PC cars that aren't PC, next round... by Kwicko

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

PC cars that aren't PC, next round...

POSTED BY: KWICKO
UPDATED: Friday, May 15, 2009 11:21
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VIEWED: 1469
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Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:33 PM

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

With apologies to Whozit, I thought this might make his list of PC cars that don't totally suck:

http://jalopnik.com/5128642/cadillac-converj-concept-a-volt-for-cadill
ac

I must say, for a Cadillac, it's awful sporty.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:01 PM

WHOZIT

I'm not crazy about the front, but not bad.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:09 PM

KWICKO

Agreed. The front ends on the new Cadillacs are a bit too blocky for my tastes, but the overall forms they're using in their current "art+science" design language do seem to come together in a coherent way, and result in vehicles that are unmistakably Cadillac, and that's a good thing in this day of cookie-cutter lookalike vehicles.

For the record, THIS is a hideous front end:

That's the new Acura TL. And that's the new "corporate face" of Acura. Bleah.

It looks like some kind of hybrid between a Spartan war mask and a Samurai version of the same.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 3:20 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Looks like a SUX 6000.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 4:15 PM

KWICKO

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:

Looks like a SUX 6000.

Pretty much. And as a longtime Honda/Acura owner and enthusiast, it kinda breaks my heart to see the direction they decided to go.

And with the global economy in the crapper, Acura decided a couple years ago that they didn't want a small, sporty coupe in their lineup. This after killing the "Integra" name a few years before that, because they said it was a name that was more recognizable to the public than the Acura brand itself. They did the same thing prior to that with the vaunted "Legend" model. Instead, we got a mishmash of letters: TSX, TL, RSX, RL, and what have you. I pretty much can't tell one from another anymore, except to say that I don't like any of them!

Next time I go car shopping, I'll probably be looking at a Hyundai first...

Yeah, it's a Hyundai. 210hp, 2.0 liter turbocharged engine based on the same engine as the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, rear-wheel drive, and by all accounts, a hoot to drive. Starts at just over $22k. Cheap by today's standards.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 6:01 PM

FREMDFIRMA

I am still lookin sideways at the Nissan Versa, myself - not that imma pay that for one, but they are cheap, and while not especially pretty or sporty, you're getting quite a bit for your dime.

Hell, if they'd ship em over here, I'd buy a Tata, it's "quality" is about on par with the Ford Fuckup, aka Focus, and it costs a hell of a lot less.

Oh, and Billy ?

Chinese parts assembled in Mexico is NOT american made, asshole.

-F

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Friday, May 15, 2009 1:39 AM

KWICKO

Keep an eye on that Versa, Frem. One of my sisters-in-law has had one since they came out (yup, she bought a first-year car, despite my warnings), and she absolutely loves it. And much to my chagrin, it has never been to the shop for anything other than routine maintenance and scheduled service. No breakdowns of any kind.

The Versa was one of the early efforts to come to market after Nissan was bought by French carmaker Renault, and I feared the worst, but Nissan's quality actually seems to have IMPROVED under the stewardship of the frogs. Go figure... As a bonus, their styling is undergoing quite a renaissance as well. If you can get past the Cube, there's lots of interesting models in Nissan's lineup: Altima Coupe, Maxima, Versa (to my eye, it shares the most styling DNA with Renault's own models), and Infiniti's G37 Coupe and sedan.

It won't be long before you can pick up a used Versa for around $5k, and if my in-laws experience is anything to go by, it should last you a good long while.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 3:07 AM

BADKARMA00

I gotta say, I've opted for older vehicles for several years now. Newer vehicles are simply too expensive, IMO, for what you get out of them. I do what I can to make sure my older rides are as eco-friendly as possible, (no, not all conservatives are assholes about the environment, lol) so I think that helps make up for the fact that my ride was made before anyone was really worried about that.

I'll admit my 4x4 doesn't get the greatest mileage, but I don't normally take it on long trips, either. And it's a comfortable ride, and easy to drive.

I do like a lot of the newer cars, mind you. I rented a car a little while back, for a trip to Florida, a KIA Rondo. At first I laughed when I saw it, but damned if it wasn't comfortable! And easy on gas. WIsh they made a 4x4 version, lol.

