SB

I went to the BMW event that I've mentioned a while ago. Lots of fun. An actual autocross with 6 laps: 3 laps in one car, 2 laps in another (3 and 4 series gas and diesel), and a timed lap. And they've actually had some SCCA champions as instructors. The only slightly disappointing part about the autocross part is the video recording they've sent. It's the in-car footage of the driver interspersed with the stock footage of the car driving (it wasn't even the car model that I drove). But then again, people might be more interested in seeing themselves than seeing how they drive, and having two cameras would be more complicated.

And aside from this a couple of demos, and lots of cars to drive on the street. I've spent a lot of time driving them, and I still didn't drive them all (but I've done a very good representative sampling :-). And also some fancier cars (the Ms and i8) on static displays, you could sit in them.

The hill descent demo is pretty impressive. They've built a steep ramp about 2 or 3 stories high, and ran the X5 truck over it. It's something like 40% ascent and descent, when going up, you can't see where you're going other than by the front camera. The early part also has rollers, so that you can see on the display how the torque gets redistributed by the wheels. And on the way down it keeps the speed all by itself.

Now about the cars. The controls in all of them are very similar, so once you learn what is where, it's kind of a transferable skill. But you could see that there are different generations of the system. The newer cars have the instrument panel all-digital, really the screens with the gauges displayed on them. The models that were last refreshed earlier (like X5, 2-series and Z4) still have the actual gauges. X5 seems to be the oldest, it didn't even have the "Sport+" mode (but maybe the combination of "Sport" and turning of the traction control by the button does the same trick, I'm not sure, because they've been resetting each other's indication on the display).

I drove a few cars before the autocross, and they all have left the impression that they could use a lot more of the sway bars. Then at autocross the same 3/4 series actually didn't feel like that. And then I've tried to change the mode from "Comfort" to "Sport" after autocross, like they've done there, and realized that it made the difference. The cars become a lot more controllable and fun to drive. I don't understand why they have the "Comfort" mode at all. It sucks. The car wallows and the steering is very light. VERY light. Once you engage the "Sport" mode, the suspension tightens (I've been wondering if they adjust the shocks or sway bars, and from the web site it seems to be the sway bars), and the steering also becomes normal. I'd just leave the "Sport" and "Eco" modes and drop the "Comfort". I mean, come on, even the "Sport" mode settings are pretty mild and comfortable. I mean, I like how mild and comfortable is my Pontiac, but the BMWs in "Sport" mode are even cushier (Z4 with M suspension is probably comparable or maybe a little stiffer). And yeah, I drove my car around the same route afterwards for comparison.

I wonder if they have some way to set the "Sport" mode as default, but looking at the internets, apparently it can't be done. Pressing the buttons every time after starting the car would be annoying. Well, I can tell for sure that it's annoying because I don't normally bother to press every time the button to disable the stability control on my cars (yeah, I would like to buy a plug that would do it for me).

Speaking of which the even more right mode is "Sport+": same "Sport" but with the traction and stability control reduced. You can get there in two ways: either press the mode selection button twice, or press it once and press the DSC button once. I'm not sure, why are there two ways, and if they do the exact same thing or somehow different. The traction and stability control can be also turned off altogether by holding the DSC button for 6 seconds (like on the stinkin' RX-8 but BMWs at least have some torque and the traction control might potentially be helpful). And there way a demo that yes, they turn off all the way. That's where I've learned about the 6 seconds. The demo was kind of about the opposite, about how the stability control won't let you spin, but you can read it either way :-)

But as the settings go, that's not the end yet. The automatic transmission also has its own sport mode. Pull the selector to the left, and it's on. I'm not exactly sure, which sport mode controls what, and they seem to overlap on the engine settings. When both sport modes are on, the transmission does the very nice downshifts and has the quick reactions. In the Eco mode it keeps the engine around 1000-1500 RPM, and you can press the gas pretty hard and lug it in there without the transmission shifting, kind of like I usually drive on the street with the stick. In the Comfort mode it does neither and is not much good at guessing anything about what is wanted from it. Can't see why anyone would want that mode.

