Never seen this board before - lets post!

Blitzkrieger

My car is astonishing.

I bet you don't hear that about a bog standard MkII Fiesta very often, but it's true! When you think about it, a car is still basically a horse-less carriage; a way of getting yourself, and sometimes twenty bags of shopping, from A to B. Something my Fiesta does quite well.

The designer of every Jazz, Amica, Yaris, etc., would love to have you believe that they invented the concept of 'maximum space inside for minimum space on the road', but the reality is the concept goes right back to the Fiat 500. I'm not the tallest person in the world, but I've loads of room in the front with a few notches to spare. I did an advanced driving test in a Clio and even with the seat pushed all the way back, my knees were still
up around my ears. Getting back into my Fiesta was luxurious afterwards. The steering wheel doesn't adjust for reach or height, so you have to adjust around it. Thankfully the seat is light and easy to adjust.

The back, unfortunately, is a different story. With my seat in it's usual position, only an anorexic midget could be comfortable behind me. It's rarely an issue because there's rarely been more than three people in the car. If I do have to seat four, I don't have to put my seat too far forward to make room in the back, and it's comfortable enough for both of us. With five people, things get a bit squashed in the back seat. To be honest, that middle seat belt is a joke. If you're wondering, ten people is about the
maximum.

You don't get much in the way of comfort or toys. I find myself listing a rear window heater and rear fog light as features sometimes. No PS, or ABS, or EW, or Airbag and forget about aircon. The seats are thin too, but they're comfortable enough. I wouldn't recommend any journey longer than an hour and a half in them, but if you had to drive non-stop from Cork to Dundalk and back again and put in a nights work afterwards, you wouldn't
need the services of an army of chiropractors to do it.

It's not particularly fast. It's the type of car people charitably describe as "nippy". Around town it's fast enough - with a bit of revving you can do 0-40 in a respectable time - but it suffers on the open road. Once you get past 50, 70 takes an age. This is a pain sometimes as that's just the speed you want to overtake at, but while I often wish I had a faster car, I rarely feel I need one. It's fun to drive too. It shouldn't be as front wheel drive cars always have terrible handling, but I enjoy twisting and turning through the city streets and hanging on for dear life around the back roads.

The boot is quite large for a car this size too. It'd just about take two big golf bags with the back seats up, but with the seats down it's cavernous. You could put an enormous fridge in there. Anything over seven feet and you really should tie it down though. It's reliable too. I used to have a Corsa that wouldn't start if it was wet, or cold, or if it was
Tuesday. It's a bad year that I spend more than EUR400 in servicing. It's been around the clock at least once and it's still on it's original exhaust. Most of the major problems I've had with it have been through disuse. You've heard about the motors of electric windows fusing if they're not used? Well the lock on my boot keeps jamming because I rarely open it.

In case you haven't guessed by now, my car has done everything you could reasonably ask of it, and quite a bit more. The kicker is that relatively speaking, it's not a good car. There's billions of cars out there that are faster, bigger, safer, more comfortable. A lot of them are all of those.

It amazes me just how many cars there are in the world. If you were to write out the parts list for a complete car, it'd probably take you ages. There's dozens of major moving components and hundreds of minor ones, and they hardly ever fail. They need servicing and repair, but major defects aren't all that common. If you add the complexity of electric windows, radios, alarms, sunroofs, aircon and fold away roofs like the 206CC and it really is amazing. Billions of people rush to work every morning and never realise the mechanical marvel that takes them there. I think my drive to work every morning is a miracle of human endeavour.

If you think about all the elements that have to come together to make it happen, you'd probably agree. Wheels, tyres, windows, lights, gears, valves, pistons, spark plugs, motors, and that's barely getting started on the car. All those things needed manufacturing themselves before they were assembled into a car. There's the miles of roadway, roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, tunnels and squashed rabbits that I drove on, and don't get me started on the petrol. It's amazing that I, and billions of other people, have a fast, safe, dependable mode of transport that can go anywhere, whenever I want, and bring anything I need with me, and it's completely ridiculous that I love it.

I've heard when it was launched it was considered quite a stylish car, I was about eight at the time and far more interested in mutant turtles than cars at time. For most people this is probably hard to imagine now, but the turtles were all the rage back then. Seriously though, it does look nice from some angles. I should be ashamed of it. I should want to get rid of it at the earliest possible opportunity, but I enjoy driving it so much that I can't bring myself to care what people think about it.

So my point is - only two pages later - that my POS car, on the arse end of the motoring scale can do almost anything you want and I love it. If you could imagine building a transport system from scratch, having to give everybody a personal and personalised vehicle that not only has to be fast, safe, comfortable, dependable and versatile, but it has to be fun, exciting and lovable too. It'd be impossible. That all this already exists and my POS car is a part of it is astonishing.



Of course, it can't go on. The roads are too crowded and there's more and more vehicles using them each year. Collectively, the governments of the world haven't a clue. There're bringing in half-arsed, cheap, short-term measures to try and deal with the problem, and lets face it, keep themselves it office. A new transport system has to be brought in. It has to be complete. It has to be all-encompassing. It has to be revolutionary

Victor

No trolling!

Blitzkrieger

Jebus! I spend all that time (admittidly it was a slow day at work) typing that out and no one replys! Mutter, mutter........

jd

Originally posted by Blitzkrieger
Once you get past 50, 70 takes an age.

did you drop down 2 third..?
oh its a fiesta ...