DBWI: I just got a new car!

Japan also surrendered to the US, albeit a few months earlier and with slightly less loss of life. The Germans surrendered to US/British forces mainly because the alternative was Stalin who pretty much shipped every German he could to Siberia.

That does not sound at all like what happened in the TL I'm from.

danielb1 said:
the only German marque to survive at all was Opel, given how 1 in 4 Germans died in the war that isn't surprising

That stinks - a lot of the German brands have survived, and even some new competitors - Messerschmidt, for example, who unfortunately has a bad reputation of making subpar cars. Do you guys have the Trabi? If so, then that is Messerschmidt's reputation in the TL I'm from.

danielb1 said:
Porsche doesn't count, its Austrian not German. Not too many big European brands around, really; there's Fiat-Lancia-Alfa Romeo-SEAT, Citroen-Peugeot, AvtoVAZ-ZIL, Zastava, Moskvich, and Saab-Scania. Not counting various outside-owned groups (Triumph, Land Rover, and Sunbeam-Talbot by Chrysler; Jaguar, Ghia, Ford of Britain, and Ford of Germany by Ford; Renault by American Motors; DAF by Toyota; Rolls-Royce by Nissan-Prince; Opel, Vauxhall, and Daimler by General Motors).

Wow, so totally not like OTL - well, other than Sunbeam-Talbot owned by Chrysler, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Zastava, AZLK (aka Moskvitch), Jaguar, Ford of Britain, and Ford-Europe (aka Ford Germany) owned by Ford; and Opel and Vauxhall owned by GM. Also in TTL, the AMC-Renault relationship is reversed - and Nissan-Prince is also owned by Renault. In addition, AvtoVAZ is owned by GM. Ghia is just another design studio, and Land Rover is also owned by Ford, after some big deal with the Austin-Rover Group - forget most of the details, but it was big news.

danielb1 said:
Neil Armstrong was Mission Commander on Artemis VII, one of the later moon missions. Grissom launched on Artemis IV. The Mars mission was Ares I, just 3 years ago.

Again, so not like OTL. We're still figuring out how to get to Mars.

danielb1 said:
Never heard of a "Rene Levendi", I never really watch French-language programming though.

Ah, well the romans are also avaliable in English as well, and as a result American TV networks have picked them up like crazy (and dropped their own soap operas in the process), because they are pretty popular. M. Levendi works in both languages (English and French), and a lot of American girls think he's a hottie. Indeed, Canadian-made romans are starting to become more popular than Latin American telenovelas.

danielb1 said:
Is that US$ or Canadian$ - in my TL, a Canadian dollar is about 80 cents US, which would make that meal sound real cheap. For other info, a British Pound is about $1.25, Japanese yen about 10 cents, Russian ruble is about 17 cents, French franc about 5 cents, Swiss franc about 25 cents.

Canadian dollars - however, unlike a lot of other currencies, the Canadian dollar is still backed by gold (though now also backed by silver and platinum as well), and gold is trading pretty well at the moment (at pretty high prices). That, combined with our near-zero inflation, has pretty much made the Canadian dollar second only to the British pound sterling as being among the strongest currencies in the world.

danielb1 said:
Gas here became unleaded during the 1970s environmental fads - they switched over to a 90% gas/10% ethanol mix which is still common although soon hydrogen will replace it for most cars.

Ah, so you didn't have to go through what happened during the early years of the leaded fuel ban in Canada, starting at around the beginning of WW2 (the original reason: lead was needed for the war effort), then allowing it to remain all the way to the present day, including a mandate sometime around the early 1950s that all cars sold in Canada (then) must use either unleaded petrol or diesel. But hey, at least our air is a bit more cleaner than in the US in the TL I'm from.

danielb1 said:
The Prime Minister of Canada's a slightly off Canadian Alliance leader named Leonard Peikoff, he cut off federal funds to the national health service and is a big-time pennywatcher.

