Category: Drive Time

More Difficult Choices

Drive Time, Guy Stuff

Last week’s post on aircraft provoked more comments from Readers than just about any other piece at this blog.

So this week I’m going to do something quite different.

The scenario:  you are going to do a road trip in Italy which will more or less follow the old Mille Miglia race course.  It will not be a race — in fact, you will end up driving quite slowly, stopping to enjoy all the wonderful views and other attractions along the way.  The only stipulations are a.) that you are in your early thirties, and b.) that whatever car you choose for the trip will be mechanically sound (i.e. no breakdowns).

To make it even more interesting, whichever car you choose will involve a mandatory traveling companion of similar vintage, and your choice therefore requires you to pick not only the car, but the companion as well.  You may not choose or substitute any outside the pairings as listed.

Choice #1:   1958 Lancia Aurelia B24 and 1958 Sophia Loren

Choice #2:  1968 Morgan 8 and 1968 Grace Kelly  

Choice #3:  1967 Austin-Healey MkIII and 1967 Gina Lollobrigida

 

Choice #4:   1965 Ferrari 330 GTS Spider and 1965 Suzanne Pleshette   

Choice #5:  1959 Corvette and 1962 Ann-Margret 

Choice #6:  1958 Mercedes 300 Roadster and 1958 Elizabeth Taylor

One choice, and one choice only.  Enjoy the trip.

Update:   I fixed the date of the Corvette, and of Ann-Margret just a little (she would have been 18 in 1959, shuddup you pervos).

Also: what part of “you’re not going to experience car trouble” was not clear?

Filthy Rich

Drive Time, Real Estate, Wealth

I’m not afflicted with wealth envy, because I’m not a Communist.  I do get upset, however, when the rich leverage their wealth to become still richer (as opposed to creating more wealth through productivity), or when people such as the late Senator Harry Reid become wealthy by abuse of their position, or by fraud (like this asshole, this asshole and this tart).

I’m also not envious of people who become rich by pure luck:  lottery winners, or people like the Sultan of Brunei, whose country just happens to be sitting on an ocean of oil and natural gas — and who went and created a $5 billion (with-a-B) collection of cars, supercars, bespoke supercars and so on, as discussed here.  I’m not upset that most of the cars have never been driven, or that they’re falling apart and becoming unrecoverable.  Rich people do stupid shit, and that’s the way of the world.

As is the case with people who spend over $100 million to own apartments in New Yawk fucking City that they’ll never visit.

The difference between them and the idiotic Sultan is that their spending is an investment, whereas the Sultan’s spending is just money thrown away, as befits so much of this kind of thing in the Third World.  The latter is similar to inheriting ten million bucks from Aunt Ethel, spending $1,000 on handmade chocolate bars, and never eating any of them.  That kind of spending is actually symptomatic of a psychological defect — but still, I don’t care.

The point about those real estate buyers is that if the real estate market crashes, and it will, the value of their investment will plummet — and they still won’t care too much, because they have that much money.  And remember the truism:  in five generations (or less), all fortunes, no matter how vast, are dissipated.

Which brings me back to my opening statement:  I really don’t care how much money people have, nor how it’s spent.

What does get up my nose is when governments do the same kind of thing as the Sultan of Brunei does:  only with our money and not their own.

Wot Abaht The Frogs?

Drive Time

…asks Reader Brad:

“You talk about VWs, Lancia, etc., all the time, but don’t seem to make much mention of what the Frogs created.”

..and then points me to this list.

Speaking frankly [sic],  the Frog cars are a classic case of where Gummint stuck its greedy fingers where they didn’t belong, i.e. by levying a tax on horsepower — the lowest tax being on engines generating (from memory) less than 15hp.  This meant that most passenger cars were perennially underpowered, despite the technological superiority that French car manufacturers had over most others in the world.  Now add the recent development of adding yet another layer to the puissance fiscale  (PF, or “power tax”) by incorporating a carbon dioxide emission multiplier:

PF = (CO₂/45) + (P/40)^1.6

where P is horsepower, and Frog cars are still underpowered except where they’re not, i.e. in rally-style cars or hot (and expensive) hatchbacks.  The giant Citroën DS’s engine, for example, never generated more than 100hp so despite the DS having the smoothest ride of any car (before and since), it was a lumbering beast whose 0-60mph time was measured by calendar rather than stopwatch.

For the most part, too, outside the luxury cars like the DS, French fit and finish have always been crappy, and the non-use of vulcanized steel meant that in a country which has wet, damp weather much of the time, you can hear the car rusting when you turn off the engine.  [some hyperbole there]

This does not mean that the French make lousy cars.  When they are allowed to, they make absolute monsters, such as the Peugot Le Mans sports cars which were Audi’s only serious competitors at that race during the mid-2000s:

…or the Matra-Simca race cars which so dominated sports car races in the early 1970s:

…or for that matter, the Renault F1 factory cars of the early 1980s:

…with their engines winning several drivers’ championshops for Williams (Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost etc.) in the early 1990s.