It can be shifted manually too, with the selector or with the paddles. With 8 gears, that's really too much work. Reaching the paddles also needs practice, because they're sitting pretty tight between the steering wheel and the turn signal and windshield wiper stalks.

Speaking of that, the windshield wiper stalk has a lot of buttons on it, I haven't figured them out, and I'm not sure if I can remember them all. I forget the complicated things that I don't use regularly. It's something that would require regular exercise to stay in practice. The navigation system seems OK at navigation as such but it doesn't have a touch screen. It uses a joystick instead. Which means that controlling it is impossible. I have a system like that in RX-8, I've tried using it once, found that it sucks big time, and never turned it on ever since. I've tried playing with the BMW's navigation, and it's just as bad. Worse yet, they have menus with pictographic icons. Icons, Carl! Pretty hard to guess what they mean. It might be nice to have if you get to drive a car in say China and can't read their words, but why not have both words and icons?

And yes, the car is started and stopped with a button, and there is no option to get the key instead.

Getting back to the chassis dynamics, after learning about the better modes, I'd rank the Z4 with M suspension first, then 740 with M suspension and 2 series, then 5 GT (which is built on the 7 platform), then 3 series and the trucks, and then the 5 series and I think 4 GT. I think the 6 series was better than 5 series but I'm not sure. I wonder if 4 GT is built on the 5 platform, like 5 GT uses the 7 platform. No matter how much Sport mode you press on the 5 series, it still wallows. Is this the model they've updated last? Not a good sign then.

I've been quite impressed by the turbo-diesels. They sound a little funny at idle but once you start driving, they feel like the normal engines.

The start-stop mode when the car turns off the engine after stop is a bit strange. Can't say that I liked it much. But the sport mode turns it off. And even by itself it's mostly smart, if you stop and then crawl forward, and then stop again (like at a stop sign or in crawling traffic), it usually doesn't turn off the engine the second time.

The ergonomics is wonderful. Even the seats with the big side bolsters (which I usually hate big time) are very comfortable. The more expensive versions have a surprising number of adjustments: among them, separate adjustments for the angle of the lower and upper parts of the seat back.

i8 is a very strange car in the ergonomics department. It has the very wide and high sills and the scissor doors. Crawling over these sills without hitting the head on the door is probably more tricky than fitting into a Lotus. I haven't sat in a Lotus recently, so I can't say for sure.

i3 the electric car is a pretty interesting experience. It goes pretty well. The gas pedal controls both the acceleration and the electric braking (by releasing it). Feels like a good engine braking, and all the way to the full stop with the foot off the pedal. I don't know, maybe it automatically engages the usual brakes at the end. The dashboard shows the meter for the flow of energy. But it's a tall car, and it could use a lot more sway bars, say an inch thicker at each end.

The normal cars also show the economy meter in the Eco and Comfort modes. In the Sport mode the instrument panel is all red, in Eco mode it becomes blue. And they also have the recharge meter. My guess is that's for recharging the normal battery (it doesn't seem to create any noticeable braking force).

Parking the cars after the drive with the reverse camera can be counted as a separate ride :-) Makes things pretty easy to fit into the tight spaces, though it still requires skill at forecasting, how the projected path lines will match the reality. They show what would happen if the steering wheel is held as-is, but normally you'd unwind the wheel near the end, so you need to account for it and overdo a bit at the beginning.

Turns out, the Ecoboost Challenge they mention in the commercials is an actual event. Found it on the Internet, thus week in my area, and went there. A fun event.

They even had the manual transmission cars available (and a tent that taught it to the people who didn't know how to use it). The stick cars were as the "reaction time challenge" and the Mustang was available with both automatic and stick.

