Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from Wired: Danger Room, Petrolicious and Business Insider.
How To Figure Out How Much You Should Pay For A Car – Business Insider
It's a question that haunts us all: How much is too much (or too little) for your next car purchase? Here's an interesting take on it from Business Insider that makes a few interesting points.
Paying cash, rather than purchasing with a car loan, is not available to everyone, and it does not necessarily guarantee a better deal at the car dealership.
BEFORE IT WAS THE BUS, VW'S TYPE 2 WORKED FOR A LIVING – Petrolicious
Another lovely history lesson from Petrolicious.
VW is known for some spectacular vintage advertising, ads which were instrumental in their success as a viable large-car alternative in America, itself a stepping stone to the international behemoth of modern-day Volkswagen. During this time, the Type 2 was merely an inexpensive workhorse (as illustrated by these print ads and brochure images), designed and developed long before its days as a counter-culture icon, a time when the idea of a 21-window bus fetching nearly six figures was simply inconceivable.
Nyet! Now Russia Won’t Sell Badass Missile to Syria – Wired: Danger Room
This piece from Spencer Ackerman gets into the curious calculus inherent in arms deals. Russia and Syria were pretty decent friends up until recently, but Russia doesn't want to send an anti-aircraft missile to its buds, despite an arms agreement, because of the possibility of the U.S. and its allies sending air assets to Syria… which it hasn't said it would do yet.
Nor is it clear that Washington played a role in stopping the sale. Max Fisher of the Washington Post speculates that Lavrov’s counterpart, John Kerry, might have pressed the issue in advance of their meeting this week in Moscow. (They are do have kind of a bromance going.) Regardless, a Syria without the S-300 serves the Obama administration’s interests, as theoretically the vulnerability should make Assad more pliable to international pressure to step down and abandon his two-year massacre of the Syrian uprising.