So what about the passenger cars?  Looking at the list above, there’s probably only one I’d take, the Venturi Atlantique 400 GT:

…because of its wonderful 1980s styling.  (Reader Brad lusts after the 1930s Delahaye 135MS, even though that long bonnet hides a 3.3-liter engine which produces only 110hp, i.e. <10 PF units):

However, my favorite French car of all time is the wonderfully old-fashioned Citroën Traction Avant:

Because if I’m going to drive around in an underpowered Frog passenger car (1900cc, 56hp, <4 CF units), I’ll take style and comfort as the benefits, thank you.  And put up with the  water leaking into the passenger compartment every time it rains — in true Gallic fashion, Citroën never fixed that problem, after making the TA for nearly a quarter of a century.

This car, by the way, is still the hands-down favorite choice in France as a bridal car.

Toy Cars

Drive Time

I was having a long email exchange with Reader Chaz from Britishland, and we were talking about Ferraris and guns and what have you, and on the subject of cars, I actually surprised myself by saying this:

For a toy car, I would certainly choose a Caterham over any Ferrari made today, and not just because of the price, either.

Here’s the subject car under discussion:

 

…and I have to confess I was very influenced by this episode of Harry’s Garage, where at about the 13-minute mark Harry Metcalfe talks about how the increasing performance and sophistication of modern cars is making them heavier and less fun to drive — “too much power” (harking back to something I’ve said often with regard to Dodge Whatevers with 500hp engines), complexity following from stupid shit like emission controls and electrification, too many driver options (such as “sport mode”, “memory seats”) and so on.

Increasingly, in my sunset years, I want simplicity in a car:  get in, turn the thing on, and drive off.  (It’s one reason why I love driving New Wife’s Fiat 500 Sputum:  stick shift, nothing to touch in the car — yes, it has a Sport mode button, but on a non-turbo 1400cc engine, it is to laugh and I’ve never used it — and driving it is an absolute pleasure.  Forty-odd miles to the gallon doesn’t hurt, either.)

If I were in the market for a truck, I’d get a base model Toyota Tacoma with a stick shift.  As I’m planning to keep the Tiguan forever, the car issue is moot — but if it was totaled or otherwise became unroadworthy, I’d probably pick a base model VW Jetta with a stick shift.

Or a Caterham with a 2-liter Ford Duratec engine, if the insurance gods were feeling really generous.

Top Picks

Drive Time

Hagerty (UK) has just published its latest list of “future collectible” cars (i.e. older models that are sought after both by car lovers and investors).

(right-click to embiggen)

So:  if you were offered just one of those cars, which would you take, and why?  (And yes I know, some would be insanely expensive to maintain and keep running — Maserati hem hem — but ignore that for this exercise.)

Read more

Have The Greens Won?

Drive Time, Watermelons

In the Comments to yesterday’s post,  Longtime Reader and Friend geekWithA.45 said this:

And if you start to dissect exactly where this premise that the internal combustion engine must be phased out, and by what authority such decrees are proclaimed, you end up with a lot of nudge and smoosh; hints of legitimate authority, but without its actual substance.  A regulation here, and interlocking requirement there, a dash of social opprobrium there, it all adds up with zero accountability, socialized responsibility, and no single bad actor to point your finger at.  The art of smiley faced fascism reaches a new high.

Looking across The Pond, where this Green foolishness has reached its apogee, you get statements like this one:

Junior transport minister Trudy Harrison, 45, told a sustainability conference owning a car was outdated ’20th-century thinking’ and the country should move to ‘shared mobility’ to cut carbon emissions.

“Shared mobility” means at best enforced carpooling and such, and at worst public transport, which denies people the freedom to go anywhere except where the bus routes and train lines so they can.  Individual choice, then, is left to bicycles or this confounded electric scooters.

But note the condescension towards “20th-century thinking” — that would be the twentieth century which outdid the Industrial Revolution in its engineering development and progress, that created the explosion of knowledge distribution which outdid the invention of the printing press, and gave individuals all over the world freedoms unknown since the beginning of recorded history.

In fact, if you think about it, the junior minister’s statement would put individuals back onto trains, buses and bicycles — i.e. the transport systems of the nineteenth century — and no doubt for reasons of animal cruelty, no horseback travel would be allowed, thus making the twenty-first century’s inhabitants even worse off than their nineteenth-century forebears.

A couple years ago, BritPM Boris Johnson decreed that internal combustion-engined cars would be banned from manufacture by 2027 — by what law he didn’t say, which is a topic all by itself — thus making the hapless subjects of the Crown eventually reliant on electric-powered transport, to be powered by an electrical system which is even now insufficient for its existing purpose, let alone the gargantuan future needs of all-electric transportation — hence the suggestion of the junior minister (age 45).

All the same is true over here, although I would suggest (or hope) that any U.S. president who decreed the end of car manufacture as we know it would be thrown out of office at the next election — if not before — and the sheer size of the U.S. market would make the demise of gasoline-powered cars and trucks a remote eventuality indeed.

Although, as The Geek has suggested, the internal combustion engine will most likely meet its end by the death of a thousand cuts rather than by any single authoritarian decree.

It may well be, however, that the key word here is “remote”.  I’ve seen several studies among the future generation (under 25 years old) that they are all in favor of the above foolishness — electric cars, mass transport systems etc. — and to be perfectly blunt, if all this is a matter of demographics, then fine:  let the future generations revert to nineteenth-century transportation and be governed by twenty-first century totalitarianism.

My generation will all be dead by then, and the little buggers can live with the consequences of this Green silliness that they and their parents adopted oh-so willingly.