Get Yourself a Tool Kit

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Great quote from Steve Lange about buying a new car, vs. fixing a used ride:

My heartfelt advice is to stop drinking the media supplied Kool-Aid, buy a tool kit and a Hayne’s manual, and start to get to know the absolute basics of your car. The big money is rarely made on the smartest customers. It is always the most ignorant and fearful that are the juicy prey of the marketplace. At this point you’re being a squeaky mouse in a den full of recession hungry boas.

Educate yourself. If you can look at a glass and see it’s half-full, you can easily read the coolant, oil, washer fluid, and brake fluid levels in your car. If you can turn a screw, you can also replace an oil filter, a battery, and nearly anything else on your car that isn’t a computer or wire. Buy a couple of jack stands, a $50 tool kit, a Mityvac, and that Hayne’s manual I mentioned earlier. The Rabbit’s are average in reliability and there’s nothing there that isn’t in 90+% of the cars that have been out there for the past decade.

The Checker Motors Aerobus

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checker-aerobus-illustration

It’s Checker Motors Appreciation Week over at Truth About Cars and they’ve triggered some bad flashbacks of Mr T and the Barbarian Brothers in 1993’s DC Cab. I didn’t realize Checker Motors made wagons, but I’m sure they worked great for cabs.

The 8-door Aerobus pictured above seems dropped in from another planet, however. Before there were Hummer H3 limos driving kids to their prom at the Jersey Shore, there was the Checker Motors Aerobus driving around vacation resorts and large airports. Unlike a limousine, the extended wheelbase Aerobus had forward facing bench seats, which is why it needed so many damn doors.

The Checker Aerobus Resource has some awesome pics of reader rides as well as a list of specs. Built from 1966 to 1974, this beast ran on a 200 hp 350ci V8. There were 6 door and 8 door versions built, with the 8 door having a 12 passenger capacity and a curb weight of 4905 lbs.

aerobus-stretchAs if the original wasn’t long enough, this dude dropped $150k to combine two aerobuses, constructing a 14 door behemoth.

aerobus-armyThe US Army used this one to transport officials on a base in the US Southwest. Roof bins have been added because I guess there wasn’t enough room?

We don’t need no stinkin’ badgers!

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Tom Vanderbilt commends the old 240 in a parenthetical comment on his blog post about “car diapers”:

I often wonder why (most) cars actually lost their extruding bumpers to begin with (look at those big rubber bricks on old Volvos) — some push for imagined aerodynamicism on the part of car drivers I suppose.

Every day my gigantic rubber bumpers scrape a little more of the “Umbria Twilight Pearlesque” from the Infinity FXs  in my neighborhood. If people would just use those hideous Bumper Badgers, everything would be all right.

Paying for Public Street Parking

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The NY Times documents efforts by some city dwellers to share information about curb-side parking spots. StreetParkNYC has an iPhone app website that allows you to announce when you’re leaving a spot. Another driver who’s in need of a spot can get info about the location for $5 and you would get a $3 kick back, with StreetParkNYC pocketing the remaining $2.

This sounds so creepy. Street parking in Hoboken, where I live, is pretty tough. It’s rare that you see an open parking space. Most of the time you have to catch someone getting in their car so you can nab the spot. I’m wondering how people would react if someone beats them to a spot they just paid $5 for. StreetPark claims their system would reduce fuel consumption and emissions, but it seems to me that it would just defer these problems to someone else.

Update: Caleb from StreetParkNYC responds in comments.

The Future Road for Volvo Cars

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Pictured above is Swedish deputy Prime Minister Maud Olofsson at yesterdays announcement of the sale of Volvo cars to the Chinese company Geely.

“Regardless of who owns Volvo Cars, its brand will still be Swedish.”

Unlike some Volvophiles, I couldn’t care less who owns the company. People are going to start hooting and hollering about this sale now that the rumors have been confirmed, but does it really matter? The important question is “Does the car suck or not?”

Critics, including Consumer Reports, have complained that the quality of Volvo cars has suffered since Ford purchased it in 1999. Is quality really going to get a whole lot worse now that it’s owned by Geely? Or is that just a xenophobic reaction about the supposed inferiority of Chinese workmanship?

