The Driveway: COBbies talk cars

Er, I think the Acclaim is a Plymouth brand, not Pontiac.

Also, my neighbor's come down by $200 for that Jetta, still debating whether it's worth it.

edit: Decided against the Jetta, the potential for stuff going wrong is just too great to really be worth it. There's a nice forest-green 2000 Volvo S70 for about the same price around here, the only thing that really gets me about it is the mileage (183k), though given that it's a Volvo, that's probably not that much.

edit numero dos: Got an '89 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera SL, with only 118k actual miles on it. It's in pretty good shape for a relatively-old car, and it came with an aftermarket CD player. Only things wrong with it are some missing molding on the driver's door and a bit of clearcoat coming off the roof. All in all, not too bad for $1400.

edited 10th Oct '12 9:40:26 AM by DemonSharkKisame

That's the 3.3-liter Buick engine, right? Stout little motors, as they're just smaller versions of the near-indestructable 3.8 engines.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Indeed it is, good sir. Puts out enough power to where I barely have to big-toe it to get to speed. Heck, I don't even need to have my foot on the gas to get to my neighborhood's speed limit (10 MPH).

edit: And it seems the gas needle in it is frozen at halfway. Only found out when the car failed to start this morning. Any ideas on how to fix? (The needle, I mean; it only failed to start thanks to running out of gas.)
addendum: After filling the tank to absolutely full, the needle seems to work. I'll have to watch and see if it'll go past half though.

edited 13th Oct '12 6:15:14 PM by DemonSharkKisame

Use the travel odometer (if you have one) and keep track of miles driven since fillups. I had a bum gas gauge once on a Volvo 740 turbo.

It's likely that the sending unit in the tank is sticking or something. You'll probably have to drop the tank to get to it. Not really worth the trouble for an old car. Now, if your fuel pump quits, well, time to either drop the tank and change the sender and pump, or ditch it for another car.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Looking through cars. I know very little about buying them used or new.

So, I'm now pretty well acquainted with my Plymouth Acclaim (I only realized about a month ago I was saying the wrong company). The transmission may not be the best. It's reluctant to shift from first to second, and when it does the whole car shakes.

Gas meter is fun to read too. Take a sharp corner or slam on the brakes and the needle goes wild thanks to sloshing. I'm also not sure how reliable the Empty mark is, since the Full mark is about an inch inside where the needle actually rests when I've filled up. A tank tends to be $40-50 and gets me a little over 200 miles (16-20 MPG).

Besides that my biggest problem with it is getting in and out. The top of the door is about two inches lower than where the top of my head would like to be, so I have to do some combination of hunching, leaning diagonally, and sitting way way on the edge of the seat to get in and out. Once I'm inside, I've got plenty of room for pretty much everything I want to do.

It has a tape player, with which I use an adapter to listen to podcasts on my phone (or music when I'm out of podcasts). No CD player, but I really only find that a problem during the Christmas season, because I have a moderate Christmas CD collection that I haven't ripped.

A coworker recently told me "I like your car because it reminds me of an awesome cardboard box, and I mean that in the nicest way possible."

edited 13th Dec '12 12:16:33 AM by TParadox

Fresh-eyed movie blog

So I've found a '94 Mazda MX-3 for sale near me, and from what I can see, it's in excellent condition. 158k miles, leather bucket seats, and a 5-speed manual for $1800... good deal? I'd be surprised if it came with the 1.8-liter V6, because even with that, the MX-3 still gets 30 miles-per-gallon.

edit: Indeed it does come with the V6, apparently leather seats denote one. Also... it's apparently a '93 Special Edition, since only they came in Raspberry Metallic. I may have a really rare car on my hands if I play my cards right...

edited 24th Dec '12 3:16:54 PM by DemonSharkKisame

@Demon: Watch those '90s sports cars...they wear out faster than cheap sneakers.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

The MX-3 was more of a sport-ish compact rather than a true sports car, but I'll keep that in mind.

Also: my neighbor's come down to $2000 for his 2000 Jetta VR6. I'm more than willing to spring for it at that price even knowing about one of the rear windows not working (needs new window motor), but my dad's still being outright dismissive about it. How am I supposed to get a car for myself if I'm feeling like I have no say in what car I get?

edited 6th Jan '13 1:11:11 PM by DemonSharkKisame

Oooo, a VR6. Those hop up well.

The wet season is playing havoc with my T-top seals, or lack of them. I need to rig up a tarp to extend the carport roof so that it keeps the rain off the TTA.

