cars
You are viewing stuff tagged with cars.
New Car
You are viewing stuff tagged with cars.
We were watching the odometer get closer and closer to the six digit milestone. I came home from work, and there was just over a mile left, so I waited for Mykala to get home… and yep, we drove aimlessly for a few minutes and made it.
Now, I have to get all the problems fixed on the car.
I wish somebody would figure out how to disrupt the car buying process. It’s unimaginable how bad things must have been before you could easily find the models of a certain type in your area — you would’ve been completely at the mercy of the dealer at which you ended up. In this day and age, we can narrow our search from home with CarSoup, reference safety and reliability using hard data rather than here-say, and can make decisions outside the pressures of car price negotiation. But, it’s still bad out there.
I do weird things now, things I never consciously realized would be a part of my life. I clean trash cans. Sort mail. Go to the store to purchase toilet paper. Clean out the fridge. It’s fascinating that, though you have relatively little freedom as a young person, you have a very unique freedom from these adult responsibilities.
There’s something I love about really tight knit online forums. My earliest experience regularly reading and posting to a forum was at NewCelica.org. I really, REALLY wanted that car (Cf. this post from 2004). It wasn’t just the car, though. It was all these people talking about something that really brought them together. Later, my fascination with old stereo gear brought me to AudioKarma.org; to this day, that is one of the best communities I have ever followed. (After all, one of its Minnesota members invited me down to his house, and FLAT OUT GAVE me an entire vintage set-up… for free. In fact, it’s sitting in our living room right now and we use it every day. I’ve still another chapter to write in that story. I’ll cover that another day.)
I find this little car to be a very interesting vehicle. Sharp looks, good gas mileage, fun.
A giant sunroof, too! Well, in proportion to the car.
Yesterday, someone parked a year’s worth of dental school (in the form of a BMW X6 outside our home. As I admired the dramatic curves of the car, it felt freeing not to want one. Now, before you start thinking I’m trying to be all high and mighty anti-buying-stuff, hear me out! This isn’t some moral triumph of mine over material goods. In fact, I understand I’ll certainly need a car when I begin working in a few years. Indeed, my thoughts about this are more practical.
Made in USA, by Paul Graham. His point: we make things fast, other countries make things well. These two positions both have advantages, depending entirely upon the industry.
Cars aren’t the worst thing we make in America. Where the just-do-it model fails most dramatically is in our cities— or rather, exurbs. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they built whole towns, market forces would compel them to build towns that didn’t suck. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the result is so depressing that the inhabitants consider it a great treat to fly to Europe and spend a couple weeks living what is, for people there, just everyday life.
Bumper stickers: I might agree with you, but you’re still annoying.
We rented a car for a few days — here we are on Highway 30, on our way to Paia.
Have 3 minutes and 30 seconds? Why not take some time out of your day to watch a rather surreal and well-produced video featuring remote control car drifting. When I first saw this, I thought the big cars in the background at the beginning were a billboard! They weren’t. They were just regular-sized cars.
I had a wonderful weekend with Mykala: we celebrated my birthday Friday night with a little dental school shirt shopping and Cheesecake Factory dinner. It’s almost warm enough to eat outside — summer is still struggling to get its act together. I pretended to be warm for the duration of our meal out on the restaurant’s patio… but I somehow don’t think I was fooling anyone. If Mykala asks though, I was perfectly toasty — I have to maintain some masculine bravado, even if it’s only in the realm of temperature tolerance.
The 2009 Volkswagen Passat CC looks like the love child of an ‘07 Saab 9-3 and an ‘08 BMW 3-Series. (That’s a good thing.)
The BMW Isetta, particularly the Iso Isetta Turismo, is probably the cutest little car I’ve ever seen…
Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car—a name later given to other similar vehicles. Other countries had other nicknames: In Germany it was das rollende Ei (the rolling egg) or the Sargwagen (literally “coffin on wheels”; the name apparently came from the small (or rather nonexistent) distance between the passengers and oncoming traffic). In France it was the yogurt pot. In Brazil it was the bola de futebol de fenemê (football (soccer) ball of a truck), and in Chile it is still called the huevito (little egg).
A throttle-happy 20-something in a BMW pulled out in front of me, and the frothy puddle left in the car’s wake expanded just in time for my bike tires to kick the water up into my clothes.
“I’d like a car soon,” I thought.
For its Japanese market, Honda makes a car called the Life Dunk. There’s also the Honda That’s, which looks absolutely bizarre.
The forthcoming Aptera Typ-1 h will be a gasoline electric hybrid getting 300 miles to the gallon. What’s exciting about it is two-fold: (1) it will be under 30k and (2) the company selling these cars is already profitable, having earned back it’s R&D through pre-sales of the all-electric Typ-1 e model. Popular Mechanics weighed in with a fun article featuring a bunch of great pictures, and this classic quote:
↓ More