The "I just drove a..." Thread

[Kitdy]

As a passenger only, true.

2009 Mercedes-Benz E 350 Coupe, V6 306 hp ...

Not ultra sporty, but the smoothness and power felt amazing. And damn sexy in black with 19 inch AMG alloys.

Yeah baby ;-)

You should try a '14.

[Man of Steel]

It was a test drive from a mate, I will ask him to go for a higher budget ;-)

[Kitdy]

The headrest is like a pillow!

[Man of Steel]

Hahaha. It was a 2011 BTW I noticed.

[RacingManiac]

i3....enjoyed it a lot, kinda want one...

[Ferrer]

With or without the range extender?

The i3 intrigues me.

[RacingManiac]

Pure EV. I mean it makes a lot of sense as a car, maybe even more so than Volt. It is kinda pricy at 42k USD, 4K more if you want the gas engine. Only think I don't like is the wheel and tire package since its skinny LRR tire with big wheels, which pretty much means you can't fit any real wheel and tire on it. With decent tire it might even be a fun car to do something like autoX with since its MR, relatively light, and LOTS of torque....

[Ferrer]

I like the combination of lightness, quirkiness and innovation (it's the Audi A2 of the modern age!), but still not ready for a pure EV. Road driving must drain the batteries quickly and we've got public transport for urban environment. Also, there's no where to plug it in our Barcelona underground car park (could possibly do in the Girona house, but not really practical).

Petrol engine could solve it, but makes it even more expensive and the fuel tank is rather small.

Good to read that it is fun to drive, though.

[pimento]

Yea EVs are still for those who can manage the logistics, but that'll happen more and more. Standards based charging systems so all manufacturer's cars can be recharged off the same plug will help. Electric scooters still make more sense to more people though, especially if you can take the battery into your office and plug it in under your desk. Kinda surprised that's not more of a thing yet, Piaggio should be getting onto that. An E-Vespa (Vespene?) would make a good concept I'm thinking.

[RacingManiac]

I don't think the battery capacity thing is any easier on the scale of a scooter though...

[pimento]

Except that for a commuter vehicle they only need half the range (as you can recharge at work if the design is such that you can take it in with you) and that with it being much smaller and lighter, the battery is orders of magnitude smaller than a car's. Electric motos already exist with massive power and decent range. Something equivalent to a 250cc scooter can't be hard, but getting the economies of scale such that it's a reasonable alternative price-wise might be. Hence starting with something that's already seen as a bit of a premium product, like a Vespa. Easier to justify spending a bit more on that, because Vespa.

[Ferrer]

I can see the point of an electric scooter. Also, if you run out of electricity it's easier to park it on a street or push it to the nearest recharging plug. Scooter also do shorter distances than a car, usually.

(Vespene is a catastrophically bad marketing name for Spain, though...)

[pimento]

(Vespene is a catastrophically bad marketing name for Spain, though...)

Would test well with the Starcraft crowd though.

[f6fhellcat13]

Over the past few months, it has been my (dis)pleasure to cavort around the US and Canada on my company’s dime. In so doing, I’ve had the opportunity to drive the crème de la crème of the rental cars parked in the lot when I got there. I am actually back in Canada for another few weeks, so I guess I’ll have to make this a running log.

Trip 1
Setting: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Québec
Car: 2013 Toyota Corolla
Mileage: 15,000 (or thereabouts) miles

Ah, the Corolla! The motoring press receives a lot of flak for their portrayal of bread-and-butter commuter cars, and in some cases, rightly so. Some wobble so hard that their wheels come off and they start decrying these cars as the Great Satans in some crypto-capitalist/communist conspiracy to rid the world of joy and choice. As armchair experts, we are more inclined to agree with them than the people who actually buy cars. After all, we are car forumites and all daily drive twin-turbo Pagani Zondas with the 4,500bhpz GT-R as a weekend runabout. That all being said… the Corolla is not a fun car. To misquote Roger Ebert: “This [car] doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels [of monkeys].” In fact, I would say that it is one of, if not, the least fun cars that I have driven.

