Now that I think about it, you might be right. The Mazda 5 is a minivan, and a lifted version of that would be some sort of #vanLyfe vehicle, whereas the CX-5 is a crossover SUV with five doors.

But surely the CX-5 can’t be the Mazda 2 or an uplifted version of it, since the 2 is (was?) a three door vehicle, no?

True, and I don’t see a problem. :)

Station wagons and utes (a la Hyundai Santa Cruz) should be a thing in the USA.

I should have clarified that the Mazda 5 is no longer in production. I’ve seen them from time to time here in California.

I’ll be upfront: IMO, hatchbacks > SUVs. That said, a number of manufacturers make “uplifted” versions of their sedans/hatchbacks, such as the Mazda CX-3 which is the bigger version of the Mazda 3 sedan/hatchback. The same applies for the Mazda CX-5 which is a bigger Mazda 5 (not in production anymore).

But directly answering the question, AWD is typically an extra weight penalty (200-300 lbs, 90-130 kg) with attendant fuel economy impact (usually around 1 MPG lower), a bit more maintenance due to having to keep the wheels equally worn, and in rare cases, gets you into trouble where a 2WD car wouldn’t.

To elaborate on that last point, in snowy weather, an AWD car can get moving better than a 2WD car, but the number of braked wheels is unchanged. So some people end up getting stuck further along on an impassable road or down in a ditch in their AWD car, in places where tow trucks have to wait for the weather to calm down. Meanwhile, the 2WD car would have already detoured when first encountering the unplowed snow. An experienced driver can make better use of AWD, but can doom a novice driver in the same situation.

If you don’t have snow, then you’re not really getting much of the benefits of AWD but have all the downsides and it costs more. AWD doesn’t shine in the rain either, since moving faster is rarely desirable in wet conditions.

If you do have snow, snow tires on a FWD is generally superior to all-season tires on a AWD or 4WD. This is because snow tires improve braking as well as acceleration in packed or slippery snow, for all cars. But you can always add snow tires to an AWD or 4WD.

So for light winters or places where it snows so badly that driving at all is ill-advised, a FWD with snow tires may be perfectly suitable. Since you’ve been happy with your Nissan Versa, I assume you don’t have the steep, slippery driveway which would tip the equation in favor of AWD/4WD.

TL;DR: it depends, but go AWD only if you need it.

From your description, this sounds a lot like how double/triple pane windows work, or like a Trombe wall. Although a Trombe wall is meant to heat a home, vents could be used to take advantage of convection currents that shed the heat away from the house.

That said, this wouldn’t necessarily be cooling per-se, but would be avoiding heat gain. And at that point, any material that’s loosely coupled to then house would be equally effective, like a wall with studs 24" (60 cm) apart rather than the USA standard of 16" (40 cm).

In fact, this is how some homes with massively overhanging roofs manage to passively keep themselves manageable in the summer, since the overhang blocks direct sunlight from reaching the walls and windows at summer’s high noon, but lets light in when the sun is lower in winter. Soffit vents let convection currents flow up the inside of the roof, exiting at a ridge vent. So the idea is sound and already deployed in relevant climates.

Another possibility is related to a [citation needed] claim about the Romans and their roads. Roman roads are remarkable in that some have stood the test of time, some still recognizable today, I’m told.

Supposedly, Roman roads were engineered as all-weather roads because their engineers understood the importance of drainage. Water destroys all, in what we understand today as freeze/thaw cycles and soil erosion undermining the road foundation.

It is said [again, citation needed] that the penalty for messing with the drainage of a Roman road was severe, possibly being the death penalty.

As roads then and now are often constructed with flanking drainage ditches, adding a driveway would necessarily affect the drainage of the road if done improperly, so perhaps some jurisdictions prohibit driveways additions unless properly engineered and permitted.

TL:DR: could modern governments be following the same logic undertaken by the Romans about road drainage? Have you thought about the Roman Empire today? :)

/s

I’ve never seen such a sign, but I’ll take a guess what it might be referring to. Here in California, the definition of a freeway does not have anything to do with number of lanes, speed limits, the presence of freight traffic, or any affiliation with the National Highway System. Instead, it is defined in the California Vehicle Code section 332 as:

a highway in respect to which the owners of abutting lands have no right or easement of access to or from their abutting lands or in respect to which such owners have only limited or restricted right or easement of access.

This roughly corresponds to what the Wikipedia describes in its page on "controlled access highways", a term which includes the California and USA federal government’s term of freeway or the eastern US states’ term of expressway or the British motorway. That is, a road which all ways onto and off of the road are carefully crafted.

