I said this elsewhere in the thread, but it's grown much larger than I'd expected - I don't expect to spend 50k on a car, but it at least provided some limitations - I mean, with an unlimited budget I'd go buy an Aston Martin Vanquish and use that for my daily driver.

Maybe there are people who aren't me who are interested in similar things. I didn't feel like over-limiting the question; I honestly didn't have the intention of making this a "Dear lazyweb, buy me a car plz ok?" sort of thread. I was genuinely interested in what sort of daily drivers hackers prefer.

For whatever it's worth, there have been some very interesting answers that have had me spending time at Edmunds looking up cars that I hadn't thought about checking out before.

I can't believe someone who was making $70k (~45k after taxes/social-security) would trade in more than a year of 8 hour days 5 days a week in some shithole development job just to be able to commute in style (though perhaps he just wants to engage in parking-lot dick waving for some girl at the office; fine, I can believe it).