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zdashamberI shall one day tell the saga of the loss of my first true car-companion, Buffy the 1983 Volvo station wagon, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that. For the moment, I will say that I presently own a different Volvo station wagon, a silver 1991 940 Turbo.
Now, the trouble with this Turbo is that it takes it an awfully long time to realize that it has an overdrive gear... On the order of 20 minutes or so of highway driving, despite $250 or so of attempted fixing. I can literally watch the gas-gauge needle dropping. It gets roundly beaten in gas mileage by Buffy, who was 8 years and 125,000 miles older. This distresses me, as I drive nearly 100 miles round-trip to gaming almost every weekend.
Also, someone pulled a U-ie into the side of that car about a month after I bought it, and then last fall I came down one morning to find the window broken and the radio gone. I prefer music when I drive, y'know? Shortly after I fixed the window, my roommate took it to get groceries and it suddenly and inexplicably died (to the tune of $450) while she was driving though the parking lot.
The kicker, though, was the Sunday about a month ago when I came down to find that the side of the car that had been previously hit had been hit again, swiped all the way down, sideview mirror shattered. "I'm sick of this shit," I thought, picking up scattered pieces of trim. "I want a car with comprehensive insurance. I want a car that isn't going to fucking die randomly twice a year for $500 a pop."
Replacing Buffy, I had looked at a wide variety of station wagons, and discovered that no station wagon on the planet could hold a candle to the Volvo 240. But the last 240 was made in 1991. So, abandoning Storage Capacity, the next item on my list had become Gas Mileage.
I've been fascinated by cars with alternate fuel dealies for as long as I've been driving. Ever since they came out, I'd had the idea that I'd get a hybrid gas-electric car when I had money and no longer had Buffy. There are currently three types of hybrids available: The Toyota Prius, the Honda Insight, and the Honda Civic hybrid.
(I also was considering diesel cars, like the VWs, because of the biodiesel option; but a bit of poking around on the internet showed me that there was no biodiesel available at gas stations, and I have no desire to store a barrel of it in my house and carry a jugful out to the car every week. Also, the EPA Fuel Economy site shows that while diesel cars get great mileage, they produce a lot of nasty combustion byproducts--far worse than normal cars. Also, semi exhaust makes me ill, and I worried that diesel exhaust was all like that.)
I'd ridden in a Toyota Prius before, and I didn't really like it... For one thing, the speedometer was in the center console, where everyone in the car could see it. So I started off looking at the Hondas.
(Well, technically, I started at the EPA Fuel Economy site, searching for all cars that got better than 35 mpg... I didn't think that was too much to ask, but apparently... Anyway, once I ruled out the sticks and the diesels, we were back to the three hybrids.)
(And technically, I learned later that the 2004 model Prius has been totally redesigned so that (among other changes) the speedometer is now in the proper location--in fact, the new Prius is apparently an amazingly nifty car. It is, in fact, so nifty that there isn't a single Toyota dealership in the Bay Area that has one to test drive, because every dealership has a waiting list 20-some people long who will put down money to buy one when it arrives. So, bless 'em for it; I didn't have the oomph to track down someone who already owns a '04 Prius so I could beg to drive their car so I could see how I liked it...)
The Honda website was great for looking at Hondas with a broadband connection; it's got neat "360 views" of the interiors. It looked like the Insight had better visibility than the Civic. The Insight certainly looked cooler than the Civic. And I've had plenty of experiences street-parking in San Francisco and Berkeley... Small really is a big plus.
I swung by a nearby Honda dealership to look at the Insight in person. They didn't have one, which I thought odd, but the saleman did try to get me to testdrive a Civic. I sat in it, glanced over my right shoulder as if I was going to change lanes, and then the rest of the time was just gently disentangling myself from the situation.
Alright, this is getting long. Here's a picture, the first I took of my Insight:
So, I got a chance to drive an Insight through Craigslist, a kickass free community bulletin board with individual pages for all over the US, though it's strongest here in its home.
Speaking of home, this is my car today, with my house behind it, catty-corner across the street, the blue Victorian-ish quadplex. Note the lovely open parking spot right out front, behind the red car? That's where my Volvo most recently got hit. See the window kind of on a line straight down from the chimney? That's my room, where I am currently.
The nice fellow whose 2002 Insight I test-drove was soon to have twins added to his family, and needed two cars able to deal with them instead of just one. He was great for pointing things out about the car, and I had settled a deal to buy from him... And then I found out that getting financing for a person-to-person car sale is pretty much impossible without a loan history... Which sucked for both of us. More on financing later, perhaps.
So, seeing that I was stuck buying from dealers, I figured I might as well get a new car. It would be nice to have a one-owner 20-year-old car, and it would be nice to know everything that had been done to the car. Also, that way I could have my choice of color. Or so I thought...
