JCC Brag About Your Car Here

is that a stock diffuser, Sarge?

 

I don't believe so. I think he said he modded it some how earlier in the thread.

 

jw is right; I added the fins.

 

Yesterday I put in Accel coils and Iridium NGK spark plugs. It's a little smoother now. Haven't had a chance to see if it has any more power or fuel efficiency.

Also replaced the interior light bulbs with blue LEDs.

 

I drove the Mustang in Project CARS 2, where's a GT4 category race car under FIA classification. Good power on straights, but not the best in corners.

 

Put in a one piece billet aluminum reverse lock-out collar on the shifter. The original unit was a glued-together 2 piece plastic thing and is now in the recycle bin.

 

Replaced the thermostat housing on my Mustang; now I just have red puddles under my car instead of red and green ones!

 

This afternoon I replaced Ford's nasty plastic bubble of a coolant expansion tank with a polished aluminum unit. Easy install, and infinitely prettier.

 

If you start replacing nasty plastic, much of the car will go?

 

In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, "One piece at a time."

 

I just popped downstairs with a colleague for a coffee. There was a 5.0 GT Mustang bullying a cyclist. Black, with gold trim. "HOR5ES" plate. Looked awful. The new 'stang can be made to look fantastic, but not in John Player Special colours it seems.

 

my cat could do Jedi mind tricks .

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I'm in the wrong thread aren't I .

 

Put brushed stainless side skirt covers on today. I'd have finished that a week ago, but I decided to paint the lettering to match the body.

 

Last week, on nothing but sheer impulse, I traded in my 2013 Santa Sport w/turbo. It might be far from a car enthusiast's vision of a good vehicle, but it was solid and reliable, and was easily the nicest car I'd ever had. It even survived what could have been a pretty gruesome car accident without too much trouble.


The interior was nice and roomy, and the acceleration was quick. It became solely mine after my big life event of 2015, and since then I've added many more fun memories to this thing. I'd put just shy of 60,000 miles on it, and it was starting to show some signs of wear and tear (highway damage from trucks kicking up pebbles, chips and dents from other random debris or who knows what). Still, I kept it clean and tidy (despite the best efforts of my kids to make it otherwise ), and all my friends always thought it was brand new.

But recently a couple of my friends had entered the car market for new vehicles and they informed me of the great deals they were finding lately, along with all these snazzy new features. I got curious enough to get my Santa Fe appraised. My one friend just bought a 2018 Ultimate Santa Fe and it was quite impressive. So while I was getting my Santa Fe appraised, I decided to test drive some new vehicles. I decided to stick with Hyundai since I've always had a great experience with their vehicles, usually more so than other mainstream makes.

I of course went for the Santa Fe Ultimate, but it was just a fancier version of my own Santa Fe. Nothing had changed with regards to driving dynamics--and in fact, the turbo on the newer model delivered less horsepower than my older model. The only advantage of trading in for the newer model would have been for a bunch of new tech and aesthetic features.

I wasn't too thrilled about that. But as I was about to leave, I saw this sharp little thing.





The 2017 Tucson Night edition. I test drove it and was surprised by how much I enjoyed driving it. While it easily looks reminiscent of the larger Santa Fe, driving it couldn't feel any more different, imo. Plus, for much cheaper than the Santa Fe, this thing comes with its own complement of snazzy features, some of which are limited to this "Night" edition. The interior doesn't feel quite as fancy as the Santa Fe's, but the panoramic moon roof is lovely, and the LEDs throughout are also pretty neat. And this thing, even with turbo, uses much less gas than the Santa Fe. I wish the trunk space was a little larger (it feels like it has less than half the cargo space of the Santa Fe), but all in all I'm enjoying this little Tucson.

I should probably mention that while the new Tucson strikes me as more exciting than the Santa Fe, the Santa Fe used your basic automatic transmission. This Tucson is using Hyundai's relatively new DCT. Most of the reviews I'd read about this car had the exact same opinion I've developed: this DCT is a little rough at low speeds when you initially begin accelerating, but once you hit driving speed, it shifts rather nicely.

I'm a pretty mundane driver, but this will undeniably be a deal breaker for some, as even I can detect the slight trouble at low speeds.

 

Years ago? I could maybe brag about my car a bit. Now? Not so much. Really hard to brag about a mini-van and a SUV.

