems they were on a downward trend and I'd not touch another one. I gave that one away after 6 years, would have been criminal to take money for it.

My last two cars have Highway Drive Assist. No beeps. It will keep you centered and will follow the curves, but you have to keep your hand on the wheel.

A couple of times a year I take a fairly long trip. Using the adaptive cruise control and HDA I'm comfortable driving many more miles. I've done over 900 miles in a day on the first day, 400 to destination the next. Much is I-95

Agree on the auto-drive. Oh, I also stop and rest stops and recline the seat, put my head down for a few minutes. Makes a big difference.

I'm lucky. When I took my car in for a recall in 2020 I saw a leftover

Anyway most of the gimmicky stuff is partially implemented and probably was available on a higher trim level. It does have electronic door locks, which I like, but not remote entry. Lane control, if turned on, shows an icon with the position but doesn't try to correct. Collision avoidance beeps but doesn't apply the brakes.

Long ago Hubby's friend worked at the GM plant summers. He said the union assemblers were real bastards; one liked to drop transmissions on the concrete floor before installing them just for the hell of it. My mom bought a brand new Caddy with a cracked transmission; fortunately they gave her full credit on a different Caddy, maybe the one that tried to kill me.

Mom bought new cars (Fords and Caddies) several times from the same dealers. They gave her so little as a trade-in that I KNOW they were well aware of the s***ty service that they gave her every 3 months or so. She gave them to me instead and I always found something truly shoddy/criminal in their maintenance. State of Kalifornia paid me $1K several times to crush them, significantly more than I could have got from the wreckers. I'd rather they'd gone on to keep their brethren and sestren going, but money talks.

I don't understand why anybody would want that. I LIKE driving.

We had 4 days to get to DC so we swapped driving until Roanoke VA when neither of us was awake enough to drive. 68 Dodge van, which we still have. Never figured out how much each of us drove at one time. We did a 500-mile day on motorcycles, and that was painful.

Actually most of the scenery in Texas is in West Texas snuggled up to New Mexico.

And New Mexico and Arizona are almost Utah :-)

Getting from Utah to Arizona can be interesting. Then there is the chunk of Arizona that you can't get to from Arizona.

I would guess that there are lots of places in all three places you can't get to except on foot, or maybe with a motorcycle -- or not at all, within reason. It will be sad when that's no longer true.

Those are plenty of those but I was thinking of the difficulties created by the canyons.

The choices still are limited.

I'd love to go through Escalante National Monument on a motorcycle. Driving through to Capitol Reef on the main dirt road wasn't enough. I wish I could remember what/where that truly pitiful slot canyon on the east side of ENP was.

not have a photo of ourself or a friend under the mushroom-shaped rock?

There are tons of slot canyons, most of which are too far for ME to walk, but the photos are spectacular. Fortunately the Navajos give easy tours to one or two out of Page. Book ahead.

Best road trips ever were in Utah. It's really not fair that they got so much pretty stuff. Makes me feel sorry for the poor people east of the Rockies. Trees are nice, but after a while you get tired of green :-)

I was born and grew up in Box Elder County Utah ... and I moved to the Midsouth because I wanted to see green instead of shades of brown and sagebrush green . We live in north central Arkansas now (Memphis for

A friend lived right on the edge of Ozark NF and took us on a jeep ride up into the mountains. Fine with hubby and me, we were dirtriders, but it was scary for my mom. We bought a monsterhome just to take our moms across the country to see stuff. Worth every penny (not a lot of them, it was used!) right there, but we took a few more trips in it.

I started down the trail from the North Rim. Things were going well until, in my mind's eye, the trail became 1 foot wide with a vertical wall to the right and a vertical drop to the left. Not my thing. I'd have to be tied on a mule and heavily sedated for that trip.

I hiked down one of the slot canyons in the Grand Staircase before it became a national monument. Most of my hiking is up mountains and I'm careful about going down canyons where I'm going to have to haul my tired butt back up.

Then there are the pour offs. I think it was Ed Abbey who wrote about going down a canyon until he got to a pour off with a long long drop. On his way backup he came to one he'd slid down but couldn't get traction on the smooth rock. He realizes that his bare feet will stick better than the boots. The boots are cumbersome and he figures the best best is to throw them up first. Then he thinks 'What if I can't get up to retrieve my boots?' Then reality sinks in -- if he can't get up he is going to die.

I did the barefoot thing at Echo Park (CO). However I'd hiked down on a good trail so if I couldn't get up the pour off it wasn't the end of the world.