Would you ride in a car with this man?
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dangermobile's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, April 19th, 2009 | | 11:19 pm |
But on the auto parking, you have to control the brakes manually
Today while I was driving on the highway there was a car in front of me that kept hitting its brakes. For a while I couldn't figure out what was going on, beause the car in front of it didn't seem to be changing speed at all, and the car that was braking all the time didn't seem to be following that closely. Then I realized that it was a Lexus, and the issue was probably the radar cruise control that you can get on a Lexus. I remembered hearing on Top Gear that it would activate the brakes to keep the distance between you and the car in front of you, and I have to agree with Clarkson's assesment that it is pretty stupid. If a car is cruising on the highway the brake lights should not be turning on. At minimum it makes someone think there is a problem where there isn't one, and it could make traffic worse since some people will instinctively hit their brakes when they see brakelights. | | Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | | 10:14 pm |
Rental Car Review, Special Edition
So, in an unprecedented move, I am going to give a rental car review for a car that I did not rent or drive. One of my coworkers was having problems with his serpentine belt, which led to problems with his water pump (or problems with his water pump that led to problems with his serpentine belt, it is unclear), so he had to rent two cars in the past few weeks. The first time he got a Malibu, which was by all accounts fine for a rental car and is not the subject of this post. The second vehicle he got was a Chevrolet Uplander minivan. Now, GM no longer makes the Uplander, and I must say that was a good call, because it was pretty bad. Mostly I am going to bitch about the quality of the second row seats. The main problem is that the seats were incredibly narrow, about as wide as the seats on my RX-8, if you took just the middle part and removed all of the side bolsters, so about a foot wide at most. This is coupled by the fact that there are no arm rests anywhere on either side of these seats, so the end result is that the only thing preventing you from sliding off the side of this tiny seat is the seatbelt and your own reflexes. And as long as I'm complaining about the seat, I'm going to nitpick the location of the back ajustment (on the inboard side, sticking out between the seat and the back), which while I had no call to use, was nonetheless in the wrong spot. About the only thing not wrong with the seat was that it was cloth and not, say, vinyl. The rest of the interior seemed rather on the poor side, but I'm not sure if that's because the interior is poor or if it can be blamed on the abuse a rental car gets. The main complaint my coworker had (other than it being a minivan) was that the mileage was poor, although from a quick check it looks like it gets about the same miles per gallon as his GTO. Oh, on a completely unrelated note, I saw someone driving a Lotus Seven replica of some sort earlier today. Probably a Caterham, but I can't be sure. | | Thursday, February 26th, 2009 | | 7:04 pm |
| | Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | | 6:31 pm |
Maybe it's a good thing I kept going
Whenever I cut a yellow light too close, I always look in my rear-view mirror. There is almost always someone following me through the intersection. | | Monday, January 26th, 2009 | | 7:05 pm |
I noticed it because it said TDI on the back
Some of you (not very many of you) will be interested to know that for the first time I noticed a 50-states Jetta TDI driving around today. It looked new, had California plates with a November registration and an Elk Grove dealer license plate holder, so I'm pretty sure it was sold in California. | | Saturday, October 11th, 2008 | | 9:47 pm |
Rental Car Review
So, a few weeks ago I was on a business trip, which means I got to drive around in a rental car. This time I got a Toyota Corolla S (the S stands for Spoiler). It's got a pretty low-power engine, which is no big problem, unless that low-power engine is attached to an automatic transmission. And this is an American rental car, so there you go. Basically, the only way the car could accelerate at any reasonable rate was if you punched the gas really hard, and then the engine starts sounding (more) annoying. The Corolla, like my old Focus, also has the seats set rather high for my liking. It seems like a lot of cars are doing that sort of thing, which I assume is some misguided attempt at stealing SUV sales. Of course, the height of the car combined with the short hood and trunk means that I really have no idea where the ends of the car are when I am driving. As for various bells and whistles, it also had a satellite radio (which I didn't use) with an aux-in jack (which I didn't use) and cruise control (which I didn't use). The A/C I did use, and it worked reasonably well, better than my Focus had and not as good as the RX-8's. There were also automatic headlights on the Corolla, which I thought took too long to realize it was dark out and I usually just switched the lights on manually. I still do think that automatic headlights are a good thing to have on a rental car, though. Overall, it was pretty much exactly what I would expect from an automatic Corolla, which is not really saying a whole lot. I was glad to have my car back at the end of it. | | Sunday, July 27th, 2008 | | 6:11 pm |
| | Sunday, June 1st, 2008 | | 3:09 pm |
Français
As I was driving today I saw a mid-80s Peugeot with at least 20 Ron Paul stickers on it. Somehow, it seemed like a perfect match to me. | | Saturday, April 5th, 2008 | | 8:11 pm |
It's Quite Large
Dear Japan, You are no longer allowed to complain about the size of American cars. You can thank Nissan. | | Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | | 6:39 pm |
| | Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 | | 10:11 pm |
Fahrfegnugen
