You've been there, I guarantee it. You've misplaced your cell phone, and you need to call someone, and you have no freaking idea what anyone's phone number is. They're all in your cell phone--and you haven't even been using that extra brain space for anything useful. (Congratulations, you can recite the entire Macintosh product line by order of introduction. You're a nerd. No one cares.)

And now, to make things worse, Lexus is introducing a self-parking car. You just pull up ahead of the space, tell the car to park, adjust the arrows on the screen to show it where you actually hope to end up, and ride the brake into the space. It does all the hard work of actually knowing how to parallel park.

In 50 years, when no one knows how to feed themselves, don't say I didn't warn you.

(On a related note, has anyone seen Mike Judge's Idiocracy? Sounds like Fox is doing their best to let it die on the vine. Bummer.)

Aram

Posted by Aram at 06:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been dedicating a lot of time, money and knuckle skin to my project/childhood dream car, a cherry red 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. I bought it with the intention of doing all the work on it myself, so that I'd really appreciate the time I spent cruising in it. And as far as I can remember from last summer, cruising was a lot of fun. I think.

These days I'm mostly to be found underneath or bent over it, cursing, banging, swallowing the odd bit of fluid, and generally taking two steps back for every step forward. The other day, it tried to kill me by having the brakes fail as I eased it into the driveway. (OK, it would have hit the side of my house about about 3 mph. More of a cry for help than actual Christine-worthy behavior.) But hey, it's old enough to be my mother; this is to be expected. (Not that I expect my mother to kill me. Moving on...)

I'll not bore you with the details (unless you ask) but I will pass on one key thing I've learned. It can be worth it to buy parts online, but unless you're buying a simple commodity product or some crazy performance thing, it will save you time and heartache to buy from a dealer that has a store near you. That way, when they ship you the complete wrong master cylinder or don't include the gasket with the water pump (to pick two examples out of, oh, you know, the blue) you can drop by the store and deal directly with them, rather than having to ship it back, wait a few more days, and hope.

That means I mostly buy from Kragen (which you may know as Checker or Schucks, depending on where you live--it's all partsamerica.com, as it turns out.) They've had their share of hiccups (see above), but they've had their act together more than other online-only stores I've dealt with.

Happy wrenching,

Aram

P.S. I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to Brian at HotAutoWeb who hooked me up with the car to begin with. Friendly, honest guy, sweet rides--Go Spudman!

Posted by Aram at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my freshman year of college, several years before the dawn of the iPod, the guy across the hall from me took a power inverter and a small LCD screen and mounted a spare Windows 98 tower he had lying around in his Nissan Pathfinder. He jacked it into the stereo et voila: car mp3 player.

A scant seven years later, Chrysler is finally about to do the same thing. Sure, theirs may have satellite radio, Bluetooth, and a navigation system, (and probably leaves more room for the passenger in the front seat) but have they figured out that you can get a neat lighting effect in your room by filling up empty beer bottles with water and highlighter ink and turning a black light on them? I'm telling you: John was ahead of his time.

Aram

Posted by Aram at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wired has an interesting story about the difference in popularity of diesels between the US and Europe. (Actually, it seems to be from Forbes, but I can't seem to find it on the Forbes site. Media consolidation confuses me.) Half of Europe's new car sales are diesels--who knew? I wouldn't normally have paid much attention to the story, since my main memory of diesels is of my grandmother's old Mercedes, which belched smoke like a factory, shook like a Magic Fingers bed and was routinely trounced off the line by Volkswagen Beetles, Yugos, and assorted turtles.

Last week, though, I had occasion to ride in a modern diesel (in Seattle, since most of them don't meet California's emissions standards), and I was pretty impressed. It was a Jeep Liberty, and I wasn't even entirely sure it was a diesel until I got out and saw CRD on the back. It was quiet, smooth, and seemed to have a fairly broad power band--not just the low-end grunt that makes diesel engines popular in large trucks.

Diesels definitely face an uphill battle in the States--like I did, most people still think of the old, underpowered Mercedes and Volkswagen engines, or Oldsmobile's explodingly inept entries--but a diesel engine has moved from "Pshaw!" to "Hmm..." in my book.

Aram

Posted by Aram at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the cost of gas averaging $3.31 here in California, my wallet is starting to feel the effects of my weekly fill up. I’ve been trying to economize, but it doesn’t help that I’m planning to drive cross country this summer. I’ve found that Gas Buddy helps me find the cheapest gas stations, along with AAA's Fuel Calculator to help calculate the cost of my trip. Or maybe it’s time that I trade in my faithful Saturn for a car that can run on biodiesel. What's not to love about a car that smells like donuts and french fries?

Mercedes

Posted by Mercedes at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I signed the papers for my car at about 7:30 on a Wednesday night. By 8:30 Thursday morning, it had been vandalized by what I can only assume were miscreant youth. What they lacked in respect for the social compact they made up for in pumpkin-throwing ability. My poor car was bashed in all over, and the insurance company's* office hadn't even been open in the time that I had owned it.

A less scrupulous person would have added the car to his policy and then reported the damage. But I chose the honest route, figuring that an agent with whom my family had been doing business for 40 years would show me the same good faith.

Two months later, I still didn't have a driver's side mirror, and my trunk was starting to rust around the dent. They hadn't paid the claim, but they hadn't denied it, either. They had simply given me the full benefit of what they learned in Customer Indifference 101. I couldn't believe these guys. My agent would tell me one thing, the adjuster would tell me another--once I actually had to get them on a conference call myself so that they would stop failing to talk to each other.

The problem was that my agent wanted to pay the claim (or so he said), but the company's bureaucracy wouldn't let him do it. It was apparent that the adjusters had no interest in approving my claim since their job was not to keep me happy, but to watch the bottom line. From the outside, I could see that the company was at cross-purposes with itself, and no one seemed to want (or be able) to fix it.

Well, someone had to care, right? Surely, someone had to see the big picture. Acting on advice from my dad (who once settled a health care claim this way), I went straight to the top. A couple of minutes of online research got me the number of the CEO. I didn't get him, but I got one of his assistants.

And you know what? After two months of jerking me around, they paid the claim within 24 hours.

Aram

*Who shall remain nameless, except to say that I didn't feel like they were very good neighbors

Posted by Aram at 01:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My love affair with RVs began as a child, with trips in my grandparents’ motorhome along the California coast. But they never took the Winnebago right INTO the California coast, and that’s where the gloriously over-the-top Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International comes into it.

Man, do I want one of these. You can drive this baby right into the water and just keep going. Think about it. With enough food and about a 3000-gallon fuel tank--or one of those refueling tankers that they use to keep planes in the air forever--you could traverse the circumference of the earth without ever stopping. Phineas Fogg and Steve Fossett would have nothing on you, and would certainly envy your onboard 42-inch plasma TV (to say nothing of your bathroom).

Dude. Sweet. Now all I need is $1.2 million.

(Hat tip, Neatorama)
Aram

Posted by Aram at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)