O god, Socred's been forming Governments? :eek: That's bad - with the way things have been around here, the Progressive Conservatives, the Christian Democratic Union, the Moderates, and the Liberals have been the only parties AFAIK that have formed Governments, with the NDP and the CCF (as well as the Greens) being the ones with some good representation but not enough to form a Government (although, out of those three, the NDP would be the most likely one to do so). We still have federal funds for the Medicare system (though the provinces themselves are responsible for most of the system), though it is now supplemented with a private health component and an investment component known as "Medibank". Is Old Age Security still around? Social Assistance? National Insurance? Social Security? Does Canada still recognize the Royal Family? (in the TL I'm from Britain still retains the monarchy) How's Québec?

(OOC: again, posting from the main TL, from my worldview)
 
Didn't know cross-timeline posts were possible... Pray tell, by what method do you achieve it?
Not sure. My terminal here at the Archive seems to have accessed a different mainframe with its own shared database.

Most the motor-city companies went belly up in the 80's.
Around here its Boeing (kept misspelling it in the original post) and Kenworth. The Deviants still make some Peterbuilts, but they're no damn good.

We don't accept any imports, so I can't speak to those.

(OOC: This thread is definitely starting to get ASB...)
Sorry about that.
 
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That does not sound at all like what happened in the TL I'm from.

Your World War II was probably a little less nasty then...

That stinks - a lot of the German brands have survived, and even some new competitors - Messerschmidt, for example, who unfortunately has a bad reputation of making subpar cars. Do you guys have the Trabi? If so, then that is Messerschmidt's reputation in the TL I'm from.

Actually Messerschmidt did make a few cars with the remnants of their factory after Germany was forbidden an aerospace industry - but not before World War II ended. They were all 3-wheelers and flopped outside Germany; they were smaller/crummier than a 2CV or Fiat 500.

Wow, so totally not like OTL - well, other than Sunbeam-Talbot owned by Chrysler, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Zastava, AZLK (aka Moskvitch), Jaguar, Ford of Britain, and Ford-Europe (aka Ford Germany) owned by Ford; and Opel and Vauxhall owned by GM. Also in TTL, the AMC-Renault relationship is reversed - and Nissan-Prince is also owned by Renault. In addition, AvtoVAZ is owned by GM. Ghia is just another design studio, and Land Rover is also owned by Ford, after some big deal with the Austin-Rover Group - forget most of the details, but it was big news.

Austin-Rover - you mean BMC? They went belly up in the 70s, remnants either dissolved or flew over to other companies. Ghia is mostly a design studio, although quite a few sporty cars in Europe - including the Puma, which is sold in the US - are "Ford-Ghia" instead of Ford, because Ghia makes the body work even does final assembly on top of Ford drivetrains.

Incidentally, does the US have all the same automakers in this TL? AMC being owned by Renault strikes me as being interesting... does Studebacker still exist in your TL? They sell Studebacker, Packard, Jeep, and in South America Kaiser, but don't sell outside the Americas and Pacific much. Of course, there's GM (Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, GMC, and imported Opels), Ford (Ford, Mercury, Lincoln and various imports), and Chrysler (Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, Imperial, various imports, and DeSoto in Latin America only).

Again, so not like OTL. We're still figuring out how to get to Mars.
The Ares series are launched on two separate Saturn VIb rocket launches, and use a nuclear-pulse drive to move around in deep space ("throwing atom bombs out the back", basically).

Ah, well the romans are also avaliable in English as well, and as a result American TV networks have picked them up like crazy (and dropped their own soap operas in the process), because they are pretty popular. M. Levendi works in both languages (English and French), and a lot of American girls think he's a hottie. Indeed, Canadian-made romans are starting to become more popular than Latin American telenovelas.
Most soap operas here in the US are US-based, especially the ABC soaps my mother loves, although telenovelas are pretty popular, and some of them are in English now. No teleromans that I know of, although I prefer other genres like sci-fi and fantasy.

Canadian dollars - however, unlike a lot of other currencies, the Canadian dollar is still backed by gold (though now also backed by silver and platinum as well), and gold is trading pretty well at the moment (at pretty high prices). That, combined with our near-zero inflation, has pretty much made the Canadian dollar second only to the British pound sterling as being among the strongest currencies in the world.
Most currencies where I am are silver-backed under the Bretton Woods system, although the Swiss Franc is gold-backed.

