The New Car Fanatic Thread

[ChiTownDoc 21006]

1 hour ago, Okie State said:

2 hours ago, Ths71 said:

I’m a wagon fan. I tried to find a cool reasonably priced(50k or less) wagon a few years ago for my wife. The only option was the Volvo V60s. None of the DFW dealers kept them in stock. All they had was the jacked up Cross Country models. Ended up getting her another Outback.

The new Buick TourX is pretty nice looking but don’t know if it is worth a damn.


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I almost convinced my wife to get a V60 or V90, but the selection within 250 miles was basically non-existent. I'd also buy a used MB E350 or E400, but she wasn't sold on the looks. I of course want the E63 version which is a unicorn and very expensive.

Wish I could convince my wife she needs the E63 wagon for her Costco trips.  That’s a badMF

Edited January 30, 2020 by ChiTownDoc
Wagon>>>>Sedan

[Pato del Muerto 52195]

I thought gm sold hummer to the Chinese 

[Prepuce of Doom 20948]

Wagons are the tits. Just finished building a new detached garage for my two - wife now gets the one-car attached garage for her car ('12 Forester XT - tried to get her to take a Outback 3.6 but she thinks they look like a cockroach). 

'07 LGT (stage 2; lowered and stiffened; ~$5k hardwired speed enforcement countermeasures; total sleeper) for the summer, '04 OB 3.0 with 210k on the clock for train station and winter/shitty weather duty. 

Once I get my '71 Skylark out of storage, the OB will have to go live up front in the driveway. Eventual plan is to "trade in" the OB for a lightly used AMG E63 wagon and (very regretfully) turn the LGT into my daily/winter car. 

[Ths71 472]

Wagons are the tits. Just finished building a new detached garage for my two - wife now gets the one-car attached garage for her car ('12 Forester XT - tried to get her to take a Outback 3.6 but she thinks they look like a cockroach). 

'07 LGT (stage 2; lowered and stiffened; ~$5k hardwired speed enforcement countermeasures; total sleeper) for the summer, '04 OB 3.0 with 210k on the clock for train station and winter/shitty weather duty. 

Once I get my '71 Skylark out of storage, the OB will have to go live up front in the driveway. Eventual plan is to "trade in" the OB for a lightly used AMG E63 wagon and (very regretfully) turn the LGT into my daily/winter car. 

I bought one of the first WRX wagons to arrive in Texas. Great sleeper. Really fun to blow away the kids in their Rice Burners.

 

I think my wife’s 3.6R looks pretty sweet. If you want her to kick you in the nuts refer to it as an SUV.

 

 

 

 

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[52-80 19030]

So I'm like 20 hours deep into a road trip with the Tesla and I had all these notes about what's good and what's bad about it.....and the thing fucking broke down and stranded me on the freeway, at the very edge of the fucking exit, at night.

 

SOS button in car....clusterfuck.  Calling all the hotlines on the emergency manual....clusterfuck. 

 

I'm literally thousands of miles from home.  Gonna attempt to limp it to relatives tonight.

[G650 13766]

You deserve this for buying a Tesla

[Okie State 3733]

$116 B market cap

[Buzzrock 14791]

I didn’t know we had so many lesbian couples on Surly.

This thing is sexy.

[TwiceHorn 30979]

Electric motors, while impressive, pretty much take all the fun out of 0-60 and 1/4 mile times.  It's just not as impressive an engineering feat as coaxing that kind of torque from an internal-combustion engine.

[Bozo_Casanova 26123]

Electric motors, while impressive, pretty much take all the fun out of 0-60 and 1/4 mile times.  It's just not as impressive an engineering feat as coaxing that kind of torque from an internal-combustion engine.

Agreed, ICE is more interesting in the same way that mechanical watches are more interesting than quartz.
However/ electric is faster in every practical real life driving way, just like quartz keeps better time

[Prepuce of Doom 20948]

27 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

However/ electric is faster in every practical real life driving way, just like quartz keeps better time

Tell that to 52-80 as he sits on the side of the road. 

[Pato del Muerto 52195]

55 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

Tell that to 52-80 as he sits on the side of the road. 

Is that an electric problem or a Tesla problem, or a horseless carriage problem?

[52-80 19030]

8 hours ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

Agreed, ICE is more interesting in the same way that mechanical watches are more interesting than quartz.
However/ electric is faster in every practical real life driving way, just like quartz keeps better time

Perfect analogy.