The three colors Insights come in are flat red, light silver, and midnight blue. The colors I love best in cars are probably 1. sparkly red, 2. sparkly green, or 3. sparkly blue... (Really, I mean "depth" for "sparkly". Though sparkly is never bad, so far as I'm concerned.) But red is ruled out by the speeds I prefer (and flat red doesn't really appeal to me anyway), so deep blue it was, although I wasn't thrilled with the navy-ness of it.
However, now we get to the odd part... Apparently, as I eventually learned from the salesguy I bought my car from, there were only 2 blue automatic Insights for sale in all of California, with 1 on order. I'd guess, from internet rumors, that's probably it for this year. And since this particular build of the Insight, the SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) is only sold in California, Massachusets, Maine, New York, and Vermont, there may be less of these in the US than I can count on my fingers.
One of them was just up the road from me, and I test-drove it. But the salespeople there hardly seemed knowledgeable about the car, or, really, interested in selling it to someone, and they didn't call me back. So I called around to find someone who would order me the car; I called nearly every Honda dealer in the Bay Area.
On the internet, I'd put in a request a month ago for a quote on the Insight, and some dealer had offered me a price of 200 over invoice. When I found the friendly salesguy who called me back quickly, and explained everything, and looked up the locations and numbers of Insights as we chatted, I mentioned to him this price, and he matched it.
So, I bought the car last Sunday, the 22nd, on contingency... If they couldn't get one of the blue ones, I would be off the hook, but would consider a silver. I was considering getting some nice paint, maybe shell pink, and putting a light misting of color on the silver car, perhaps with some Japanese Maple leaf silouhettes...
Perhaps fortunately, Friday the salesguy called, and said that the Honda place up the road had finally relinquished their hold on the blue Insight (which honestly seemed unlikely, and the other blue one was in Alhambra (a subrub of LA)), and I could come pick it up Sunday after they drove it over and had it detailled.
So I did that.
Enough and more than enough story, but I should probably explain the photo below... See, the midnight blue grew on me in a great bound when I discovered how it vanishes seamlessly into the night. However, when silouhetted against today's sunset in the dusk, that made for a very dark picture, the Insight barely separable from the shadows of the road. So I got into "Curves" in Photoshop and made it visible, which had the effect of making the sunset clouds surreal... I think it's actually quite appropriate.
Endnote: For those who didn't grasp the reference in the lj-cut text, there's the treat of looking at the Alice's Restaurant lyrics for the first time.
Now, the trouble with this Turbo is that it takes it an awfully long time to realize that it has an overdrive gear... On the order of 20 minutes or so of highway driving, despite $250 or so of attempted fixing. I can literally watch the gas-gauge needle dropping. It gets roundly beaten in gas mileage by Buffy, who was 8 years and 125,000 miles older. This distresses me, as I drive nearly 100 miles round-trip to gaming almost every weekend.
Also, someone pulled a U-ie into the side of that car about a month after I bought it, and then last fall I came down one morning to find the window broken and the radio gone. I prefer music when I drive, y'know? Shortly after I fixed the window, my roommate took it to get groceries and it suddenly and inexplicably died (to the tune of $450) while she was driving though the parking lot.
The kicker, though, was the Sunday about a month ago when I came down to find that the side of the car that had been previously hit had been hit again, swiped all the way down, sideview mirror shattered. "I'm sick of this shit," I thought, picking up scattered pieces of trim. "I want a car with comprehensive insurance. I want a car that isn't going to fucking die randomly twice a year for $500 a pop."
Replacing Buffy, I had looked at a wide variety of station wagons, and discovered that no station wagon on the planet could hold a candle to the Volvo 240. But the last 240 was made in 1991. So, abandoning Storage Capacity, the next item on my list had become Gas Mileage.
I've been fascinated by cars with alternate fuel dealies for as long as I've been driving. Ever since they came out, I'd had the idea that I'd get a hybrid gas-electric car when I had money and no longer had Buffy. There are currently three types of hybrids available: The Toyota Prius, the Honda Insight, and the Honda Civic hybrid.
(I also was considering diesel cars, like the VWs, because of the biodiesel option; but a bit of poking around on the internet showed me that there was no biodiesel available at gas stations, and I have no desire to store a barrel of it in my house and carry a jugful out to the car every week. Also, the EPA Fuel Economy site shows that while diesel cars get great mileage, they produce a lot of nasty combustion byproducts--far worse than normal cars. Also, semi exhaust makes me ill, and I worried that diesel exhaust was all like that.)
I'd ridden in a Toyota Prius before, and I didn't really like it... For one thing, the speedometer was in the center console, where everyone in the car could see it. So I started off looking at the Hondas.