So, last week at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Lamborghini unveiled the Lamborghini Reventon, with a sticker price of one million Euros. It's unclear why you'd actually buy one, though. You can get a Bugatti Veyron with 340 more HP (about a 50% increase) for the same price. Or you can get a Lamborghini Murcielago that looks about the same and has about the same horsepower for a quarter of the price. Or you can get a Mazda RX-8 with about 35% of the HP for 2% of the price. Plus, the Reventon doesn't even have a Wankel! But, I want to talk about a different Volkswagen unveiling that happend at Frankfurt (oh yeah, Volkswagen owns Lamborghini, didn't you know that?): The Volkswagen Up! concept (exclamation theirs). The Up! is pretty much production-ready, and widely expected to become the new Volkswagen Lupo. (L upo, get it?) Most commenters have labeled the car as a competetor to smart, but there are other competetors in this class, like the Fiat Panda and Ford Ka, although the smart is the only one coming to the US any time soon. The thing about the Up! is that it's an affordable, very small rear-engined 4-seater from a German company, which you may recall is the same combination of the original Beetle, the Type 1. This would be a real follow-up to the original Type 1, unlike the closest thing to a Type 1 you can buy new today, the Porsche 911. Even the New Beetle is a Golf in a different suit. Plus, maybe they'll contract out to Karmann to make a sports car version, and Karmann will in turn sub-contract out to Ghia to design one. Hey, it worked before. | | Sunday, August 26th, 2007 | | 3:43 pm |
Contrast
Today I learned that it's quite strange and maybe even slightly funny to the right person to hear a Lotus Exige drive by right after a Ford GT. They sound very different for both being mid-engined sportscars. Perhaps something to do with the Ford having twice the number of cylinders and three times the displacement. | | Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 | | 7:52 pm |
Yo Magnum!
Edmunds.com has a mid-life crisis, buys Magnum's car. Of course, my car ends up getting pretty much the same power for still less than what they paid used, and even with the Wankel my car is bound to be more reliable (plus, I get a warranty). Or maybe I'm just trying to minimize the fact that, for slightly more than I paid, I could have got a Ferrari. | | Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 | | 7:34 pm |
Ha Ha Rims
Between the rain the day after I bought it, the rain the next weekend, and the bugs from that trip I took on the back road to Auburn and back, and the pollen and dust that lands on my car every day despite the covered parking spot, my car had gotten rather dirty already. So I decided to wash it. I'm pretty sure that was the first time I'd ever hand-washed my own car. Anyway, I think somebody wasn't thinking straight when they decided it would be a good idea to put shiny wheels right next to the part of the car that generates incredibly fine and incredibly hard to clean dust. Also, shiny:  | | Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 | | 8:22 pm |
Vroooooom
So, I got myself a new car. It is quite fancy. Those ketchup packets at McDonalds that say "fancy ketchup" on them? It is many times fancier than that. | | Sunday, April 1st, 2007 | | 12:26 pm |
April 1
It's that day of the year again, where we celebrate the anniversaries of the introduction of the Gremlin (1970), Amphicar (1961) and the Barracuda (1964). It also marks the anniversary of Samuel Morey's patent for the internal combustion engine. | | Thursday, March 29th, 2007 | | 9:23 pm |
Getting a Handle on the Situation
So, there's a bit of a continuation to my story of the broken window. I noticed a while ago that something in my passenger door had started to rattle (more than the other rattles in the car), and that there was a gap on the trim piece where the door handle went. I just assumed that they had failed to secure all of the clips when they put my door back together, and it took me a while to get around to fixing it. On Saturday I finally gave in and took the trim piece off and had a look. It turns out that a large tab on the door handle assembly had been cut off. I suppose I could just ignore this, since I'm planning on getting rid of the car soon anyway, or I could take it back to the body shop. But I figure the part is cheap and they'd probably dock me on a trade-in if I didn't fix it. And I didn't do the body shop because it's so inconvenient to go all the way down there, and they'd probably challenge my claims since it's been so long since they had my car. Anyway, so I went to the local Ford dealer to buy the part, and they didn't have it in stock, which continues my perfect streak of the dealer never having the part I want in stock. Although all the other times the part was for a car that was over a dozen years old, and as far as I can tell my car uses the same part as the currently produced version. I didn't get the part until Wednesday, and when I tried to remove the old part I found I couldn't get it disconnected from the cable without damaging the handle or the cable. So I took a saw to the handle. I speculated to one of my coworkers that maybe they did that to cut down on the sale of recycled parts, but he didn't think they bothered thinking about anything past when the car leaves the dealer lot. He's probably right, at least for Ford. I plugged in the new handle and put the door back together, and the trim gap is gone and I couldn't hear the rattle this morning. I still can't unlock it from the outside, but if a new door handle didn't fix that, the solution involves far too much door disassembly for me to bother. Overall, +1 for making it so I only have to remove a trim panel instead of the whole inside panel, and -10 for everything else about the door handle. | | Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 | | 6:18 pm |
WASH ME
There's a Hummer H3 at work that occasionally shows up to the parking lot with a liberal spraying of mud. One thing I've noticed is that whenever it does, the headlights are always cleared off completely without any remaining streaks of mud, but the mud around the headlights don't have any smudges around them at all, which I would expect if someone were wiping the headlights off. I originally suspected spray-on mud, but I realize after looking at the website that the spatter is a bit too extensive and realistic for that. The owner probably puts some sort of cover on the lights and then removes them for driving on the roads, just so as to not smudge the the perfectly-applied mud. | | Friday, March 2nd, 2007 | | 5:36 pm |
Cars I Have Known
The oldest car I remember my parents having was an AMC Gremlin. My memory of it is a static image that's rather vague and likely inaccurate. It was sitting on the grass between my parents' driveway and the driveway of their uphill neighbors, parked facing the street (which seems like a very odd place for it to be). I also have some slight memory which I may have completely made up of the faux-denim and copper rivet interior. Most of what I know about the car (which isn't much) I learned second-hand from my parents. The two things they told me was that the Levis interior package was a bad idea, because those copper rivets get really hot when the car has been sitting in the sun, and the doors used to fall off (heavy doors with with a center of gravity too far away from the hinge). The car was eventually replaced with my parents' Chevy Cavalier, which was later my Cavalier (which I will talk about some other time). The next oldest car, which my parents had at the same time as the Gremlin, was a Chevrolet Citation. It was a brown (or at least a dark tan) 4-door hatchback. For daily purposes it was my dad's car and had a trailer hitch on it, for towing the sailboat trailer. Near the end of it's time with us, bubbles started forming in the headliner where it separated from the roof, which became a more advanced problem in the Cavalier. (Apparently this was a common problem for GM cars of that era.) After we sold it, we occasionally saw a car around town that we were sure was the same vehicle. The Citation was replaced with a blue Plymouth Voyager minivan. When my parents were buying it, one of the last questions they were asked was what brand they wanted, which didn't really matter all that much since the thing was covered in pentastars anyway. This took over the trailering duties of the Citation, as well as the road-trip duties of the Cavalier, with my dad the one using it as a daily driver. The van provided two bench seats which allowed both my brother and I to lie down on long trips. In addition to trips to the grandparents, the van also took us to Washington, DC and Orlando, FL. But, the van also had cheap plastic latches on the bins in the rear passenger area, the paint started peeling off right about when the warranty expired, and in general it didn't really age well. The van was also the second car I ever drove, after some random car belonging to the driver's ed school. I never really liked driving the van, it was big, the driving position was too high, and it really caught crosswinds. but it had the easiest clutch of the three cars we had at the time, so it was assigned to the task of teaching me a manual transmission. Eventually the Cavalier was relegated to the kids' use (my brother and I), and my parents got a Saturn SL-1 for my mom to use. Since there was no Saturn dealer in Rochester, my parents drove up to the Twin Cities to buy it. (The local Chevrolet dealership was able to perform most of the scheduled maintenence until a Saturn dealership moved to town, though.) The Saturn's a good car, seats adults in the backseat comfortably (while still keeping a low profile), plenty of room in the trunk (the seats even fold down), and I don't think we've had any reliability problems with it. Plus, it has excellent fuel economy. When I started looking for a new car, I figured there'd be plenty of cars that got 40+ highway, since the Saturn was getting that back in '97, but it turns out not many. In fact, the only car that beats it without cheating (by using a diesel or hybrid) is the Toyota Corolla, although I believe several cars get better average fuel economy by improving the city mpg. It's ten years old now, and other cars around that age would probably be getting close to replacement time, but the Saturn's paint job isn't flaking (or rusting) off, and the headliner hasn't started falling down, so it can probably go on a while longer. Plus, to my mind there isn't anything out that really replaces it. Eventually, not too long before I went off to college, my parents decided to replace the van with a new van. Two things happened between the purchase of the first van and the second one: minivans got bigger, and manual transmission minivans completely disappeared. My parents knew some people who bought a Honda Odyssey, and they were rather impressed with it. Eventually, they decided to order one, although it took several months for the backlog to clear out enough to get to their order (and by that time they ended up getting the next model year). Despite our misgivings about the minivans of the era, the Odyssey was very well put together, especially compared to the old Voyager, and I handled the lack of clutch by simply driving it as little as I could get away with. Plus, it had sliding doors on both sides, and the fold-away rear seat came in very handy when moving all of my junk to and from the dorm. I don't recall for certain, but I think it can hold a full-size sheet of plywood flat on the floor, too. When my brother and I were away at college, my grandmother bought herself a new PT Cruiser, and she needed to do something with her Cavalier. (In fact, it's the same Cavalier that's pictured on that page under "Second Generation".) Since both my brother and I were living in the Cities (and my parents thought it was too dangerous to drive our Cavalier around the Cities), it moved to the street next to my brother's apartment and my brother mostly used it. I occasionally took it when I needed to get somewhere I couldn't easily get with the bus. This Cavalier was 5 years newer than our other one, and it had never been parked out on the driveway under the birch tree for years, or had two new drivers wear out its clutch, and was pretty much the stereotypical car that was only driven to the grocery store and the church. Other key differences: it was an automatic, it had the power package (locks and windows), and the A/C worked. My brother kept it until rather recently, when he finally got his new VW Jetta TDI. | | Saturday, February 24th, 2007 | | 5:37 pm |
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