Category: Drive Time

Way Too Much

Drive Time, Technology

Insty posted a link to the Car & Driver  long-term road test of the Porsche Cayenne SUV, and while I am generally a fan of Porsche (other than their Germanic penchant for over-engineering and the fact that all their cars are pig-ugly), there were still a couple of things pointed out in the study which set my teeth on edge, to whit:

The perfect long-term car is one that delivers 40,000 happy miles, and our 2019 Cayenne is well on its way to achieving that platonic ideal. It’s never left us stranded, and so far all of our gripes have been handled by the dealer.

You know what?  That reliability is a given nowadays, thanks to manufacturers like Honda and Toyota,  In fact, after shelling out the ~$100K for a fucking SUV, I would demand that nothing breaks in the first 40,000 miles.  But that’s not the end of it.

While that 10K service and recall work didn’t come with an invoice, the 20,000-mile service reminded us that Porsche ownership is just as expensive as it sounds. It set us back $632. In addition to the work done at the 10K visit, the 20K visit calls for replacement of both the cabin and the engine air filters. The dealer also replaced some worn-out wipers for $82.

I know, I know:  if you can’t afford the maintenance, don’t buy the car.  Over six hundred for a lousy 20k service, and eighty-plus bucks for a pair of windshield wipers?   Ah don’ theenk so, Manfred.

But that’s not the worst of it.  Enter the most useless fucking technology ever inflicted on car owners, all for the sake of eco-consciousness:

An aggressive stop-start system often kills the engine too early, and the restart occasionally comes with a horrible driveline thud. Disabling stop-start eliminates the thud, but we can’t help but wonder if the occasional transmission stumble on cold mornings is related and a sign of something else going on with the ZF automatic.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again:  if I buy any car, this stupid stop-start bullshit would be turned off before I left the dealership.  (And if it couldn’t be turned off permanently, it’s to a different car brand I’d be going.)  As for the Cayenne, any kind of “driveline thud” is a Bad Thing.  I can’t believe the C&D testers didn’t address the issue after the first hundred miles, let alone after forty thousand.  (Don’t even get me started on the engineering philosophy behind an “aggressive stop-start system, or we’ll be here all day.)

I seldom pay much attention to new-car tests because all new cars are going to be okay.  It’s the long-term tests that are interesting because that’s what exposes faulty materials, engineering or design.

And I’m sorry, but all the joys of “90mph cruising” (with the concomitant shitty fuel consumption) don’t  compensate for all the above.

Spoilsports

Drive Time

Some time back, I noted with glee (here and here) that the NY-LA Cannonball record was repeatedly smashed during lockdown.

The Cannonball Race (UK version) runs from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Scotland (and vice-versa), and its record too has come under pressure recently.

The response of the British Filth (that’s cops, not Guardian readers) has been typically humorless:

Thomas Davies, 29, drove from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Scotland in September 2017, in what he said was the fastest ever land time of nine-and-a-half hours.
He is said to have flown through 50 cameras and past 15 police constabularies, and hit only one red light – all without getting a single ticket despite an average speed of almost 90mph.
But Davies, of Corwen in North Wales, is now on trial charged with two counts of dangerous driving in a specially adapted Audi S5 with a 4.2 litre VA engine and for having an additional fuel tank in his boot.
He is also accused of perverting the course of justice for using false registration plates, displaying false number plates to avoid speed traps, and kitting out his Audi with speed-trap detectors discovered in a police raid.

So here we have a situation where Brit Ultra-Woke F1 champion driver Lewis Hamilton is in line for a knighthood for driving very fast, while Our Hero above is getting crushed by the “justice” system for doing the same thing, albeit under admittedly different conditions.

As for the charges:  every single one comes courtesy of legislation and regulation stemming from the efforts of the busybody Safety Nazis Of Britain (SNOBs) because They Know What’s Good For You and They’re Doing It For Your Own Good.

I know what they (and their US counterparts) are good for, and it involves stocks, whips, and nooses.

No doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this suggestion.

The takeaway from all this, of course, is that if you’re going to break some record that isn’t blessed by The Powers That Be, shut up about it.  Which really sucks, as record-breakers deserve all the acclaim they get — just not from the Fuzz.

Nothing Good Since

Drive Time

Also at CW’s is this masterpiece:

Now of course it’s pig-ugly by today’s standards, and yes it has crappy fuel economy and yes it has no seatbelts and yes it will kill everybody in a crash.  I know all that stuff.

My point is that 190hp is pretty much all one needs in a car these days, even in an all-steel behemoth like the above.  (Don’t even get me started on the idiocy of 500hp in a “street” car, as pushed by 21st-century Big Auto.)  Also, I bet the frigging transmission won’t lock up if the battery runs flat, either — unlike a certain VW Tiguan of my acquaintance.  (List of further 250 bullshit modern automotive geegaws and doodads omitted, for reasons of blood pressure.)