Bad_karma
Great and Exalted Grand Pooba, International Brotherhood of Moonshiners, Rednecks, and Good Old Boys.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 3:55 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Mikey ?

Quote:
And much to my chagrin, it has never been to the shop for anything other than routine maintenance and scheduled service. No breakdowns of any kind.

That's cause they were smart about it and went with a solid, proven engine design that's good for at least 150,000 miles, and mated it to a CVT transmission, which might I remind you has only three moving parts - although apparently not all Versa models come with that, some have a conventional 4speed auto transaxle, which is almost as durable.

One thing that seems to bother folk about a CVT is a perceived (but not actual) lack of power cause in action your RPMs are fairly constant and there's no jerk between gears to indicate the shiftpoints, and folk fail to realize is that the jerk of a shiftpoint is actually a net LOSS of RPMs and kinetic force which over time causes more wear and eats more gas, as well as losing power with each shift, something I need not tell you since you're no doubt familiar with all the means of abating that problem.

I tend to convert most of the CVT scoots to a lower rpm curve which trades off accelleration for a higher top speed and fuel efficiency, which in the end results in overall better performance since a scoot doesn't have all that much takeoff to worry about, and in comparison going with a slower but more constant curve is a better choice - think of the old game F-zero and the difference between the Yellow car and the Pink one, the Pink one ALWAYS wins out in the hands of someone with half a clue, right ?

BK ?

Quote:
no, not all conservatives are assholes about the environment, lol

Funny thing to that is most folk who get all environmental make the same mistake as anti smoking zealots, in that they ruin their own case by taking an OBVIOUS truth (smoking is harmful to you, don't crap where you live) and then shovelling so much bullshit and distortion on it that they ruin their own argument by self-sabotaging their credibility despite having a decent point in the first place.

They'd do better to keep it simple and stick to the facts instead of trying to inflate their case.

Quote:
I rented a car a little while back, for a trip to Florida, a KIA Rondo. At first I laughed when I saw it, but damned if it wasn't comfortable! And easy on gas. WIsh they made a 4x4 version, lol.

I'd stay away from KIA, while nice enough off the lot, heaven help you if you ever need to repair it, cause they're designed without a whit of regard to ever having to actually repair the vehicle - there's no haynes or clymer for em, and trying to fix anything under the hood or behind the dash is an outright nightmare, and complicated by such lunatic ideas as having a seperate ignition coil on each spark plug wire instead of a distributor cap.

As for surprisingly nice rentals, we rented a Geo Metro 4 door in reno for a friends wedding, and despite it's seemingly-narrow automatic gear range, once you got used to feathering the accellerator to take advantage of it, she was quite peppy, comfy and roomy - and we told em up front we were gonna more or less torture test it when we paid for unlimited mileage, since we had biz all over NV and in CA as well, I blew through Donner Pass in that little thing and it left a pretty good impression on me.

As opposed to the Focus, which we got stuck with for a rental by the sleazy rental company our insurance stuck us with after someone damaged our front bumper in a parking lot - who then despite having plenty of un rented cars, claimed to not have a comparable midsize (a base lie, and we both know it) and stuck us with that shitty little heap which felt so fragile I thought pieces were gonna fall off, with an interior that seemed designed by marquis de sade, most of it requiring various odd contortions to reach and needing one to take attention off the road to do so, in combination with the fact that despite being a civvie ripoff of a rally car, the steering was both erratic and unresponsive, the brakes took too long to engage and then grabbed and pulled hard to one side, and the power curve was so pathetic that I was standing on the gas with both feet cramming it to the floor howling "That's all she's got, captain!" down exit ramps and still not reaching even 60mph before merging, which in MI, which has an average Highway speed limit of 70 miles an hour, and a population which consistently drives 10-15 more than that, wasn't exactly safe, yanno ?

Mind you, that wasn't a beat up and abused pre-rented either, damn thing had forty miles on it when they rented it to us with a suppressed snicker.

That car left an impression so horrific that it soured my perception of ford products deeply, they've got a LONG way to go to live down that horror, and from all I have seen, no intention to do so.