 

A mechanical watch exposes its workings to you.  Combustion motors gives you more certainty about its mode of failure - whether a belt snapped or the coolant emptied.  Electric systems leave you blind.

 

Car was chugging down the highway when a series of dings accompanied the messages "power reduced", and then "rear motor failure*", and then something basically about catastrophic inoperability.  It stuttered and shook itself to a stop, depositing me on the shoulder just outside of Bratislava with 18 wheelers whizzing by.

 

[*Elon famously tweeted, and it's still written prominently on Tesla website, that dual motor config provides full redundancy when 1 fails.... which is complete horseshit]

 

I hit the car's SOS button hoping to reach a Tesla operator.  A Slovakian lady picked up and repeated the some gibberish over and over again.  She didn't respond to single word of English or German, which was unusual for an emergency operator, and the 2 overwhelmingly most prominent language on the continent.

 

We hung in stalemate for 5 minute, so I gave up and Ctrl+Alt-Del'ed the car.  It allowed me back into gear and limp gingerly to an exit. 

 

After booting, the screen is showing residual error messages, telling me to contact Tesla.  Except not anywhere in this damn iPad interface is a direct link or instruction to actually contact Tesla.  I rifle through the emergency booklet and start dialing the 24/7/365 numbers.  My wife and I are working our 2 phones dialing Ireland, UK, Norway, Netherlands, etc.  Some numbers are unreachable, others trap us in menu-hell, and the rest puts us in a 10+ minute hold. 

 

I rebooted the car a few more times.  It's lost all connectivity, but gained instead these error messages.

 

After a 10 hour day, we're stranded 2 hours from our final destination.  It's 10pm and near freezing.  Heating is off because I'm reluctant to draw the apparent remaining 25% of battery.  We gambled on driving it to the next charging station 1 hour away, and then powering home.  BUT (1) with the car not connecting back to mothership, there's a chance it won't be allowed to charge and (2) I needed assurance car was driveable.

 

I caught a technician on the US hotline.  He politely informed me that according to the logs, he did see the car "perform a 'graceful shutdown'", but afterwards no evidence of reboots or irregularities.  (Of course, he couldn't, because the car refused to reconnect).  He gave me numbers to some more europe numbers to call and wished me well.

 

Long story short we dragged it to a nearby charger.  It miraculously charged.  After 30 minutes it regained cellular connectivity, boosting our confidence a bit, though my wife is now ultra skeptical.  Got to our destination after midnight.  There's no servicing centers in this country, or in Slovakia.  And now we're sorta wary about driving this thing 2000km on the return trip.....

 

 

 

On the plus side, this thing has stupid amounts of passing power.  Not just 0-60, but 60-100.  If a car isn't north of 100k AND already in-gear AND already under-boost, I don't think it will touch this thing.  It accelerates quicker than your thinking about accelerating.

 

On the down side, any notion of self driving cars within a handful of years is lunacy.  Cameras get clogged.  Speed mapping is wrong. Car randomly brake-checks.  Can't even trust the basic cruise-control.

 

Interesting adventure but I'm hoping not to have any more.

 

 

[TwiceHorn 30979]

Well, you seem to be handling the situation with more equanimity than I could muster.  Sorry it happened.  Good luck with it.

[52-80 19030]

14 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, you seem to be handling the situation with more equanimity than I could muster.  Sorry it happened.  Good luck with it.

This character is my spirit animal.

 

 

Sometimes when my wife gets all frazzled and historical, I show her the clip.  It usually makes things worse.

[TwiceHorn 30979]

Haha. I do the same.  Out of rep.

Wife actually takes it pretty well.  Probably because it took me about 13-14 years of adulthood, hard drinking, and then a couple of years of recovery to become that guy.

Edited January 31, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[Bozo_Casanova 26123]

Well that sucks. I think Tesla is about where Windows XP was - they've worked out most of the major kinks and what they've built is ready for prime time, but they  have started layering in "features" that are too cute by half. The result is something that works very well most of the time in typical conditions, but the machine contains ghosts that will get angrier and more destructive for the next 2-3 major release cycles or so as attempts are made to suppress them and technical debt is incurred.  

We have not seen the "Vista" release of Tesla software yet. But it's out there. 

Edited January 31, 2020 by Bozo_Casanova

[Buzzrock 14791]

I don’t think near term self driving cars are lunacy. Your story while certainly incredibly frustrating is anecdotal. Self driving cars have logged millions of miles and the technology is getting better every day. The cars are being tested in Vegas now.