The reaction time challenge is like the very first moment of a drag race, just measuring the first few inches. With the Focus ST and Fiesta ST. With the prizes every hour for the two best times (and a shoot-out between them for the first prize). I've got lucky enough to win the 2nd-place prize, a model Focus ST. Honestly, there was no skill involved, just luck. I've got my best time on my first run. I could not find a comfortable position in the Focus ST, so I've just lifted the clutch at the last light of 3, fumbling a little, and got the time 0.012s. On the second run I tried not to fumble and jumped the start at -0.017s. At the shootout I've got a different car with different seat adjustments, and fumbled it differently, and got 0.5 second. Well, it worked to the best, since I've liked the model car better than the first prize, a set of fancy headphones, anyway. I mean, I already have a set of fancy headphones sitting in my closet for 10 years, and the only time I took them out was when I wanted to try the hearing test with them.

The rest of activities were: Mustang on a course, trucks/SUVs with competitors on a course, and a variety of cars on a street drive.

I must say, the turbos work pretty decently nowadays. They all felt like normal engines, with no turbo lag whatsoever. Given a choice, I would still probably prefer a normally aspirated engine, but turbos are comparable now.

Mustang seems to have an interesting handling. I've felt it going a little sideways when I've overestimated a turn and had to brake in the middle of it, so it seems to handle well, not just plowing straight like some. But unconsciously it felt large. Maybe it's because of the very long and high hood, and the driver's seat thus being somewhat close to the back. The hood certainly looks very cute from inside but it gets in the way of visibility, much longer than say on the Fox-body Mustang.

The back-to-back comparisons were F-150 vs Silverado, Edge vs Subaru Outback and Escape vs Subaru Forester. As a side note, I can't remember the Ford model names. They all mix into a meaningless blur and I had to look them up now.

The most impressive one was the Edge, it just blew me away. Not only the 3.5L turbo engine is strong, something like 350 horsepower, but it also can handle, the handling felt like a car, and way better than anything else in the test. And it had lots of weird options like air-conditioned seats, every which way cameras, and self-parking - not only the parallel parking but nowadays also the backwards parking into a perpendicular slot. For whatever strange reason, the front 180-degree camera can be turned on only on a standing car, and turns itself off once you start moving above the crawling pace. Maybe so that people don't start driving by the view from it. Well, I'm not sure, how much use is in all these options, but the driving experience itself is impressive.

The second best was Silverado. Compared to it, F-150 is outright crap. The suspension is a little mushier but the thing that really kills it is the horrible slow steering. By the way, Expedition suffers from the same problem. The Ford trucks just always had the horrible steering but a few years ago I drove one at a GM event that felt decent. Either that was a fluke or they tried a better steering and then decided to go back to the shitty one. It's so incredibly shitty that I'd never buy a Ford truck, and try to avoid renting one. Yeah, and acceleration-wise that same 3.5L turbo doesn't seem to stand up to GM's V8.

The Escape wasn't particularly memorable, about on par with the Subaru. I have a vague feeling that Forester felt a little better just from the lower stance and interior standpoint but I can't say for sure, and driving-wise I think they felt about the same. And as Subarus went, the Outback and Forester felt fairly similar to each other.

The street driving included Expedition, Transit 7-seat micro-van, Edge with two engine variants, Escape, Fusion Hybrid, and Focus (no turbo).

The common feeling is that Ford tends towards kind of cramped driver's seats. The feel comes from both the seat itself and from all the panels around it, with tall dashboards and middle consoles. And it repeats in every car and SUV, maybe less so in the full-size trucks. It disturbs me slightly and with other things being equal I'd definitely choose a less cocooned feeling, but I guess it's not so bad to be a deal-breaker.

In Focus, I liked the basic interior much better than one in the ST. I could find a comfortable driving position in the basic Focus but not in ST. Maybe it's because of the extra side bolsters. I passionately hate the Recaro and like-Recaro seats in all the cars, and Focus ST has it much worse than my G8 GXP, about on par with the older Cadillac CTS-V. The electric seats in ST are at least much better in adjustments than the manual ones, the manual adjustments are a monstrosity beyond monstrosity, they seem to have a fixed and very high height of the front of the seat (though ironically I've had my best reaction time in a car with the manual adjustment).

I've really liked the pedal position adjustment in the Expedition. Not sure if it's available in the other cars, haven't found it anywhere else.

