carbibles.com

Carbibles.com is a site with what I consider to be some really straight forward and easy to understand info on cars and specs. I read the section on oil and it agrees perfectly with what i've learned over the last few years. its a must read. for reference, it looks like the site was made and run by this guy

heres the proof its a good read and will suck you in.. after an hour or so of reading in the engine section (i knew alot of it, but his diagrams are superb) i ran across the following

[on the topic of extra valves] When you get further down the page (and if your wife / husband hasn't come and complained to you about spending so damn long reading this stuff so late at night), you'll find some more information on why this is A Good Thing.

I love his cost of ownership example. I think it will help most 'paris hilton' americans understand a little something. look for it on page 2 of fuel and engine

The owners of these vehicles are Barbie and Ken, and to be suitably sexist, Barbie has a pink VW Polo and Ken has a blue Ford Crown Victoria.

ok, off on a tangent, but oh well. its hard to find EPA MPG ratings for cars, but you can see it here where it is from real people submitting data. the datasets arn't very large, but it is big enough for me to see that i'm 1-2mpg low on my milage on the car, not bad, but hope i can do better. the cool thing is that in 2008 the EPA is changing how they rank cars, for example, they will actually turn the AC on when its on the dyno... still not a real world test, but at least the AC's running. see the comparison of what the old numbers were to what the 2008 numbers will be. everything is drastically reduced! all these scientists make up some crappy test when you all you had to do was have a temp worker drive it like crazy and make a few laps in LA and you'd have much more realistic results and it would only cost you the price of the car (the temp worker crashing it would be the obvious conclusion to every test)