It manages to be so boring, not only by having a setup that is completely antithetical to driving fun, but by being so proficient in most regards. I did have some quibbles, but I’ll get to those in a bit. This meant that driving the car was never a challenge; at no point did my heart rate ever exceed its resting pace. “But f6fhellcat13,” you might be saying, “you did your Driver’s Ed. in an early-decade Corolla. How can this be worse or less-fun than an older version of itself?” I would kindly inquire as to how you know that, but the point does hold up. When I was doing Driver’s Ed. there was an element of excitement (and fear) because it was a new experience. For our first weeks of driving, we didn’t need our twin-turbo Zondas, or even a low-powered sportscar for stimulation. The edge had yet to be taken off piloting a ton-and–a-half of steel at many times the speeds a human can naturally travel; a car was enough. Now, though, we are jaded and demand things like handling, mellifluous exhausts, old-car unreliability, and Lucas electrics to get our kicks. Like all junkies, the tolerance grows and the need expands apace.

That little bit of exposition aside, the Toyota Corolla is a very very boring car. Not once was driving it in any way challenging, though there were a few annoyances. I’ll start with the bad, I suppose. Power; there is none. In their ruthless optimization of this car to have no more than it needs of anything, Toyota has given it an engine that can maintain speeds of up to 90mph but cannot really get there in any sort of haste. When caravanning with my colleagues to dinner after work, the Corolla could only keep up in first gear. Admittedly they were all being driven like rental cars (80-90%), but being out dragged to 110 km/h on Montreal’s autoroutes by a Mazda3 (a rocketship!), a Ford Edge, and a 5.3L GMC Yukon is pretty pathetic. As yet another aside, has anyone ever told Canada that they’re the second-largest nation on Earth? The way they drive, you would think the place is about the size of New Jersey, and there’s no way any self-respecting resident of Durty Jerz would drive that flaccidly. The Corolla’s 1.8l engine felt like a 1.5 or 1.6l at best. With 130hp and 130lbft, I would have thought that such an engine could pull the 2,700lb (1,250kg) car well enough. In addition, and far more annoyingly, while driving through the hills of Vermont, the Corolla had a nice 1-2 step routine it would do on steeper grades. Though I don’t think they ever got much above 5%, it could not make it up them in top (fourth!) gear. After losing a few mph, the torque converter would (jerkily) unlock, hold for a couple of seconds, lose a few more mph, and then downshift. I spent most of the trip with the cruise control somewhere between 70-80mph; closer to the 70mph side, it would downshift to third, but on the steeper hills at 80 it would downshift to second. An incredibly thrashy and unpleasant engine note did nothing to lessen the annoyance. It would also exhibit this behavior when I tried to pass people, which made that experience into a weird Mexican standoff between the transmission, traffic, and me. Most of the other issues I had with the car were less far-reaching; the steering wheel and the suspension conspired to make driving the car by feel impossible. Sight was really the only way to accurate receive information as both feel and sound were completely nonlinear and could, at times, be quite deceiving. In the grand scheme of things, these issues are quite minor and likely wouldn’t dissuade any from buying the car unless they’re drinking our particular brand of Kool-Aid.

The thoroughness with which Toyota designs these cars is really incredible. After 15,000 hard rental miles there were no squeaks or rattles, all the detents clicked smoothly with little freeplay, the switchgear felt solid etc… Everything was ergonomic and the iPod integration, the most important part of a rental car, was spectacularly easy to use with no drop in customization/functionality compared to its competitors. That said, its competitors set the bar pretty low on that front; I would like to mess around with the audio and playback settings far more than any of my rentals allowed. The car came with a medium-sized touch screen in the center console, and while it might not be the most attractive interface, everything is perfectly intuitive. The seats weren’t super pleasant places to be, but at no point in my seven-hour drive up to Montreal did they make me sore.