By the way, Fusion also seems to have different seats. I've got a Fusion rental car recently, and the seats were not only somewhat strange by themselves, like on a Dodge, but also the electric height adjustment moved not the whole seat but just the cushion. Very strange and annoying. But the Fusion Hybrid here had the normal seats and normal adjustments.

In general, Fusion Hybrid feels like a normal car (by the way, no turbo on it, the one I rented had a turbo but no hybrid). "Starts" without starting the engine, then turns on the engine when needed (and you can feel a little vibration when it does that). Has a lot of indicators, like what percentage of energy was captured in the regenerative braking. But it shows that after the braking is completed, I think it would be more interesting to see some indication in real time when the braking is too hard to recapture the energy.

For me, the reason to buy a hybrid would be if I could use it as a generator for my house. But it doesn't seem to work like that. It has a 110V outlet but a search on the Internet shows that it can do only 150W. Why not make it externally accessible, either multiple outlets or a large generator plug, together capable of at least something like 10KW? After all, the engine and generator can produce more, the generator plug can handle 30KW, and the battery would come handy for not running the engine when there is little load.

Oh, and the trunk on the Fusion Hybrid is seriously reduced by the battery. It gives the strange shape to the trunk. The square-section bags won't fit in the deep part of it. A flat one will, but only one across the car if you don't want it to interfere with the deep part of the trunk at the tail end.

Ходил на ихнее мероприятие, которое только по приглашению - опробовать CTS-V на трассе. В Монтиселло.

Ну, очень мило. Собственно из езды было: на трассе ознакомительная сессия - сначала провезли один круг, и два круга самому. Потом вторая сессия была самому 4 круга. Были образцы с ручной коробкой, и я на них ездил. На трассе они разметили правильную траекторию конусами. Что с одной стороны удобно, а с другой стороны несколько сбивало. И на просто CTS в отдельном месте попробовать слалом, торможение в пол одновременно с поворотом (система стабильности умеет такое делать), и разгон-торможение в виде маленького дрэг-рейсинга.

В перерывах были маркетинговые разговоры, а также давали поообщаться с Джоном Хайнриси и Энди Пилгримом. Хейнриси я спрашивал, почему для Камаро нет опции 19" колес, а то для автокросса гоночных шин 20" размера нету.

Завтрак был неплохой, но послеобеденной группе давали обед лучше.

Про машину: очень прикольно. И поворачивает мило, и разгоняется шустро. Но на нижних оборотах тянет не очень сильно, вот когда раскрутится - то прет со страшной силой. В-принципе оно и хорошо, внизу педаль газа получается не такая чувствительная и ей удобно плавно регулировать процесс на выходе из поворотов. Тормозные колодки у них хреновые. Требуют очень большого усилия на педали, особенно когда холодные, как родные колодки от Камары. Они их небось любят за малое количество производимой пыли. Вот на Понтиаке у меня родные колодки - совсем другое дело. Хоть колеса и все черные от пыли, но тормозят нормально, не хуже, чем любимый Hawk.

Трасса в Монтиселло мне, честно говоря, не понравилась. Вообще мне трессы с большим количеством поворотов обынчо нравятся, но у них просто какая-то мания во-первых к поворотам на гребне холма, чтоб их было нифига не видно, во-вторых к поворотам с уменьшающимся радиусом. Сплоошная эбанутость, а для конкретного применения со всего 7 кругами времени - и вовсе не толково. А, ну и утка, которую они запускали про Формулу-1 - сплошной смех. Для Ф-1 эта трасса очень-очень медленная и очень-очень узкая. Зато клубный дом у них красивый.

Ходил на покатушки на Сонате. Кстати, если кому надо, дают на http://www.sonatauncensored.com/Register1.aspx - у них еще в Вашингтоне будет. Кататься дают на Сонате, Кэмри и Аккорде.

Кэмри - ужас-ужас с большим отрывом. Ужасная управляемость, безобразно валкая, и при этом почему-то и одновременно самая тряская. Ее Соната одним махом побивахом.