The last american made car I owned that I had any real respect for was a 1977-78 Lincoln Town car we turned into a basher and used for demo derbies down in virginia on weekends when we were off-duty, freakin thing was so tough we just kept clobbering it back together till it looked like something out of The Road Warrior, and what it did to other cars in the ring can only be described in vaguely pornographic terms...

We seriously need to get our shit together if we wanna remain in the car building business, but that ain't never gonna happen when the damn fools running the auto companies KNOW the Gov is gonna bail em out no matter how bad they fuck it up and thus have no incentive to even try - hell, GM was PLANNING for the bailout as early as 2001, and thus chose to maximize the profit of their upper management at the cost of every damn thing else.

All I really need is a box with an engine in it to go get groceries, and to hell if imma pay ten thousand bucks for some piece of clobbered together shit designed by some asshat who learned "engineering" from the american public 'education' and join-the-club-fee 'college' system - when someone with a 'high school education' can point out the damn bloody obvious flaws on paper that some dimwit who spent a quarter mil on supposedly learning better didn't seem to catch, I can see why so many companies are desperate for non-american engineers.
(And don't even get me started on how american colleges pad the damn bill by requiring courses that have ZILCH to do with the specialities someone wants to learn)

We need to step up our game, and rewarding failure is the wrong way to go about it, you ask me.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

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Friday, May 15, 2009 5:26 AM

BADKARMA00

You're absolutely right about rewarding failure. It's what has gotten us to this point, at least in part. A sense of entitlement, which is not found just in the 'welfare row' btw, means that people make less of an effort to do quality work, then bitch when the 'corporate assholes' wind up shutting down plants due to poor sales.

There's more than enough blame to go around in the auto industry for the failures we're seeing right now. I remember when it was 'buy american' because it was better quality, even if it did cost more.

Now, it's just a mantra. Sadly, quality isn't important to many of the exec's, and many of the workers. I used to take pride in my work, when I was able to do it. I made quality products, and I knew when something I made went out the door, it wasn't coming back.

I don't think we concentrate on that enough these days. People should take pride in what they do, and make sure they do it well.

And I own't be buying a KIA anyway, lol, but thanks for the tip. I just threw that in because it looked like. . .well, a hot wheels car, and I'm a big ole boy. I laughed when I saw it, and told the girl who was checking me into it, "the shadow of my ass won't even fit in that thing", lol.

I was wrong, though. Just goes to show ya, I really DON'T know everything.

Bad_karma
Great and Exalted Grand Pooba, International Brotherhood of Moonshiners, Rednecks, and Good Old Boys.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 7:49 AM

KWICKO

Quote:

There's more than enough blame to go around in the auto industry for the failures we're seeing right now. I remember when it was 'buy american' because it was better quality, even if it did cost more.

Now, it's just a mantra. Sadly, quality isn't important to many of the exec's, and many of the workers. I used to take pride in my work, when I was able to do it. I made quality products, and I knew when something I made went out the door, it wasn't coming back.

I've tried for years to explain this to both employees AND employers, to little avail. If you pay someone who's competent, they're going to do the job right the first time, and not have to do it the second time. I had an old boss who used to go out and hire me a bunch of $5-an-hour "helpers" who I'd end up babysitting and then running off, because they not only couldn't do the job they were hired for, but they were taking me away from MY job, thereby slowing production to a crawl while simultaneously INCREASING the number of mistakes and rejects. I'd wait 'til the boss wasn't around and then I'd shit-can the deadweight; when the boss got back, I'd tell him what I'd done; if he didn't like it, he could fire me. He never did.

I always tried to explain to him that if he'd just hire me ONE $10-an-hour guy who was actually worth that, that worker would get more done and with less fuck-ups than 2, 3, or 4 $5-an-hour workers, because the higher-paid guy had been there, done that, and had the experience to know what was what.

And that boss never could get it through his skull that one $10-an-hour guy is actually cheaper than two $5 guys, because while the pay works out the same, production goes up and rejects go way down.

When I left, he also couldn't understand that it wasn't about the money, but rather the fact that I was fighting a losing battle trying to keep someone's business alive when they were bound and determined to drive it into the ground despite my best efforts. They closed down less than 8 months later.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 7:51 AM

KWICKO

Quote:

I gotta say, I've opted for older vehicles for several years now. Newer vehicles are simply too expensive, IMO, for what you get out of them. I do what I can to make sure my older rides are as eco-friendly as possible, (no, not all conservatives are assholes about the environment, lol) so I think that helps make up for the fact that my ride was made before anyone was really worried about that.

Right there with ya, Karma. Up until I got this horrid Durango that my dad left me when he died, my NEWEST car was 18 years old. Funny thing is, it gets better mileage on a daily basis than most people in the real world are getting out of their hybrids. :)

Quote:

And I own't be buying a KIA anyway, lol, but thanks for the tip. I just threw that in because it looked like. . .well, a hot wheels car, and I'm a big ole boy. I laughed when I saw it, and told the girl who was checking me into it, "the shadow of my ass won't even fit in that thing", lol.

You might want to try out a Honda CRX if you can track down a decent one. I actually fit just about perfectly in mine, and I'm 6'8", 260 lbs. If you can, avoid the Si model, though - you lose about 1.5" of headroom with the sunroof on that model. My favorite CRX is a '91 "DX" model that I did *just a few* modifications to. It's comfortable enough that I've run it on long-distance trips from Austin to Orlando, Florida and to Los Angeles and Moab, only stopping for gas and food. What can I say? I'm a big fan of just getting in the car and GETTING THERE ALREADY. :) Although 29 straight hours of driving will make you a bit of a vegetable by the time you get there...

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 10:54 AM

WHOZIT

Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
Agreed. The front ends on the new Cadillacs are a bit too blocky for my tastes, but the overall forms they're using in their current "art+science" design language do seem to come together in a coherent way, and result in vehicles that are unmistakably Cadillac, and that's a good thing in this day of cookie-cutter lookalike vehicles.

For the record, THIS is a hideous front end:

That's the new Acura TL. And that's the new "corporate face" of Acura. Bleah.

It looks like some kind of hybrid between a Spartan war mask and a Samurai version of the same.

Finnaly! Somebody has discovered chrome! I think they used chrome on cars millions of years ago. Also, I would have replyed sooner but BONES came on, that trumps everything.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 11:02 AM

KWICKO

Don't get me wrong, Whozit - a little chrome here and there, I got no problem wtih. What bugs me is that gigantic monolith sitting on the schnozz of that damned Acura. It's just a giant hunk of metal, appropos of nothing, signifying nothing, whose sole function seems to be... nothing.

Form follows function. Automotive cooling systems have gotten to the point of efficiency that they really no longer need a big radiator grill opening, so the car doesn't really need to have a grill at all. Lexus tried it with the 1990 SC300 coupe, and it was beautiful:

But someone decided the car didn't have a "face" without a grill, so the grafted one on, even though it served no purpose at all. Infiniti did teh same with their big sedan, the Q45.

And now we've gone from cars with no grills or very small ones, but cars with ENORMOUS grills which serve no purpose at all, except to act as oversized pro-wrestler-style showoff belt buckles. They don't in any sense fit the overall image or mission of the car. And they're butt ugly to boot.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 11:21 AM

WHOZIT

Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:
Don't get me wrong, Whozit - a little chrome here and there, I got no problem wtih. What bugs me is that gigantic monolith sitting on the schnozz of that damned Acura. It's just a giant hunk of metal, appropos of nothing, signifying nothing, whose sole function seems to be... nothing.

Form follows function. Automotive cooling systems have gotten to the point of efficiency that they really no longer need a big radiator grill opening, so the car doesn't really need to have a grill at all. Lexus tried it with the 1990 SC300 coupe, and it was beautiful:

But someone decided the car didn't have a "face" without a grill, so the grafted one on, even though it served no purpose at all. Infiniti did teh same with their big sedan, the Q45.

And now we've gone from cars with no grills or very small ones, but cars with ENORMOUS grills which serve no purpose at all, except to act as oversized pro-wrestler-style showoff belt buckles. They don't in any sense fit the overall image or mission of the car. And they're butt ugly to boot.

Mike

Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

You're right BUT! Cars of the 50's were rolling works of art, ( even the Studabakers) I'm sure somone with talent and a computer (you need both now) can find some place to put some chrome.

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