Ah, so you didn't have to go through what happened during the early years of the leaded fuel ban in Canada, starting at around the beginning of WW2 (the original reason: lead was needed for the war effort), then allowing it to remain all the way to the present day, including a mandate sometime around the early 1950s that all cars sold in Canada (then) must use either unleaded petrol or diesel. But hey, at least our air is a bit more cleaner than in the US in the TL I'm from.
I don't think this happened in the US or Canada in my TL. The need for lead may have been outweighed by the use of ethanol in industrial processes or the crops for food (Europe needed as much as it could get, especially right after the war).

O god, Socred's been forming Governments? :eek: That's bad - with the way things have been around here, the Progressive Conservatives, the Christian Democratic Union, the Moderates, and the Liberals have been the only parties AFAIK that have formed Governments, with the NDP and the CCF (as well as the Greens) being the ones with some good representation but not enough to form a Government (although, out of those three, the NDP would be the most likely one to do so). We still have federal funds for the Medicare system (though the provinces themselves are responsible for most of the system), though it is now supplemented with a private health component and an investment component known as "Medibank". Is Old Age Security still around? Social Assistance? National Insurance? Social Security? Does Canada still recognize the Royal Family? (in the TL I'm from Britain still retains the monarchy) How's Québec?

Canada technically still recognizes the royal family, mostly because the Progressive-Conservatives would pull out of the coalition and cause the government to fall if they did. Both Canada and the US have Social Security programs, but they're privatized. Canada has no national health system, although I know Ontario and Quebec have their own systems set up. Some of those programs I don't recognize, but some are around - not that Peikoff isn't trying to get rid of them, I'm sure, but some members of the Alliance would bolt if he did and the Progressive-Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois would cause his government to fall even sooner (OOC: in OTL Peikoff, who is indeed from Canada, is the head of the Ayn Rand Institute :p).

Quebec is still at least nominally part of Canada. BQ cooperates with the government because Peikoff is a strong regional-rights advocate.Who is the Christian Democratic Union? I haven't heard of them but I don't know much about Canadian politics from before I was born. The PC had a government in the eighties, then they kind of collapsed, the Liberals ran things (and misran them) for awhile, and now the Alliance has it together with PC and BQ against a Liberal-Green-NDP minority. I don't think CCF is big anymore, but it was at some point in the past...

The US has the Republicans and Democrats, of course, though the Libertarians are big enough to have a couple of seats in Congress and the governor of New Hampshire. There's a Green party as well - even less relevant than Canada's, most of the non-fruit-basket eco-people are Democrats anyway - and the American party, which was bigger back when opposition to Civil Rights was more of an issue and less of something to laugh at (most "American" party supporters are diehard southern whites who won't embrace the religious wings of either party because they're too tainted by association with the religious black vote - they're important swing voters in some states, especially rural Southern blacks who vote nearly 50/50; Sebelius's choice of Barack Obama as Vice-President probably clinched her the election from Guinn/Hutchison in '04). Others... I think Prohibition still exists, and there are independents from time to time who win office.
 
Well, seeing these posts, I see that most of the timelines went the same way so much of mine went...motorcars everywhere.

I do have a motorcar...a Cork Motors Runabout. I love it...plenty of hauling capacity, a good electric motor with a 2 hour duration and a 75 KPH top speed. And it has the new recharge feature--if you're driving along a tram line, you can pop up the pole and draw power to recharge from the tram's overhead wire. A built in meter keeps track. Mine has 4 seats, and, in the places so equiped, can be sent on its way without me. So, I can use it, then send it of to get family and bring them elsewhere. or send it to the store with a list, and the store clerks will fill it.

Here, Eire's an exception to the motor trend. Thre's plenty of trams to get around locally, and the interurbans run at speeds in excess of 300 KPH. Most of us don't even need motorcars. And delivery of groceries and the ocasional large purchase is not all that expensive compared to the cost of owning a car.

Heck, the Englishmen coming to Eire looking for a better job than back home always say how nice it is not to need a car. No more "Irish Navvies" jokes from them.
 
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