Just one idiot’s opinion of course.

[Pato del Muerto 52195]

I don’t even trust the auto parallel parking features that use the proximity sensors. 

[Prepuce of Doom 20948]

I hate all that shit. 

I hated driving my boss's RS7 in traffic because the blind spot monitoring system and all the other intrusive nannies are so overcautious that it wants you to have some ridiculously unrealistic gap before merging, changing lanes, etc. It does nothing but sow unwarranted self-doubt (which is a huge problem, and in my opinion, far more dangerous than what it's supposed to protect from) in a competent driver. 

I really respect Porsche for refusing to add any of that nonsense to their cars. 

Edited January 31, 2020 by Prepuce of Doom

[Atxracer 797]

6 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I really respect Porsche for refusing to add any of that nonsense to their cars. 

Oh, they did.  It would interfere if you got too close to the solid line and then jerks the car back over.  Then, after a few corrects, it basically tells you to pay attention.  Had to turn that crap off.    

[52-80 19030]

2 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

I don’t think near term self driving cars are lunacy. Your story while certainly incredibly frustrating is anecdotal. Self driving cars have logged millions of miles and the technology is getting better every day. The cars are being tested in Vegas now.

Just one idiot’s opinion of course.

My story was just about operational failure.  The automation part I was even more disappointed in:

 

It misread the speeds of a large chunk of the route, not just counting irregularities like construction zones.  It hesitates and behaves weirdly around big trucks.  It's unpredictable at lane merged and lane splits.  It randomly brake-checks....often.

 

But even at a fundamental level, before getting into the progammed behavior, the automated suite simply wasn't available some of the time because rain and/or condensation obscured the sensors!!!! Even when it was clear and dry, and I had manually cleaned the camera lens, the "camera blocked" error kept blocking up!

 

This car has the most advanced sensor suite and processing computer ("HW gen 3") currently offered by Tesla.  I'm guessing those test cars have massive radars and antennae everywhere for redundancy, but it's not on the production fleet. 

 

I also ponder whether they drive on streets where the car could simply follow neighboring cars like a school of fish, and lower speeds means greater margin for error.  My car abruptly snapped out of its cruise mode at 85, down to 50....because it thought the limit had changed.  If there was a vehicle behind me, that shit wouldn't have gone well

 

[Prepuce of Doom 20948]

2 hours ago, Atxracer said:

Oh, they did.  It would interfere if you got too close to the solid line and then jerks the car back over.  Then, after a few corrects, it basically tells you to pay attention.  Had to turn that crap off.    

Disappointing - I remember reading in C&D or R&T (fairly recently, or so I thought) that Porsche was the only manufacturer to still refuse to put in those types of nannies.

[JSB 677]

Starting to look for a new suv for my wife with a third row to replace her QX80. Wish I could talk her into a wagon, but she is having none of it.

[Chewbacca 7664]

Starting to look for a new suv for my wife with a third row to replace her QX80. Wish I could talk her into a wagon, but she is having none of it.

GLS 450. Will replace my wife's QX80 soon.

[Brew 2954]

Expedition has been perfect for us. After a string of Audi’s and a RR, it’s nice to pay $50 for an oil change every 10k or so miles. It has also been on several 1,000 mile road trips and with 2 kids and a dog no one has complained about lack of space.

[HoustonHorn 1059]

My wife likes the Expedition Max. Hated her Cadillac Escalante XL or whatever it was called. The Ford is nice, has plenty of power and plenty of space. Also has all of the camera shit for parking that i guess the suburban doesn't have this year.

 

 

[JSB 677]

Will have to look at the Expedition. She hates the Mercedes SUVs based on their lineup from 2013 (the last time we were in the market), so hopefully I dodged that maintenance bullet. Cadillac is out, but I also want to check out the Navigator.

[TwiceHorn 30979]

19 hours ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I hate all that shit. 

I hated driving my boss's RS7 in traffic because the blind spot monitoring system and all the other intrusive nannies are so overcautious that it wants you to have some ridiculously unrealistic gap before merging, changing lanes, etc. It does nothing but sow unwarranted self-doubt (which is a huge problem, and in my opinion, far more dangerous than what it's supposed to protect from) in a competent driver. 

I really respect Porsche for refusing to add any of that nonsense to their cars. 

My car has that shit.  It's really unintrusive as implemented and easily disabled.  It's pretty funny, when you do something it considers ill-advised, like change lanes quickly without a signal, or with the blind spot warning "lit," it grabs your ass.  Grabs to the left if the problem is to the left, right to the right, and in the middle if it's ahead or behind.  It's a big vibration, but it feels like someone is grabbing your ass.