Even worse than those 90's sports cars are the 80's ones. They have all of the issues of the later model cars, along with less power and more age-related decay. Plus they often lack decent factory audio equipment and you can find them without factory A/C as well. They can be downright spartan compared to a recent car.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Indeed, sir. I have seen what can become of a Volkswagen 6 cylinder engine. I mean, my god. O.o

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

So the VR6 is good? I'll keep it in mind, but as of yesterday, I'm likely to get something else. See, my dad had his eyes on an absolutely pristine '83 Chrysler New Yorker Fifth Avenue (it only had 22,000 original miles), and yesterday, he finally went and took a closer look at it. Turns out that some nice British mechanic owned it, but my father was just a bit too late: it had just been sold. However, it wasn't all bad news; the mechanic is willing to sell a '99-'01 (not sure of the exact year, but the design puts it squarely in that range) Suzuki Grand Vitara with only 11,000 miles on the engine (I'm assuming it's been restored/rebuilt) for $1800. Only thing that needs work on the Vitara is a new windshield, but it's otherwise exceptionally clean. Since Kelley Blue Book value on the average Grand Vitara of that era is around $4000, I'm thinking it's quite the steal, I just want to know if there's anything like quirks I should look out for with a Vitara.

Side note: the mechanic was working on restoring a Bristol 408 as well as a Triumph TR8. Really seems to know his stuff.

Side note: the mechanic was working on restoring a Bristol 408 as well as a Triumph TR8. Really seems to know his stuff.

With British sports cars (particularly older ones), you kinda have to "know [your] stuff" just to keep the bloody things working.

edited 16th Jan '13 4:23:07 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

I'm not too keen on Suzuki cars, but that's just my baseless opinion. I'd go for Toyota, if I was going Japanese. Something like a Corolla or a Camry. If you can afford it, grab a Cressida with one of the 7M engines. Inline six-cylinder engines are awesome.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

The Grand Vitara's a small SUV, not a car (think the Chevy Tracker... the four-door one, not the Geo Tracker, the Geo's a rebadged Suzuki Sidekick). Not that it really matters, it got sold to someone else yesterday. Not all doom and gloom though, since the mechanic's willing to fix the busted rear passenger window on the Olds. I may want to ask about either the Mercedes or the Jaguar he's got sitting near his garage, though I highly doubt I'd be able to afford either based on brand alone.

Jaguars, as the joke goes, only spend 280 days in the shop a year. Just how much car are you looking to get?

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

To be honest, as long as it's reliable and in good condition, I'm not very picky. I wish I knew if that guy still has that Honda Prelude sitting somewhere, I might want to inquire about it (it's a third-gen model, that's all I know about it).

Shark, the conversation about the practicality of Jags we had a year and a half ago when I was lusting over one starts here. You may find it edifying and amusing.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Oh, I know all about the reliability of a Jag, I was just entertaining the thought.

Okay, humor a question from somebody who knows very little about cars. I always hear people, particularly my Mom, whine about much gas they're wasting if they have to spend time circling around in a parking lot, or if they're sitting idle in a traffic light or something. But if cars get miles to the gallon, how much gas could really be wasted sitting at a traffic light or taking a few spins around a parking lot? Is there really anything to this?

edited 10th Feb '13 4:49:24 PM by JMQwilleran

Taken separately, not all that much. The effect, however, is cumulative. Car makers didn't come up with stop/start for engines when the car is stopped but not turned off just for shits and giggles, after all.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

The amount of gas a car uses when the engine is running is measured in Miles Per Gallon, because most of the time when a car is running, it's also moving, and the number of miles it moves is easy to measure. But it's burning gas every instant that the engine is running, whether the wheels are turning or not. So yes, sitting idling in a traffic jam (or in the driveway, or at stoplights or wherever) does burn gas, and so does circling a parking lot looking for a space. Unless you do an awful lot of either one, (and I mean hours of it) though, you're unlikely to be burning enough gas to really make a difference in your average MPG. For instance, during the time it took me to use the last tank of gas in my car (about a calendar week), I spent about 1 and 1/2 hours total with it idling in the driveway waiting for the heat to come up and the windows to defrost enough to drive safely. My gas mileage for that tank of gas was enough lower than usual that I figure I burned somewhere around a gallon and a half of gas in that 75 minutes that I wasn't moving.

Make sense?

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

It makes sense to me, and would seem to confirm my point, then— that complaining about day-to-day frustrations regarding such matters is just stressing yourself out over something that's beans in the overall picture. Thanks!

Have been looking for my first*

car lately; while perhaps kinda boring, the Prius C is looking mighty appealing to date.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

The Prius is more a "feel good" car than anything else, though, once you consider all expenses, like needing to replace the battery pack (not a cheap item) in ~10 years, and all of what goes into a Prius going from the order to build it to the showroom floor.

A few years back I had to drive a rental Prius.^explanation I was havng some work on my regular car that required it to be unavailable for a while, and put in a reservation for a rental subcompact to cover. They didn't have the reserved car when I actually got to the rental place, so they substituted what they did have, a Prius, at the subcompact price ($30/day vs $100/day) because I had made the reservation instead of just relying on dumb luck. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great, either.

If you go and get a hybrid anyway, please don't be one of those douchebags that crawls away from a red light that just turned green, for the sake of saving gas. It doesn't help the mileage of the people behind you that were stuck at the next red light because they couldn't get through in time thanks to your slow ass.

/petpeeve

edited 12th Feb '13 5:21:41 PM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump