The P1800 is one of the finest cars ever made. Love those things.
They now own Tetley Tea! They’re like Mitsubishi (whose logo I’d seen on canned food).
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It’s not his fault, he’s suffering from trumpfluenza.
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All right, I shall start recording every incident where I think (oh dear) that I have encountered an asshole on the road. Hmm, too biased. Have to develop a scoring system, like 1 for minor tailgating (say two car lengths on a highway), up to 10 for causing an accident by deliberate asshood. But the scoring system will have to be investigated, probably by a trial using profession drivers on a racetrack. Video and accelerometers placed on the cars would be helpful. Once that’s been peer reviewed, published (in the journal International Journal of Asshood and reproduced, we can safely use it. Maybe develop an international standard at ISO, called “Scoring Systems for Assessing Asshood in Drivers.”
Of course I might cause an accident whilst recording in my lab notebook. Besides it’s just me, which we know is biased. I’ll need to take a team of neutral scorers (maybe non-drivers), who’ve been trained at the racetrack. Say ten scorers. But they wouldn’t fit in my car. Maybe get one of those 360 degree cameras Google uses for street view, and have the scorers in a room with VR headsets on.
But even tests like that have been shown to have bias. What to do? Give up, go home, throw keys in trash. Thank goodness I’m not commuting anymore!
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You argue like a BMW driver
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I’ll take that as a compliment!
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Colloquially, people often call purchases “investments” and ask questions like “is this ladder a good investment?” when they really mean “is this ladder a reasonable thing to spend money on, or is it a piece of junk?”
You can absolutely apply the same meaning when talking about a car, and that’s fine as long as everyone understands what you mean.
The problem is, people don’t. A car is an extremely expensive item for most people, and people use that sort of phrasing as part of the way they convince themselves to go deeply into debt financing a car they can’t afford. They think “oh, brand x is supposed to be a good investment because of the resale value” or whatever.
So, I think it’s good to use precise language when considering what to spend your life savings on. A car is not an investment. It’s a capital expense that you (may) need to make to live your life. If you want to buy an expensive car, understand that you’re doing it for fun, or to pretend you impress people, or whatever.
Investments are things that a reasonable person would expect to go up in value.
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An investment asset doesn’t have to go up in value itself, it can be something that enhances the value of other things. A bespoke suit can be an “investment” if it makes potential clients or business partners look upon you more favorably. A reliable car can be an “investment” if it affords you access to jobs you couldn’t otherwise get to; it doesn’t have to itself be an investment vehicle.
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I assumed you would! 
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I do think that it is important to distinguish between an investment and a speculative investment. An investment is speculative to the extant that it is based on appreciation of the asset price rather than returns. So a stock that doesn’t pay dividends is a purely speculative investment, but a bond that provides regular payments is not speculative.
FTFY. As always, most investments carry an element of risk. And you’re applying a needlessly narrow usage of “investment” to cars if you insist that they must only present a dollar profit over the course of one’s ownership of them. Of the thirteen 1971 Plymouth HemiCuda convertibles ever made, it’s been a while since somebody bought one as anything other than as a financial investment. I mean, they’re 45 years old, and they’re Plymouths, and they aren’t particularly comfortable, they get terrible gas mileage, they’re noisy, they’re hot, they’re fiddly to keep in tune, they wear out tires awfully fast, and parts are hard to come by. As transportation, they’re not great investments because so many factors work against a driver being actually able to drive one. Even insurance is a pain.
…because as investment-investments, well, one of those HemiCudas sold for $3.5 million at auction in pretty much the same shape it was when it was a $4,174 new car down at the dealership. I don’t think anyone who just plain loves Plymouths has been able to afford a '71 HemiCuda convertible in quite a long time. That’s investor-only territory now.
And yet, when the car was new, nobody expected them to give any kind of return on that $4k investment. It was just a car, and would have been expected to depreciate just like the Dusters and Valiants parked right next to them.
I’d say a new car is an extremely expensive item for most people, but unless we’re talking about the vast majority of the world’s population that may never ride in, let alone own a car, I’d say that based upon the numbers of cars on the road these days (253 million in the USA, with an average age of 11.4 years, sez the L.A. Times) and seeing as how the Kelley Blue Book prices an eleven-year-old Camry (the most boring-ass average car I can think of) at $3500, most cars on the road today aren’t exactly “extremely expensive.”
The reason people use “investment” when talking about a potential car purchase, as you imply, is not because they expect it to go up in value. Today’s “reliable transportation” is next year’s crumpled paperweight, if my own car-owning history is any yardstick, and people think of their “return on investment” not in terms of dollar profit, but rather “Can I get a few years of reliable and comfortable use out of this car before I sell it for as large a fraction of my initial outlay as possible? And in the meantime, can I go fast, listen to loud music, and maybe impress a few people while I’m driving it?” You can outlay your capital on a recent Volkswagen (bad investment, since even if you enjoy it you’ll never be able to sell it for very much) or a Honda (good investment because you might enjoy driving it as much as you’d enjoy the VW, but the Honda will hold onto much more of its value). And yet you’ll never turn a profit on either of those unless you lock them untouched in a clean vault for a century or more. The actual driving use of the car, coupled with whatever comfort and/or style benefits it provides, constitute the lion’s share of return on the investment.
If you have to spend your life savings to do it, you shouldn’t be buying that car. I’ve bought cars with $28,000 price tags (used), and a few with $400 price tags. All of 'em served my purpose and got me where I needed to go. None of 'em were “bad investments” (except maybe the 1974 Super Beetle with the bad exhaust valve; I should have walked away from that one). But again, I had to marshal some savings when I bought my '94 Toyota truck. I looked into S-10s and Rangers (my sister-in-law bought a Ranger of the same year and lived to regret it), but decided to invest in the Toyota. I got 225K miles out of it, my niece has gotten a further 70k out of it, and it’s still running like a top. Kelley says I could get $1,700 for it, so not counting gas, fluids, and maintenance, that car cost me tuppence a mile to own.
Not only was that a sound capital expenditure, it was a wise investment. 
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Yeh, you’re right! They were in takeover talks but that fell through and resulted in Ford taking over the JLR marque but nothing else. For some reason I thought they’d gotten more than that but apparently not. (BMW going to shit must just be coincidental timing, lol!)
I must have been, oops! (They got JLR from BMW, but that’s all.)
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Interestingly, when the movie SkyFall was being shot, the scene where he rolls the car spectacularly was set up with BMWs because they were cheaper. They rolled easily just by putting a small ramp on the inside of the curve. When it came time for the Audi though it was impossible to roll - it would literally level itself back out in mid-air! They finally had to put a squib under it to shoot the scene.
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My wife and I both switched to BMW after having a series of great VAG cars - jettas, GTI, passat, Audi.
Both our cars have been excellent, though I do think that Audi and Mercedes beat them on interiors at pretty much all levels.
I especially think they represent an impressive value when purchased as a CPO.
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