Zero to One-Eighty » cars

Mini with the works

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:28:13 +0000

What you need to know: supercharged, 1.6 liters, four cylinders, 214 horses

Seen on Main Street earlier in the week. It’s the Mini Cooper S with John Cooper Works GP tuning kit (supercharger, wheels, brakes, suspension, bits of red). They have a Flickr group all of their own. Naturally, the front brake calipers are rouge. I mean, how could you not? Would be a dereliction of duty.

Post thumb by Paul Mullett.

A serious car

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:30:05 +0000

Porsche Boxter wheel detail, Mattabeseck, Quinnehtukqut

Whosoever first thought of making the calipers red surely got a big bonus that year. It’s a great example of “Drapering.” That is, making a distinguishing feature of a common one: every car with disc brakes has calipers, but colour them red and your car has some serious stoppers. (Disclaimer one: I just saw A Serious Man (2009)^† whence I stole this title. Disclaimer two: I don’t actually consider the Boxter a serious car — this is a serious Web Site on the actual Internet — but I bet the owner does.) See also…

† Yes, of course you should see it.

Mini with the works

Honda CR-Z

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:35:22 +0000

Want.

Update: heart skips a beat — Mugen is going to mod the CR-Z. I may just want to drive this car to the end of days.

Wired: GM killed the wrong brand

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:57:19 +0000

This has been burning me for a while. The El Camino was discontinued in 1987. In 2010, Pontiac were planning to reintroduce it with this:

2010 ~~Holden Ute~~ Pontiac G8 Sport Truck (Photo: General Motors)

But even before they killed Pontiac, GM nixed the return of the American ute. Some things are just too pure for this world. Chuck Squatriglia for Wired confirms the people’s choice:

General Motors is unloading three brands and tossing one overboard in a scramble to stay afloat, but the one it scuttled may be the one it should have kept.… It turns out Pontiac, which got the axe, is the brand people wanted to see saved.

Almost 10,000 responses to the article’s poll say the same:

Which brand should have been killed? n = 9,993
Pontiac	Saturn	Hummer	Saab
6%	27%	55%	10%

Ding, ding, ding: we have a winner.

Capped

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 10 May 2009 23:56:50 +0000

Went to bed with one perfectly good hub cap, woke up with four:

US$5 reward to anyone who comes forward with information.

The Silicon Valley of the 1920s

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:59:42 +0000

James Griffioen, in his Detroit design guide:

Detroit was like the silicon valley of the 1920s. A new industry emerged here to transform the entire world. There were jobs for everyone. There was money to throw away on art deco skyscrapers with gilded roofs. As Detroit’s auto barons poured their wealth into the city’s buildings, they created one of the greatest collections of 1920s architecture in North America. Eventually, half the population left for the suburbs. That means the city is very empty. There are a lot of vacant lots, empty houses, and even empty art deco and beaux-arts skyscrapers. At night, a great swath of our lovely skyline is dark.

And showing a reporter from Time around the city:

I drove him down the main commercial drag of the old Polish neighborhood that now looks like it never recovered from a nuclear blast. I showed him the operating automobile plant that years ago required a vibrant part of the old Polish neighborhood to be torn down, but also explained that the Chevy Volt—the plug-in electric car that represents much of Detroit’s future—would be built there.

Reading Jim, the “nothing” I know about Detroit is gradually being turned into a small “something,” about where the city has been, and where it may be going.

El Caminos on Flickr

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:59:50 +0000

By simonov, Gush Party and mezone

Beautiful.

If you can’t drive the car you love

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Joel Berry on why it makes financial sense to buy a modest car, own it as soon as possible, and drive it into the ground.

Joel’s 1995 Geo, photographed by Jami Dwyer

Pretty simple insight: a car is a liability, so it’s best to act accordingly.

The most important person with no job

Little boxes on the hillside

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:53:27 +0000

Loving Weeds, I wanted to know more about that opening song. Telstar Logistics obliges with an article about, and a photo shoot of, the suburb that inspired Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes.”

Westlake neighbourhood, Daly City, CA. (But dude, El Caminos ain’t ticky tacky.)

The Big Three and the good fight

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:12:26 +0000

Jim at Sweet Juniper! last week:

One thing I do like about GM, Ford, and Chrysler is that they are companies that still make something. What do the vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies even do? What does Goldman Sachs do? What do all those companies in Silicon Valley make? They shuffle paper, sure, transmit blips of binary code, attend important meetings, and make “deals.” Maybe brown people somewhere across an ocean will make whatever it is they’re selling or shuffling on paper or e-mailing each other about. But in Detroit, and in plenty of other industrial cities across this country there are still people making things without exploited labor, and believe it or not that still means something.

and this week:

It’s no secret that Americans don’t like to confront real issues of class. But I’m going to do it anyway. I think this ugly response to a mythology perpetuated about blue-collar workers is particularly shameful because so many American white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors are incredibly lazy themselves. God forbid a factory worker should step away from her job twisting the tops on the toothpaste tubes for a minute, but just because someone has a Bachelor’s degree that apparently entitles them to dick around on the internet all day with impunity.

I really like this blog. (Via Kris.)

A time of bad debts

How fuel efficient is the Honda Fit?

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 03:57:10 +0000

2007 Honda Fit Sport

Update: Honda announced a hybrid Fit on May 21, 2008.

