Tag: cars

A shift has been under way for years in automotive culture – the move from manual transmissions to automatics.

At the Denver Auto Show, Jaguar was so proud of offering a car with a manual transmission that they plastered that fact on the door.

I made the shift myself about five years ago. I used to love manual transmissions. The old story was that you could squeeze more performance and fuel economy out of your vehicle with a manual transmission. Now it’s the opposite for many newer vehicles.

And there’s the drawback of the pain of shifting in stop-and-go traffic. My last two years in Nairobi, Kenya taught me that it’s no fun to keep shifting over and over in heavy traffic. I almost vowed to never get a manual transmission again.

Then again, if someone offered me a new Mazda Miata with a manual for free, I would not turn them down.

Tip: One way to save fuel with an automatic transmission is to pop it into neutral while going down a mild hill. (Use this tip at your own risk. Results may vary. Some users have been known to have increased blood pressure.)

I snapped this old beauty on the way to work a week or so ago. I love the blocky style of the mid-1960s Ford Galaxy 500. It weighs enough to stop a tank, should the driver encounter one on his way to work. It has no airbags or shoulder belts, so his safety was in his own hands.

I do love the style of old cars. But they pollute. The gas coming out of the tailpipe is significantly more polluting than what a modern car produces. Paris, Santa Barbara, California and Texas all have programs to take old cars off the road.

But it’s not necessarily an easy equation. Sometimes keeping your not-very-new car may be more environmental than buying a new one, because of the environmental impact of manufacturing a car (details).

I would totally support a ban on really old cars being daily drivers, or maybe a tax on using them as commuter cars. That would keep the environment cleaner. And the drivers would have less chance of getting in an accident and ruining that piece of history. Additionally, fewer drivers are out on the weekends, so each drive would be more pleasurable. Why not create an old car sharing club and split which weekends you get the old beauties? Then you will have some variety in which ancient iron you take to the highway.

This letter appears in the December 2011 issue of Automobile Magazine.

I love writing letters to the editor. This is my 15th or 16th letter to get published in a national or international magazine. I get a buzz out of seeing my name in print. Egotistical? Maybe. (Forgive me for that, if it’s true.)

Roughly the same amount of time it would take for you to comment on a blog post – and have 21 people see it – can yield a few more views, if your thoughts are published in a magazine. Print may be dying, but there is still a good number of people who read printed magazines. Obviously, I’m one.

If you’d like to read more of the dead Volvo story, it’s in my previous blog.

And here’s Ezra’s column. The December Automobile Letters to the Editor section had more letters about that column than I’ve ever seen focusing on any article or column before.

The Opel Corsa is the European version of the USA’s Chevrolet Sonic.

The Corsa (shown) is a great little car. Our family of five did a day trip of 160 kilometers (100 miles) across Belgium and Holland without any problem, in spite of the relatively small size. The feeling of quality was evident in all the controls, how solidly the doors shut and in my general perception of the components being substantial.

The Corsa/Sonic handles well. It was quite comparable to the Ford Fiesta I drove a few days before driving the Corsa.

Sadly, the Sonic has an ugly front end, but it’s still a good car – far better than the Aveo, which it replaces in the Chevrolet line-up. The Aveo was based on a relatively cheap quality Suzuki.

A huge difference between the car you can buy in Europe and the USA model is more than cosmetic – the European models can be bought with diesel engines. In the 1.3 liter model we rented, I recorded about 43 miles per gallon. According to Opel’s website,* the gas (petrol) model gets about 23% less fuel economy. (And the Sonic will get even less fuel economy than the European gas model.)

I found the power from the small turbodiesel to be more than adequate. We’re not talking sports car territory, but it had more power than our Toyota Corolla, which has an engine that is almost 1.5 times bigger than the Corsa’s.

I’m just sad that American cars don’t get such great small engines – when they are already being made and sold in the rest of the world.

And finally, here is a great article on why America just doesn’t get diesel cars, from Automobile Magazine. (It’s a PDF. And copyright pardons, please. And forgive the poor quality of the scan; I spilled water on the page.)

* Note that this link is to the Vauxhall Corsa, England’s version of the Opel Corsa.