The front collision thing doesn't activate until you're pretty close.  I actually find it useful when you're in traffic trying to get over a lane going slow and dividing your attention between the car ahead of you and those assholes to the left and right that may or may not be letting you over.  It's just enough to get you on your brake.

It would be intrusive if you were trying to weave through traffic at high speed, but you're a douchebag if you do that anyway.

I am bad about unsignaled lane changes when there's little or no traffic behind me.  It just slightly resists such a change, doesn't actually steer you back.  It's just enough to cause me to correct that bad habit.  It's so subtle that the first time I did one, I thought there was a raised section between the lanes.  I think it would be effective to curb a "zoned out" drift, but am not really sure about that.

Also, the following distance monitor is interesting.  I rarely time the "two second rule" anymore, I just kind of eyeball it.  I would have guessed that I probably generally follow a bit too closely for my speed.  The monitor tells me otherwise.

Overall, I'm impressed with it.

Engine start/stop is fairly impressive too, but is more intrusive.

Edited February 1, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[G650 13766]

I have that part turned off, mine just has th he indicator lights come on, and steering vibration if you have someone in your blind spot when you change lanes. You can basically pick and choose which features you want.

[Okie State 3733]

My SS has a few very basic ones, but I keep most of them off. The forward collision warning has saved my ass a few times although it doesn't brake for you like some of them do.

 

The wife's Volvo has all kinds of stuff. Some I like and some I don't. It lets you turn them on or off though so I'm okay with it.

 

Not really a safety nanny, but the adaptive cruise control is great on road trips and the one thing I wish my car did have.

 

 

[Goofyboy 3069]

My wife’s BMW has all of that stuff and all of it except the blind spot notification on the side mirrors is shut off.

[ChiTownDoc 21006]

Cullinan...surly wins again. 

[ChiTownDoc 21006]

On 1/31/2020 at 4:06 AM, 52-80 said:

Perfect analogy.

 

A mechanical watch exposes its workings to you.  Combustion motors gives you more certainty about its mode of failure - whether a belt snapped or the coolant emptied.  Electric systems leave you blind.

 

Car was chugging down the highway when a series of dings accompanied the messages "power reduced", and then "rear motor failure*", and then something basically about catastrophic inoperability.  It stuttered and shook itself to a stop, depositing me on the shoulder just outside of Bratislava with 18 wheelers whizzing by.

 

[*Elon famously tweeted, and it's still written prominently on Tesla website, that dual motor config provides full redundancy when 1 fails.... which is complete horseshit]

 

I hit the car's SOS button hoping to reach a Tesla operator.  A Slovakian lady picked up and repeated the some gibberish over and over again.  She didn't respond to single word of English or German, which was unusual for an emergency operator, and the 2 overwhelmingly most prominent language on the continent.

 

We hung in stalemate for 5 minute, so I gave up and Ctrl+Alt-Del'ed the car.  It allowed me back into gear and limp gingerly to an exit. 

 

After booting, the screen is showing residual error messages, telling me to contact Tesla.  Except not anywhere in this damn iPad interface is a direct link or instruction to actually contact Tesla.  I rifle through the emergency booklet and start dialing the 24/7/365 numbers.  My wife and I are working our 2 phones dialing Ireland, UK, Norway, Netherlands, etc.  Some numbers are unreachable, others trap us in menu-hell, and the rest puts us in a 10+ minute hold. 

 

I rebooted the car a few more times.  It's lost all connectivity, but gained instead these error messages.

 

After a 10 hour day, we're stranded 2 hours from our final destination.  It's 10pm and near freezing.  Heating is off because I'm reluctant to draw the apparent remaining 25% of battery.  We gambled on driving it to the next charging station 1 hour away, and then powering home.  BUT (1) with the car not connecting back to mothership, there's a chance it won't be allowed to charge and (2) I needed assurance car was driveable.

 

I caught a technician on the US hotline.  He politely informed me that according to the logs, he did see the car "perform a 'graceful shutdown'", but afterwards no evidence of reboots or irregularities.  (Of course, he couldn't, because the car refused to reconnect).  He gave me numbers to some more europe numbers to call and wished me well.

 

Long story short we dragged it to a nearby charger.  It miraculously charged.  After 30 minutes it regained cellular connectivity, boosting our confidence a bit, though my wife is now ultra skeptical.  Got to our destination after midnight.  There's no servicing centers in this country, or in Slovakia.  And now we're sorta wary about driving this thing 2000km on the return trip.....