Аккорд же наоборот менее валкий и лучше управляется. Несмотря на то что более большой и наверное тяжелый. Еще у Аккорда гораздо лучше traction control - на скользком покрытии Аккорд замечательно разгоняется, в то время как Соната и Кэмри решают, что типа раз лед, то никуда ехать не надо. И, кстати, выглядит гораздо лучше. И салон поприятнее, и пожалуй менее гинекологическая посадка. Единственное, в чем Аккорд (4-цилиндровый) проигрывает Сонате - это разгон. Разгоняется Соната старательнее. Я когда в первый раз проехал, то по сравнению со своей машиной совершенно не заценил, а когда побольше на образцах покатался, то заценил, как Соната лучше разгоняется.

Из интересных фенечек на Сонате (в комплекте с навигацией) прилагается камера заднего вида. На Кэмре тоже прилагается, но у Сонаты еще и показывает квадратиками, куда оно едет, проецируется по положению руля.

Руль, кстати, у них у всех очень легкий. У Сонаты даже на месте вращается вообще как пустой.

Навигационная система в Сонате какая-то напрочь ужасная. Я тут приобрел Томтом и морщусь на него, а у них оно еще все гораздо хуже. Чтоб скажем карту перерисовывать медленнее Томтома - это надо постараться.

Заднее сиденье на Сонате не понравилось. Оно какое-то тесное и не плоское (вообще, что нынче за мода такая, делать неплоские сиденья?)

Сходил посмотрел. Видимо, по случаю пасхи народу было как-то необычно мало. Даже к Мерседесу и БМВ можно было подойти и посидеть. Зато евреев в пейсах и тюбетейках были просто толпы, прям как какой-то конгресс еврейского народа.

Ну, чего было. ( Read more... )

P.S. Еще вспомнил - добавил.

Ходил вчера к местному дилеру на презентацию Линкольна MKT. Закусить и покататься.

Турбо-мотор ихний себя проявил неплохо. Тянет прилично, и провалов внизу незаметно. Впрочем, может дело в коробке, может просто коробка переключается вниз довольно активно, и задержка на раскрутку турбин совпадает с задержкой на переключение коробки.

Очень прикольная система автоматической параллельной парковки. Она сумела залезть в та-акую масенькую дырочку, аж датчиками на бампере пищала. Недостаток - нет обратной системы, для вылезания из дырочки :-)

Посадка не понравилась. Хоть и педали и руль двигаются, но даже при паделях в самом заднем положении и руле в самом переднем сидеть неудобно. Или ноги скрючиваются или руки не достают. Сиденье тоже вниз дальше не опускается. Имени японцев. Руль с дурацкой электрикой, так что при выключенном зажигании уползает, а при включенном приползает. Раздражает. Заводится тоже дурацкой кнопкой.

По высоте оно в-принципе неплохо, пониже обычных СУВов, но все равно сильно выше седанов. Третий ряд сидений мешается в багажнике. Когда складывается, то образует ровный пол. Второй ряд складывается даже без снятия подголовников - там хватает места. В третьем ряду предусмотрена специальная пластинка, которая закрывает по сути кусок пустого места, чтоб был ровный пол. Более подробное исследование показало, что место там не совсем пустое и под эту пластинку фиг что засунешь - там живет подставка под третье сиденье.

Случилось чудо. Нет, не Карлсон вернулся, а я купил новую машину. В смысле, прям новую-новую. Понтиак G8 GXP. V8 6.2 литра, 415 л.с., ручная коробка. Единственный минус - седан, а не универсал. Еще я впервые купил машину в кредит.

( Read more... )

Догадался, что большинство проблем с OnCourseNavigator'ом было оттого, что я на евойной СД-карточке поставил защиту от записи. Я им сначала гневное письмо написал, потом догадался.

К остальным странностям типа странных менюшек можно привыкнуть. Только он с моим новым приемником все равно не работает. И все равно иногда валится, но гораздо реже.

Автомобильное и вообще транспортное

Будучи на родине, покатался на Жигулях, а также на марштурке и даже троллейбусе. ( Read more... )

Дали мне намедни напрокат Мицубиси Галант. Должен сказать, что он мне на удивление понравился. ( Read more... )