The EPA recently revised it’s method of calculating fuel efficiency, expressed as MPG (Miles Per Gallon). According to the agency’s report, Fuel Economy Labeling of Motor Vehicles: Revisions To Improve Calculation of Fuel Economy Estimates:

New test methods take into account several important factors that affect fuel economy in the real world, but are missing from the existing fuel economy tests. Key among these factors are high speeds, aggressive accelerations and decelerations, the use of air conditioning, and operation in cold temperatures.

A lot of this has come about because independent reports have criticised the EPA’s methods for failing to approximate real world driving conditions. Pre-2008 city and highway estimation methods, according to the EPA, were first created about 40 years ago and have been revised only once, in the 1980s. These methods assume a conservative “driving style” (at least by north-eastern standards) and temperate environmental driving conditions modelled on the climate of southern California. (Which is to say, the EPA’s window stickers on cars in dealer lots fell a long way short of “real world driving conditions” in 2007. There are city and highway figures, then there’s “You’re a New Englander, and assuming you drive like an asshole…” figures).

Interestingly, with the new revisions the most fuel efficient vehicles (gas-electric hybrids) have the most sharply (i.e. downwardly) revised mileage estimates:

City estimates for some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles, including gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles, will decrease by 20 to 30 percent. The highway mpg estimates for most vehicles will drop on average by about 8 percent, with some estimates dropping by as much as 25 percent.

Which explains the confusion when I read on the federal government’s fuel economy site that the 2008 Honda Fit was dramatically less efficient than the one we own. (Although it might seem like a hybrid—”one of those ‘double cars’” as a friend of ours calls it—it’s not. Nevertheless, the Fit is an economical car by U.S. standards, and it’s certified as a “low emissions vehicle,” meaning that it produces relatively low pollutant emissions aside from the absolute amount of gasoline that it consumes.)

Whereas the EPA’s MPG window sticker on our model, a 2007 Fit Sport manual, read “City: 33, Highway: 38″ when we bought it in March, the same model in 2008 reads “City: 28, Highway: 34.” It turns out that the 2008 model is rated with the same figures, adjusted for the new estimation methods, as the 2007 Fit. Both models get a 6 out of 10 air pollution score. (For an opposite-end-of-the-spectrum comparison, the Ford F150 pickup, 2WD 6 cylinder automatic gets 14/19 respectively under the new rules, and 3 out of 10 for pollutants.)

Also interesting is that the 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid, which trailed the 2007 Toyota Prius on highway mileage 45 to 60 under the old system, is now the Prius’s equal at 45 apiece under the new. To my knowledge the Civic and the Prius are the only models that have ever broken the 40 MPG barrier on both city and highway tests (currently measured at 40/45 and 48/45 respectively).

Overall, the EPA’s new tests have shortened the total range of MPG estimates for passenger vehicles, which I take as a sign that the estimates are now more valid. I haven’t looked at the methodology but the new figures for the Fit accord with my own observations: we don’t get 38 miles per gallon on the highway in winter, although we may get close to it on long trips in the summertime, and low-30s is probably a more accurate annual average than mid-30s.

I’m clearly biased, but to those interested in the Fit, and in the market for a fuel efficient car, you can do better, but not for the price. At $15k the Fit is just about the best value/design/efficiency bundle you can find. (The Toyota Corolla gets better highway mileage, but the Fit is empirically way cooler. And I don’t think that the Yaris is actually a car.) I hope that our next set of wheels is a hybrid, but at today’s prices that privilege will set the buyer back an additional $10k.

QED. The Fit is (ahem)… Go.

Getting nailed

Adrian Cooke — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:07:43 +0000

We call our ’95 Dodge Caravan “Caravaggio” (or the ‘Vadge for short). This morning went like this:

08:25 – Something doesn’t feel right in the general wheel region as I’m pulling away from the kerb.

08:26 – Curse. Stop. Get out. Discover bastard flat bloody tyre (on the other side to last weeks’ leaky tyre, which was repaired).

08:28 – Our landlord pulls up. “Do you know where the spare tyre is on these things?” I plead. “Uh…” he bends down and looks under the car, “It’s right there.” Yep, yep, right, sure. I retort with, “Can I borrow your jack?” He says, “Well sure if you need it, but you should have one. What does the manual say?”

08:30 – Learn that the jack is located in the engine compartment. I later have time to reflect that — given the opportunity — I would object quite strongly to a proposal by Chrysler’s design people that placed the jack nice and close to the radiator’s overflow container.

08:45 – Discover new objection to mid-90s Chrysler design in the form of a completely rusted out spare wheel underneath the rear of our jacked-up Caravan that looks like it would be a bit too small for my first bicycle.

08:46 – Remember that a bad time to dislodge tight wheel nuts is when the wheel is hoisted nice and high and free-spinning in the cold morning air.

I swore a lot. It was probably pretty funny. Elena kept me focussed and stood guard to make sure I wasn’t hit by any of the neighbours (who don’t take too kindly to being forced to slow down on the local chicanes). And then Shoham and Michel came to our rescue by supplying a fully functional Honda to get us to the tyre shop, and then work.

It was a nail, by the way. But really, it was as though the ‘Vadge was protesting the fact that she will soon be replaced by one of these.