We’re Fewer Than 100 New Members/Upgrades From David Living In An Aztek

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We’re less than a week into our effort to get 200 new members/upgrades by the end of the month to celebrate our 2nd anniversary, and already we’re at 105 new members/upgrades. As previously mentioned, if we hit this goal then not only will David Tracy buy an Aztek with a tent, he’ll live inside of it. Y’all asked for an update so you can track it and, so, here it is. As a reminder, if you’re not yet a member you can get 20% off an annual plan if you follow this link.

I want to shout out the people we have here who gifted their friends/other readers a Cloth membership. Just a reminder, you can gift a cloth membership by clicking this link, or a vinyl membership by clicking this link.

Because one of you asked, if someone becomes a new RCL member or upgrades to RCL we’ll count that as 5 total upgrades/members so that’ll get us that much closer. I’m feeling good about this and am wondering what we should do if we go over 200 new members/upgrades.

I’m open to ideas, let me know what would persuade you to become a member.

For those who don’t know: As a Cloth member, you get access to posts like Tales From The Slack and our exclusive member newsletter.

  • As A Vinyl Member You Get:

    • Everything in Cloth, plus…
    • A limited edition Members Only bumper sticker
    • A limited edition Members Only shirt

Vinyl is now $80 and Velour is now $200 a year instead of $250. That comes with all that^ plus:

  • As A Velour Member You Get:

    • Everything in Cloth+Vinyl, plus…
    • A custom grille badge for your car
    • Invites to a quarterly virtual trivia night
    • A Jason drawing on your birthday

The Jason drawing is worth $500 alone if you ask me. Look at these things!

So what are you waiting for? I really want David to live in an Aztek!

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45 thoughts on “We’re Fewer Than 100 New Members/Upgrades From David Living In An Aztek”

  2. Couple questions – link to Vinyl shows $100, will that change at checkout? Also, if I have like 8 months remaining on my Cloth will buying a year of Vinyl overlap, or will it add an additional year to the time I’ve already prepaid?

          1. Turns out I only had a couple of months left until renew anyway – who knew it was already almost a year since Cloth became a thing? So basically I paid to re-up a little early and got into the t-shirt/sticker tier at no extra cost. Great deal for anyone like me who signed up as soon as Cloth rolled out…

  4. Aight, quid pro quo: how much to get David to allow the Jag story?

    eta: I was seriously asking—but now I’m not sure. Is setting a price on overriding his judgment a good idea? I’m not sure of the implications there…

  6. Are you tracking the IP addresses of new member signups? If a cloth membership is $7 per month and only 95 new members are required, $665 spent on cloth memberships for fictional Autopians could force David into this endeavor…

      1. I disagree. Some day when I’m an old man I want to able to say I once spent hundreds of dollars purchasing fraudulent memberships to make an automotive journalist temporarily live in a Pontiac. This has been on my bucket list for years (sort of… my original goal was to spend hundreds of dollars committing website membership fraud to force an automotive journalist to temporarily live in a Subaru. Beggers can’t be choosers, though).

  8. I’ll sign up if you promise to get rid of auto playing videos. If those videos were their own separate update, I’d probably watch them. But, as something I didn’t ask for, I close them %100 of the time and it’s annoying every time(especially on a slow ass old phone)

    I love Autopian. It’s the best website on the internet. It’s everything great about the old site, minus the lions share of the bad stuff. But autoplaying videos are the worst

    1. As a paying velour member, I get them too. What is more annoying is that they never stop, and I never bother to go back to the video.

      With this I see the site as transforming into Jalopnik with Top Gear/Grand Tour, but in “printed/read copy” instead of video. I barely see any reviews of new cars coming out (I know there are tons of magazines doing that, but another opinion cannot hurt), or any in depth technical articles. I love Huebert’s suspension articles, but I would like to see some about tuning engines, aerodynamics (Toecutter is always full of information and entertaining) other technical and design aspects of cars.

      **Also, which manager do I talk about not getting the gear? I juat want to represent!!!

    2. Hey Morgan! If you sign up and sign in then you don’t get the pop-up video player. That goes away. When you scroll through the video on the desktop/story page the video will play, but with no audio.

      1. K. Sounds good. I’ll sign up

        I genuinely think you’d get better traction by giving the videos their own separate updates. It would also make it more reader friendly

      1. It’s a whole complex thing. We didn’t want to do the pop-up or audio-on video player thing and we’ve mostly resisted it. We tried to do it non-play to begin but it turns out that, because the Internet is terrible, it doesn’t actually function the way we need it to function. Our compromise to make it work was:

        • No pop-over for logged-in members.
        • No audio overplay.
        • Reduce ad-density

        It’s not quite where I want it to be yet, but it’s in progress.

        1. I know I am a bit of a Negative Nancy, but I can understand that. I’ve found that you can have all the ideals in the world…but without ever compromising you won’t get far.

    4. I purchased a browser plug in called stop the madness. $10 I think. Works on almost every site and no subscription. Worth every penny. Does a lot more than stop auto videos but that is the best feature.

  9. The Aztec should prove to be a very livable vehicle. The main thing is that you can sleep in it and stay warm in the winter, which the Aztec is well capable of allowing.