Frankly, I rather like the station wagon… and I bet it wouldn’t do to badly as a Pantifa/BLM Riot-Flattening Device.  Those fenders look pretty solid.

Poxy Electronics

Drive Time, Technology

Whenever I start bitching about electronics, or “the Internet of Things”, or the disappearance of the manual transmission in cars, or anything to do with the fact that we are gradually losing the ability to manage our existence or daily business without mains power or batteries, I’m laughed at and told to get with the program (or, to use the disgusting modern expression, “learn to code” grrr grrrr grrrr ).  Yea even on this website have my Readers chuckled and called me names for being so “stuck in the past” (like the present is so great and the future even more so).

When I turn off the Tiguan’s engine, the lights don’t go off immediately:  they burn softly for a minute or so, then fade to black (so to speak).  This is fine, except that if you’ve left the headlights on, the beams don’t switch off, they simply switch to “daytime driving mode” — which means that if you turn off the car and leave the garage right away, you may not be aware that you left the lights on — until the next morning, when your Tiguan has now (electrically speaking) turned into a brick.

No problem, you might think.  This is why God invented jumper cables.  Except that God didn’t account for the fact that the engineers at VW made sure that if their car has no electricity, you can’t move the gear lever out of “Park” and into neutral so you can push the poxy 2,700-lb deadweight out of the garage and into the driveway where New Wife’s Fiat 500 is purring gently, waiting to electronically suckle her big brother back to life.

All of which happened to me after Thanksgiving Dinner #3 at Doc Russia’s fortress  house last Saturday night, where drinks were taken, and of course your Genial Host omitted to turn off the headlights when leaving the Tiguan in the garage for the night.

And the following morning was to be spent with the Son&Heir at the range, testing the new Savage 94F rifle.

Aaaargh.

Anyway, I borrowed the Fiat from New Wife for the trip to the range — did you know that the trunk of a 500 is too small to accommodate even a short rifle bag?  I do, now — and afterwards, S&H came back to the apartment with me to help me push the Tiguan out of the garage for Operation Jumpstart.  Which is when we discovered the VW Electronic Schema Of Death as explained above.

Fortunately, my jumper cables were (just) long enough to reach from the Fiat’s battery along the length of the VW and into the latter’s engine compartment.  But I should also point out that said jumper cables were (where else?) underneath the trunk lid of the Tiguan, which… because the trunk’s lock is electronic, couldn’t be opened — and which meant pulling the back seats down and wrestling the spare tire compartment open (it opens from the back, and can’t really be opened easily from the front because you have to kneel on the poxy thing to be able to reach the latch).

Loyal Readers will no doubt already have guessed that Uncle Kimmy said a few Bad Words during this entire process (“cocksucking German bastards — no wonder they lost two fucking world wars”  was one such tirade), but eventually we got the bloody car to start up and the rest of the day passed uneventfully.

I know:  somebody’s going to say I should have one of those inverter thingies which plugs into a wall socket and can be used to start a dead battery.  I do have one, only I’d lent it to Daughter — such is the Murphy Legal System, as any fule kno.

The Son&Heir, of course, being of the Modern Generation, looked up “How can you get a VW Tiguan’s gear shifter out of Park when the battery is dead” on the Intertubes and found a forum where just that question was addressed (short answer:  you can’t).  The very first entry after the question, however, was “This forum to be flooded with gleeful people who own stick shifts in 3…2…1…”

I have spoken many times before on these pages of my intention to replace the Tiguan with a car which has manual transmission (most especially here), and this past weekend’s fun & games has only cemented that intention.

You see, when I borrowed New Wife’s Fiat 500 to go to the range, I had the time of my life driving it because, of course, it has a stick shift and despite the cramped quarters (my bulky ass plus sundry range bags, ammo cases and rifles all sharing the eight cubic feet of the front compartment), I reminded myself just how much I love driving and controlling the car’s progress by up- and downshifting the gears by hand.

I enjoyed it so much that when I used the revitalized Tiguan to run some errands yesterday, I found myself on more than one occasion reaching for the gear lever to downshift, and moving my left foot to engage the (non-existent) clutch pedal — and on every single occasion, I felt disappointment when I couldn’t.  (As I’ve said so many times before:  driving a car with an automatic transmission isn’t driving;  it’s steering.)

Nope:  I’m going back to real driving as soon as I have the opportunity to do so.  And for the umpteenth time:  a pox on electronica moderna.  And on VW engineers, while I’m there.