Who defines a corporation’s product anyway? The nation that owns the company? The nation that originated the company? The nation where the cars are built? The nation where the cars are driven? Why is a Toyota that’s built in the US still a Japanese car, while a Volvo or Saab that’s owned by an American or Chinese company is still a Swedish car?

The idea of a nationally branded car is quaint. When Ford bought Volvo the brand ceased to “be Swedish,” whatever that means. It became just another commodity in a global marketplace that gets parts contracted out to companies all over the world but has the imprimatur of a corporate board and an aura constructed by the branding wizards of the marketing department.

Is the Volvo Wagon Dead?

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According to a memo leaked to Jalopnik, the Volvo V70 will not be offered in North America after 2010. And while the V50 will still be available, its time may be numbered. That means the name “Volvo” may no longer be synonymous with “station wagon.”

I remember checking out the NY Auto show 4 or 5 years ago and being surprised that there was no V70 on display. I guess they had started the process of phasing it out back then. I was told that the XC70 was just like the V70, but, I’m sorry, it’s not. I don’t count the XC70 as a wagon, and Jalopnik agrees. However, Volvo execs feel that “the personality of the XC70 is a good fit for today’s lifestyles.” To which commenter chathamh responds:

If the current product lineup of most manufacturers was an accurate reflection of American lifestyles, most Americans would spend their free time fording creeks, hauling trailers, powering through snow drifts and traversing miles of unpaved mountain trails.

Today’s manufacturers, at least for cars in the US market, don’t understand that not everyone wants to have to choose between a vanilla mid-sized sedan and a blinged out monster truck. I’ve purchased 2 cars in my life, a 745t and my current 245. What brought me to Volvo wasn’t their “personality”. It was the fact that they made really nice station wagons, vehicles that had great carrying capacity, had a relatively low center of gravity and drove like cars. Europeans understand this. In my visits to Germany and France I’m always impressed that they had such beautiful, sleek wagons. They understand that you can increase carrying capacity without raising the vehicle sky-high, tacking on knobby tires and forcing the driver to sit upright. That’s why Volvo will still be making the V70 for the European market.

This news from Volvo goes hand-in-hand with what’s happened to Subaru’s once sexy Legacy wagon. They dropped it a few years ago in favor of the Outback, and then they converted the Outback into a bloated crossover SUV. Someone in my neighborhood just got one of these abominations and I shudder every time I walk by it. Doesn’t Subaru already litter our aesthetic landscape enough with the Tribeca? How is the Outback any different?

Jalopnik posted a heart-warming eulogy to the Volvo wagon, a historic look back at the rise and sudden fall of the iconic boxy brick. RIP.

PS. I hope to wake up tomorrow and find this was all a horrible nightmare. Or maybe I should just get a life, because I’m not in the market for a new car anyway, and I’ll probably drive my precious 245 into my grave!

Uma Thurman’s Brick in “Motherhood”

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Apparently the movie “Motherhood” opened last October in theaters in the US, but it’s making the news now because it only made about $115 on its opening weekend in the UK a few weeks ago. That includes the sale of ONE ticket on the Sunday of its premier.

From the trailer it looks like we have yet another case of a typecast blue beater brick. Uma Thurman is a mommy blogger (as is my wife) who lives in an inexpensive apartment in an expensive urban neighborhood (like my family) and the movie chronicles a day in her life where she prepares for her daughter’s 6th birthday (like my daughter had on Thursday), deals with her hapless husband (played by my doppelganger Anthony Edwards), and struggles to find a space to park her brick (which I do on a regular basis).

According to the website there’s a “battle for a parking space during an epic alternate side parking showdown.” Don’t know if it’s with that hot rod Camaro in the frame grab above.

I found a couple weird photos of the car taken by the dog trainer. The first one shows Uma’s puppy sitting in the passenger seat while the other has the film crew gathered around the car preparing to shoot a scene.

It sounds like the blue beater gets good screen time as the trailer shows it in the background in a bunch of shots. I’m guessing it’s another symbolic stand in for the main character; a tough, grizzled veteran with a heart of gold. Considering the movies reception in London, however, I don’t think I’ll bother renting it to find out.