    I’ve camped out in my trikes before and they aren’t nearly as roomy, which is why I want to build a solar camper trailer that I can haul with them.

      1. I haven’t built the trailer yet. It will dramatically cut the efficiency of both vehicles when towed, but I could store as large of a battery as I want in it. I’d probably want about 5 kWh, which should get range back up to 150+ miles and allow me to run an electric stove burner as well as videogames and laptop computer.

        I’ve slept outside in both trikes. They are surprisingly comfy, but the space is inadequate. I’ve run an electric blanket out of the electric one via inverter when it was below 32F outside as I slept.

        Two trikes,

        Trike#1, Custom-built and designed by myself body shell:

        In its last iteration, the bike has a 1.7 kWh pack of Molicel P42A batteries. It can run off battery alone via throttle with a 20 mph/750W limit, with a 28 mph/750W limit with pedal assist, pedal-only with a cruising speed around 23 mph on flat ground with me contributing somewhere around 150W and a top speed of 35 mph in a sprint without the motor doing anything but adding cogging torque drag, or also operated in race mode with no speed limit(I’ve never topped it out since the upgrade to the Molicel pack, but it might be capable of over 90 mph) and 10 kW power limit via pedal-assist, and everything in-between. I operate it differently depending on where I am at. The pedal-assist is enabled via torque sensor. At 10 kW, it beat a V6 Dodge Charger at a stoplight once to about 30 mph. This is with a single Leafbike 1500W 3T wind motor in the rear wheel and an ASI BAC4000 controller. At 250W of assist, gets about 7-9 Wh/mi at 30-35 mph cruising speeds with about 100-150W of pedal input, or the equivalent of 4,000 mpg from the battery. I could take a trip from St. Louis to Kansas City on $0.25 worth of electricity.

        It is being upgraded to AWD and 25 kW peak with a new more aerodynamically slippery body shell based upon the design of a Milan SL I bought, and should end up capable of 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds with a top speed around 110 mph, reaching top speed from a stop in about 7 seconds. The goal is to be able to fuck with the local Hellcats. Not ready for that yet. Everything is being built up to handle highway cruising speeds and it’s going to get a roll cage and safety harness. This bike is currently in a bunch of different pieces in the living room waiting for me to get it all back together. I melted some XT150 connectors racing cars at stoplights using 250A phase current.

        In some jurisdictions, it is legally a “bicycle”, but in others, if I operate it with a 750W/28 mph limit for the electric assist while pedaling, it’s a “Class 3 ebike”.

        The next body shell is getting 250W of solar panels integrated into it as well.

        Trike#2, Milan SL velomobile:

        Currently unmotorized. I can pedal it to 50 mph on flat ground within about 1.5-2 miles from a stop pedaling very hard, but I generally cruise around 30 mph on flat ground for much less effort. It is being upgraded to a 2 kW electric drive system with a 1.5 kWh battery pack. This should be enough power for 0-60 mph in about 15 seconds with a top speed of 80-85 mph, and maybe enough battery capacity for 400 miles range at 30-35 mph cruising speeds with my pedaling accounting for a generous portion of the power used.

          1. No. A cheap hotplate purchased from a dollar store for $10. Plug it into an inverter run off of the 12V auxiliary battery, which itself is fed from the traction pack via DC-DC converter.

            1. Might be worth upgrading to a newer induction unit. They don’t get hot so they pose no burn nor fire hazard nor any need to wait for it to cool down after use before putting it away. They also tend to be more energy efficient than a hotplate which is extra important here. Dunno if there’s any weight savings. The only drawback other than cost which isn’t THAT much is the need for compatible cookware.

              1. Induction stoves don’t get hot……. Which is a problem when trying to heat a space. You’d have to bring a metal plate for the induction stove to heat, which would be a burn and fire hazard.

                Resistive electric heating is exactly 100% efficient, as is induction heating(once you consider waste heat from the stove).

                1. Induction stoves don’t get hot because they transfer the energy to the pot which is what gets hot. Unless there is a compatible pot on the cook top an induction stove stays cool regardless of the setting. Even when a hot pot is removed it becomes cool to the touch quickly.

                  Sure the heating element in a regular stove converts 100% of the electricity to heat but 100% of THAT heat dosen’t get into the pot which is the waste heat you speak of. That waste heat is what poses the burn and fire hazards. That transfer also takes time so the pot heats slower so the stove is on longer which also takes more power.

                  Yes the pot can also pose a burn hazard. That’s going to be a problem regardless of what type of stove is used. You can probably just put the pot outside to cool faster or put water in it. A hot stove doesn’t really have those options. You just have to wait.

                  And I don’t think its a good idea to use a stove as a heater for such a confined space. Better I think to use a heating pad or something that doesn’t get hot enough to melt synthetic materials much less burn skin.

                  1. Yes, for heating a pot, not quite 100% of the heat goes into the pot. But if you’re heating a space, 100% of the heat goes into the air around the stove.

                    1. That’s not needed as Toecutter mentioned an electric blanket is used for heat.

  10. And despite what the caps would lead you to believe, they’re actual autopian bumper stickers and t-shirts, not weird vintage (or new?) Members Only ones.

    Which is good for me, as I long ago stopped wearing that jacket b/c of my concerns that too many of those sporting them were in fact non-members.

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