I could bore you with tales of helmsmanship and dabs of oppo, but I didn’t have much time for such antics, interest in doing those things in a Corolla, or anything like fun roads to drive on in Québec’s Indiana-like humid flatness. I can tell you that it rolls and understeers about as much as I expected, which is to say gradually and in an uninteresting manner. The steering and brakes would probably be familiar to ‘70s Cadillac and early Lancia Scorpion/Montecarlo drivers, respectively. There was not an ounce of feel in the steering; while not as light as a Cadillac’s, the steering wheel felt like turning a potentiometer. The brakes were incredibly overboosted; I managed to get a few pulses of ABS at the stoplight right after pulling out of the rental lot. They were obviously limited in their feel as well. Perhaps I’m just used to driving old cars with soggy brakes, but I would imagine that even people used to driving contemporary cars would find them to be a bit overeager.

Mileage throughout the whole trip held contstant at 33.5 mpg (7l/100km), seemingly regardless of what I did to it. Early on in my journey I did a lot of neutral drops and foot-to-the-floor nonsense, but, by the end of my first day with it, the car's excessive dullness managed to drain the fun from that childishness. I was expecting to see mileage increase on Canada's highways due to their lower speeds. The fuel economy didn't change at all, which I confirmed with at the pump calculations. That number would have been impressive about a dozen years ago when every moron was driving around in an H2, but for a "small" car from 2013 doing 80% highway driving, that is not really an impressive figure, merely adequate.

The Toyota is a solid, uninteresting, and nonthreatening car; a fact borne out much better by its sales figures than any nonsense I write. The sheer ubiquity of this car is a testament not only to Toyota’s engineering, but to their finely-honed market analysis as well. I find it hard to believe that millions of people are willing to put up with the insipid Corolla, when even an equally-reliable Civic manages to not make driving seem like such a chore; no challenge, no reward, no reason not to do your makeup while shaving and reading the paper on your way to work. This willingness for people to forgo engagement for perceived solidity and reliability astounds me. That said, I am an idiot. At this point in a review of a Corolla, one usually states that, while they would never buy a Corolla, they would recommend one to a friend with no interest in cars in a heartbeat. I would not. Whenever I hear: “You like cars. What $18,000 car should I buy?” I repeat the above caveat that I’m an idiot. If they persist, I tell them to browse craigslist for Borgwards, and if they persist beyond that I mumble something under my breath about how contemporary Mazdas are nice.

So there we go! Stay tuned for tales of Korean crypto-sportiness and American pseudo-luxury!

I have pictures of the other cars, but apparently I couldn’t summon the willpower to take some of the Corolla.

EDIT: Turns out I could!

[Ferrer]

Some comments:

1) Lucas electrics are the single best automotive invention ever.
2) I thought 4 speed gearboxes had disappeared from cars by now
3) Great read
4) I bet this car is as fast (or maybe faster) as my car in straight line
5) I have a bumper sticker in my MX-5 which says "My other car is a Zonda"

I have to say, there is one great truth in the above post, and it is that most people can't actually care to differentiate between cars. Of those people there are two groups: those who couldn't care less about what drive/wear/have (Toyota customers) and those obnoxious snobs (Audi drivers).

In my years as the local Mediterranean lunatic petrolhead (you know, the sort of chap who believes that the Audi A2 is a really interesting car) I've discovered that it is hopeless trying to explain why the rear end agility of the Hyundai i30 is such a great treat. Essentially you get two reactions: either you get a confused stare as if you had just landed from Mars and had four arms and three eyes or you get mocked about because their Audi S-Line is better than seeing an unicorn bathed in the light of a lovely sunset in a bucolic scene.

One of the greatest ironies is a friend of mine, which is an engineer, and who simply can't understand my obsession with Toyota iQs and Citroën C6s. I'm not saying he should buy a Renault Avantime, but if an engineer can't appreciate the greatness of the Miller engine in the supercharged Micra we are doing something wrong.

Nevertheless, if I ever get thrown the perennial question ("what car should I get?") I always try to steer them (see what I did there?) towards something that at least isn't catastrophically bad, for fear that they'd end up in something as terrible as a Mercedes-Benz A-Class...

Oh wait.

(PD. I recently drove one of the new Skydrivegreemotion Mazda 3s and it is interesting to think why would anyone to spend significantly more to get something that's worse)