 

My bragging point would be how long mine has lasted and how long I've owned it. (1985 Golf and I've owned it since then). It's functional - not pretty. It's had its share of minor war wounds. But it runs pretty good for its age and at this point it falls into the 'rather the devil you know' category.

 

You've owned your car longer than I've been alive!

 

That's great. My first car out of high school was my dad's hand me down 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. That car lasted our family about 30 years. My next car was a 2002 Elantra that lasted 12 years before one of the cylinders kept misfiring and no mechanic seemed able to figure out why.

 

My first was a '64 Ford Falcon V8 convertible that I shared with my dad (I took him to the train station in the morning and picked him up at night. During the day I had use of the car to get to school, etc). Lovely car. When it started acting up my dad got a couple of Beetles - a beater car for his commute and then a nicer one for me. He taught me to drive stick on the beater car. I've had VWs ever since. The family car was a Buick since my mom had no desire to drive a stick. I hated driving that car - it was power everything and I damn near killed myself the first time I hit the brakes.
My Golf has also been on two continents - I bought it in the US and it came over on the boat to the UK with my furniture when I moved here.

 

I will use this place to brag about American cars, since Ender Sai claims they are worthless.

Here in China (mainland north/central), the BUICK sedan (and van) are the "cars of choice" for towncar service for hotels and executives here... so nyah!

(but seriously... a Buick? Really?)

 

Yeah mate the country that makes the Great Wall and Chery are your go-to people on what a good car is.

I mean, like I know white liberal Americans will, without context, literally die at this but: they're awful, awful drivers dp4m. You know this. I've had cab drivers watching TV as they drive and miss turns. Turning left from the rightmost lane, across 10 lanes of traffic, is just something they consider ok.

 

Um, I know they're terrible drivers... It's one of the few places on earth I prefer Uber as those cars have seatbelts in the rear.

The cab I got into this morning I had to be in the seat in the back with the TV in front of me... and it had a shatter-area, as if someone's head had already hit that exact spot (I showed my car-mate and she just laughed at me)...

But, again, a BUICK?!? Really?

PS - I described the driving here as "like being in Pune again, except there are actually traffic lights and lanes on the road... they just ignore them..."

 

If you want to see some terrible driving, try commuting to work in Florida every day. I'm pretty certain that Florida is usually ranked as one of the most dangerous places in the country to drive in, as I think it boasts the highest car accident rate per capita in the country.

You typically can't drive around the Disney World area without seeing an accident either having just happened or about to happen. Much of this is caused by either speeding in congested traffic, lack of blinker use, and people just being lost (tourists maybe) and relying more on their GPS than their own eyes and the signs around them.

It really is a grueling experience depending on which highway you need to use. I was rear-ended once and the driver that did so tried blaming me for stopping so suddenly (even though if I had not then I would have hit the car that had stopped right in front of me). No one seems to believe in an appropriate following distance here regardless of the speed that they're using.

Even last night I was being tailgated while on an exit ramp. Speed limit was 40 mph, and this was a big winding ramp high up. I most certainly did not want to go over the speed limit on this thing. But the car behind me apparently wanted to go 80 miles an hour around this circular ramp.

Tailgating is so bad and regular here that it even pissed off my really good friend once, who is usually one of the calmest people I know. He was so pissed by the tailgating that he hit his brakes to warn the other guy off. But since the other guy was following so close he slammed right into my friend's car.

Edit:

On the topic of brake-checking tailgaters, people that drive those sport bikes are relentlessly awful, discourteous drivers. There are so many campaigns about being aware of motorcycles, but so many of them are being driven by discourteous Neanderthals.

Probably more than anyone else I've seen the people on sport bikes speed in congested traffic, lane change without using a blinker, and of course tailgate. Given how vulnerable they are on the roads you would think that they would be a little bit more cautious.

I once saw a cop actually zip through traffic to finally pull one of these people over. You could have seen all the smiles through everyone else's car windows.

I actually (somewhat unintentionally) brake checked one of these idiots once. Speed limit was 35 miles per hour and this guy was on my rear for over a few miles. He had to swerve into the swampy grass or risk smashing his entire body into my SUV when i stopped for a cat or squirrel or something.

He was following that closely. I didn't feel bad for him at all. Makes no sense. You would definitely think that people on a motorcycle would follow at a reasonable distance.

 

Got my Mustang from the dealership a year ago today. To celebrate, here are some before-and-after pics.




Still not finished, of course, and probably never will be, but she's come a long way.

 

Summer wheels and tires are off, original wheels and snow tires are back on. Sad.