 

 

 

On the plus side, this thing has stupid amounts of passing power.  Not just 0-60, but 60-100.  If a car isn't north of 100k AND already in-gear AND already under-boost, I don't think it will touch this thing.  It accelerates quicker than your thinking about accelerating.

 

On the down side, any notion of self driving cars within a handful of years is lunacy.  Cameras get clogged.  Speed mapping is wrong. Car randomly brake-checks.  Can't even trust the basic cruise-control.

 

Interesting adventure but I'm hoping not to have any more.

 

 

My wife’s family is from Trencin.  They’ll scoop you if you’re still on the side of the road there.  I’m only half joking, they’re infatuated with this site bc it’s all they see me on...

[Loco 3752]

I have a car that only has transistors in the stereo and amp.  - it's a deathtrap

I'll take all the tech I can get in every other vehicle.

@52-80 comment about diagnostics and the value of mechanisms over software is valid for a shrinking sliver of the population.  Open the hood on most new cars and you won't be looking at anything mechanical.  You're looking a fascia and 99% of the folks with those cars will NOT be looking behind the plastic curtain.   The first thing any mechanic does is plug in ODB2 and read the codes off the COMPUTER.  Gone are the days of the shade tree mechanic.  Skeeter has a laptop.

Tesla's have fewer parts and better diagnostics and certainly more data leading up to a fault.  Unless they spaghetti code the fuck out of it the car should get better and better.  The sheer pool of data developed by users should also allow Tesla to ID problems and fix them in future version much faster (will they?  IDK, but they have a massive information advantage over ANY other car company)  Yup electric motors are mechanical things and can/will fail, but they are also relatively simple mechanical things compared to gas engines.  

 

I do love my strictly mechanical deathtrap though.  

 

 

[G650 13766]

28 minutes ago, Loco said:

ODB2

Showing your age man.

 

Top post though, spot on.

[52-80 19030]

9 hours ago, ChiTownDoc said:

My wife’s family is from Trencin.  They’ll scoop you if you’re still on the side of the road there.  I’m only half joking, they’re infatuated with this site bc it’s all they see me on...

Do they know who you are? Or have they began to suspect that everyone are just socks of NowThis and hitby

[Loco 3752]

19 hours ago, G650 said:

Showing your age man.

 

Top post though, spot on.

Is ODB2 not a thing anymore?  I have a 2 year old car with an ODB2 port.  I know some manufacturers have priority stuff but I'd be surprised if the bulk of cars sold today don't have ODB2...  or has it been superseded?

[Anton Chigurh 3318]

OBD2 is still a thing.

 

Dunno what ODB2 is. Ol’ Dirty Bastard 2?

[Prepuce of Doom 20948]

He likes it raw. 

[Pato del Muerto 52195]

On Doard Biagnostic

[Loco 3752]

Did you hear about the dyslexic guy who tried to commit suicide?

Spoiler

He threw himself behind a bus

I'm not dyslexic...  just retarded evidently

[Loco 3752]

1 hour ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

He likes it raw. 

your mom is a great teacher...  so much experience

[Loco 3752]

 

[G650 13766]

I'm still laughing at ODB2. I wish there was an ODB2 man.

 

No, OBD2 is still a thing, but most cars are starting to go with proprietary stuff on top of that. You need that software package to do any real stuff anymore.

[troph 24419]

Whoa ... Porsche electric car on the super bowl ad!! Whoa! So wickedly bad ass. Shoulda already know about it but damn still, sleek looking car. Might want a used one in 2028, ha!

 

[52-80 19030]

4 hours ago, G650 said:

I'm still laughing at ODB2. I wish there was an ODB2 man.

 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/rgwz3r/meet-young-dirty-bastard-son-of-ol-dirty-bastard

[G650 13766]

YDB holla

[Pato del Muerto 52195]

14 hours ago, troph said:

Whoa ... Porsche electric car on the super bowl ad!! Whoa! So wickedly bad ass. Shoulda already know about it but damn still, sleek looking car. Might want a used one in 2028, ha!

 

Saw one at the Porsche museum. It’s pretty. 

[troph 24419]

they say it competes with Tesla but it's pushing 50% more expensive.  I guess some folks slum it in their model S ludicrous mode.  that Porsche is pushing $200K - so maybe it competes with the yet to be built roadster.  crazy times.