There are many roads in California and the United States which will meet the requirements outlined by the Interstate Highway standards, and will look and feel like an interstate freeway, from the signs and lane markings and shoulder sizing.

But none of that matters for the California legal definition of freeway. Indeed, some freeway-looking roads will have signs that say “end freeway” or “start of freeway” with no other visual cues. And this is because the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) has not acquired the property rights from adjacent landowners to prohibit building driveways onto the public right-of-way.

To clarify, a right-of-way is not an individual right like free speech or freedom against unreasonable searches. Rather, it’s a legal term referring to a property right, namely a grant of access on/over some piece of property in order to cross it. In the case of public roads, the property right is held by a public entity, and that means the public can use it. Since a right-of-way is a type of property, there are rights implied by a right-of-way. So a right-of-way right. Yeah, lawyers named things badly here. Anyway…

A feature of public rights-of-way is that any adjacent private properties can connect to and travel upon the right-of-way. The rationale – to oversimplifying things – is that if the public entity could deny the right – including to build a driveway – then a property could end up with zero ways to access it without trespassing, making it impossible to enter or exit, which makes the property near worthless. It is an age-old rule from English Law that rendering property worthless is bad, so private property rights necessarily comes with an implicit ability to connect to adjacent public rights-of-way.

But property rights are a bundle which can be sold separately by their owner. For example, many suburban property owners don’t own the rights to minerals underneath the land, since the preceding developers sold that right to someone else. And so the state – through CalTrans – or the city or county can buy (often through eminent domain) just that single right from the property owners. Thus, the properties along a road might – unnoticeable to the naked eye – not be legally allowed to build a driveway, having shed that legal right away by forced-yet-fully-compensated sale.

To that end, it’s possible that a sign warning against illegal driveways is the state’s way of preventing future land owners from trying to build such driveways, since those owners would lose in court. If the state has acquired such rights, it’s usually because the road is planned to become a freeway or expressway (a limited-access road, in California terminology), or they wish to preserve that possibility early and for cheap. So far as I’m aware, in California the right is only ever acquired for state roads, with the sole exception of the expressways in Santa Clara County, because they planned well ahead in the 60s.

Other states may be similar, by extrapolation.

TL;DR: OP’s state might be hedging their bets to build a future freeway, and wants to prevent future legal issues with landowners, since the state knows it would win those cases

I’m not a physicist. But I did live in an apartment at university, and shortness of funds plus hot weather meant experimenting with various box fan configurations.

What I found most optimal was to open two windows on opposite sides of the dwelling, with the one box fan aimed outward, using cardboard to block the openings around the fan. In my case, the choice of egress (ie air flowing out) window was based on: the window which best fit the box fan’s shape, proximity of noise to the bedroom, and the quality of the window screen.

As for why the fan points outward, this sends the heat of the motor (60-100 W) out of the dwelling, rather than drawing it in. Also, if facing inward, the high airflow at the tips of the fan blades would tend to draw small flies into the dwelling. But if the fan is at the egress window, then the ingress airflow will average out over the full surface area of the ingress window, producing a lower peak airflow rate, akin to a gentle breeze.

If you have a multi-floor unit or house, it would be optimal to place the fan at the highest egress window, to take advantage of heat naturally rising. Opening multiple ingress windows will quickly cool those rooms, while also reducing the peak ingress airflow and resulting drafts (eg blowing papers off tables). Of course, it’s necessary to open all the doors to form a path between the ingress and egress windows.

A quick “rule” is to see how old the word/concept is. “plaintiff” would have existed almost as long as the English legal system came into being, or probably even older to the court of Assizes pre-12th century.

Whereas firefighter as a profession might have only become a word after the establishment of fire departments by insurance companies, which I think might have been a 19th century development.

This entire series by Cathode Ray Dude is a wonderful dive into the world of PC boot sequence, for the folks interested in a touch of embedded architecture. His delivery is also on-point, given the complexity and obscurity of the topics.

From this video alone (41:15):

The way this worked was: they installed Xen hypervisor on your PC, put Hyperspace in a VM and Windows in another. Now, you either know what a VM is – and I don’t need to explain why this is terrifying – or you don’t and I need to make you understand so you never independently invent this.

And (43:59):

This is just a bad idea, ok? Virtualization belongs in data centers. Putting some poor bastard’s whole OS in a VM is a prank. It’s some Truman Show shit. It’s disassembling the coach’s car and putting it back together inside the gym. It’s not remotely worth the trouble and it probably didn’t work.