Interesting Situation

Drive Time, Sports

Last weekend, Lewis Hamilton won the Turkish Grand Prix and with it, the F1 Driver’s Championship for the seventh (!!!!) time, tying the venerated-but-comatose Michael Schumacher for the all-time record.  Much has been said about the little twerp, especially by me, for the fact that he’s driving a  car (factory Mercedes-AMG) which is hugely superior to most if not all of the other cars in Formula 1, and to a certain degree this is true. (Mercedes had actually clinched the F1 Team Championship title the race before.)

However:  in Istanbul on Sunday, conditions were terrible.  It had rained all night before, and to add to the drivers’ woes, the track had only been resurfaced a couple weeks prior, which meant that even dry it would have been slippery;  add metric tons of water to the mix, and you get mayhem.  Which is pretty much what happened.  Nobody cared to race on slicks, when meant “wet” or “intermediate” tires were the order of the day, and all during the race, cars were sliding around and off the track like they were being driven by five-year-old boys and not by arguably the best drivers in the world.  Even worse was that because the tires were wet-weather ones, they degraded very quickly when the track did dry out a bit.  Ordinarily under those circumstances, you’re lucky to get ten to fifteen laps before the tread wears to such an extent that you’re in essence racing on slicks, on a soaking-wet track.  This was not the case in Istanbul, because it drizzled on and off during the entire race, which meant that the alternate wet- and dry track gave the intermediate tires a few more laps’ life, to maybe twenty laps.

Hamilton changed off the wet tires on lap 8 — and then drove the last fifty laps on the same tires, winning by a huge margin because all the other drivers had to make two and sometimes three pit stops to change theirs.  It was a drive of unbelievable virtuosity, and as much as I personally detest the little asshole, it was a drive worthy of a champion, the win and therefore the title richly deserved.  And by the way, Valttieri Bottas (the other Mercedes driver), driving the same machinery, finished somewhere like fifteenth.  So much for “equipment superiority”.

I told you all that so I could tell you this.

Hamiton’s seventh driver’s title has resulted in calls for him to be given a knighthood by the Queen — she doesn’t make the decision, by the way, some government flunkey or other does, I can’t be bothered to look it up as like most Americans I think the whole title thing is silly.  Regardless, other sportsmen have been knighted before for their sporting success (F1’s Jackie Stewart and Stirling Moss, cricketer Ian Botham — more on him in another post), so it’s not an unusual thing for a sportsman to be thus recognized.

However, this is Lewis Hamilton we’re talking about, so of course there’s going to be a turd in the punchbowl.  And this is it:  many years ago, Lewis left the U.K. and took up residence in Monaco to escape Her Majesty’s onerous taxation (once again, not the old girl’s fault;  she doesn’t makes the laws, she just signs the papers).

To the ever-censorious British public, who think that leaving Britain for this reason equates to near-criminal behavior, this is causing some problems, conceptually.  On the one hand, he’s brilliant and deserves some social recognition, but on the other, he’s a reprehensible tax-dodger who’s being rewarded by the Crown despite his “disloyalty”.

Needless to say, I think the wealth-envious Brits are total idiots when it comes to this nonsense:  taxes are an evil, evil form of theft:  one should pay only as much as the law mandates, and not one fucking penny more.  Avoiding paying taxes (as opposed to evading, or not paying any) is one’s fiscal responsibility, and tax loopholes (created, of course, by loathsome politicians) should be used to the utmost advantage without actually breaking the law.  Tax accountants and -lawyers exist to know about and bring such loopholes (okay, exceptions) to their clients’ attention and save them money.  That’s the beginning and the end of what I call the commonsense approach to paying taxes — but that’s not what the vast British (and huge swathes of the U.S.) public believes.

Thus, the quandary the Brits find themselves in is an exquisite one, as I stated above.  And I find myself curiously conflicted:  on the one hand I think Hamilton’s achievement is incredible, and worthy of recognition;  but on the other, while the tax haven thing is irrelevant, the thought of this woke little BLM-supporting twerp becoming “Sir Lewis” sticks in my craw like a chicken bone.

Not Too Awful

Beauty, Drive Time

In yesterday’s post which talked about colors, one color came in for some (much-deserved) mockery, this being avocado green.

Well, I guess it can be a situational thing.  Here’s why I say this:

Now it must be said that the peerless E-type might look better in another color;  but if someone came up to you and said, “Here are the keys and pink slip for that car, it’s yours,” I think it would be safe to assume that you wouldn’t get all offended and say, “Oh noes!  I wouldn’t seen dead in so ugly a color!” and turn it down.

In Kim Terms, this would be like turning down an evening’s bedtime entertainment with Salma Hayek just because she was wearing a strangely-colored dress.  And as this statement is useless wifout pichers, here’s what I’m talking about:

Errr I’ve lost my thread.  What was I talking about, again?