(Well, technically, I started at the EPA Fuel Economy site, searching for all cars that got better than 35 mpg... I didn't think that was too much to ask, but apparently... Anyway, once I ruled out the sticks and the diesels, we were back to the three hybrids.)
(And technically, I learned later that the 2004 model Prius has been totally redesigned so that (among other changes) the speedometer is now in the proper location--in fact, the new Prius is apparently an amazingly nifty car. It is, in fact, so nifty that there isn't a single Toyota dealership in the Bay Area that has one to test drive, because every dealership has a waiting list 20-some people long who will put down money to buy one when it arrives. So, bless 'em for it; I didn't have the oomph to track down someone who already owns a '04 Prius so I could beg to drive their car so I could see how I liked it...)
The Honda website was great for looking at Hondas with a broadband connection; it's got neat "360 views" of the interiors. It looked like the Insight had better visibility than the Civic. The Insight certainly looked cooler than the Civic. And I've had plenty of experiences street-parking in San Francisco and Berkeley... Small really is a big plus.
I swung by a nearby Honda dealership to look at the Insight in person. They didn't have one, which I thought odd, but the saleman did try to get me to testdrive a Civic. I sat in it, glanced over my right shoulder as if I was going to change lanes, and then the rest of the time was just gently disentangling myself from the situation.
Alright, this is getting long. Here's a picture, the first I took of my Insight:
So, I got a chance to drive an Insight through Craigslist, a kickass free community bulletin board with individual pages for all over the US, though it's strongest here in its home.
Speaking of home, this is my car today, with my house behind it, catty-corner across the street, the blue Victorian-ish quadplex. Note the lovely open parking spot right out front, behind the red car? That's where my Volvo most recently got hit. See the window kind of on a line straight down from the chimney? That's my room, where I am currently.
The nice fellow whose 2002 Insight I test-drove was soon to have twins added to his family, and needed two cars able to deal with them instead of just one. He was great for pointing things out about the car, and I had settled a deal to buy from him... And then I found out that getting financing for a person-to-person car sale is pretty much impossible without a loan history... Which sucked for both of us. More on financing later, perhaps.
So, seeing that I was stuck buying from dealers, I figured I might as well get a new car. It would be nice to have a one-owner 20-year-old car, and it would be nice to know everything that had been done to the car. Also, that way I could have my choice of color. Or so I thought...
The three colors Insights come in are flat red, light silver, and midnight blue. The colors I love best in cars are probably 1. sparkly red, 2. sparkly green, or 3. sparkly blue... (Really, I mean "depth" for "sparkly". Though sparkly is never bad, so far as I'm concerned.) But red is ruled out by the speeds I prefer (and flat red doesn't really appeal to me anyway), so deep blue it was, although I wasn't thrilled with the navy-ness of it.
However, now we get to the odd part... Apparently, as I eventually learned from the salesguy I bought my car from, there were only 2 blue automatic Insights for sale in all of California, with 1 on order. I'd guess, from internet rumors, that's probably it for this year. And since this particular build of the Insight, the SULEV (Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle) is only sold in California, Massachusets, Maine, New York, and Vermont, there may be less of these in the US than I can count on my fingers.
One of them was just up the road from me, and I test-drove it. But the salespeople there hardly seemed knowledgeable about the car, or, really, interested in selling it to someone, and they didn't call me back. So I called around to find someone who would order me the car; I called nearly every Honda dealer in the Bay Area.
On the internet, I'd put in a request a month ago for a quote on the Insight, and some dealer had offered me a price of 200 over invoice. When I found the friendly salesguy who called me back quickly, and explained everything, and looked up the locations and numbers of Insights as we chatted, I mentioned to him this price, and he matched it.
So, I bought the car last Sunday, the 22nd, on contingency... If they couldn't get one of the blue ones, I would be off the hook, but would consider a silver. I was considering getting some nice paint, maybe shell pink, and putting a light misting of color on the silver car, perhaps with some Japanese Maple leaf silouhettes...
Perhaps fortunately, Friday the salesguy called, and said that the Honda place up the road had finally relinquished their hold on the blue Insight (which honestly seemed unlikely, and the other blue one was in Alhambra (a subrub of LA)), and I could come pick it up Sunday after they drove it over and had it detailled.
So I did that.
Enough and more than enough story, but I should probably explain the photo below... See, the midnight blue grew on me in a great bound when I discovered how it vanishes seamlessly into the night. However, when silouhetted against today's sunset in the dusk, that made for a very dark picture, the Insight barely separable from the shadows of the road. So I got into "Curves" in Photoshop and made it visible, which had the effect of making the sunset clouds surreal... I think it's actually quite appropriate.
Endnote: For those who didn't grasp the reference in the lj-cut text, there's the treat of looking at the Alice's Restaurant lyrics for the first time.