Postcards from the Bleeding Edge: Christmas cars

Postcards from the Bleeding Edge

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Christmas cars

I took a break from shopping at the mall to look at cars. (My car is finally paid for, therefore I think it's going to spontaneously fall apart).

I looked at Toyota, Mazda and all the American brands, save Saturn. My reaction? Yuck.

The only car in the last 5 years that caught my eye was the ugly beauty of the mini, and that, mostly because of a lovely driver in the movie "The Italian Job".

The Toyota Spider MR2 isn't bad, but I still prefer the angular, F117-like look of the original MR2 - and the original MR2 handled lots better (too bad it had a tendency to catch on fire). The Miata is a cute car but it is still underpowered, and the suspension still sucks. I owned one 10 years ago - for any drive longer than 2 hours, call your chiropractor in advance.

I'm glad to see all the SUVs piled up in parking lots like the dinasours they are, but the mini-SUVs take the prize for the most ugly cars of the decade. The most ugly mini-suv was this square boxy Scion XB thing. It looks like a HMMV in an awkward pre-adolescent stage.

I wish I could find an RAV4EV - a battery powered SUV that actually could go a useful 125 miles on a charge - but they didn't make many - and they sold them only to fleets - and they were quickly discontinued. Too bad. Everyone I know that owns one raves about how comfortable they are, how great the engine is, and how little maintenence they need...

I'd give a lot to have a truly silent car with lots of juice in it - I'd mount an Athlon 64 X2 in the back, hook up a highly tweaked USB microphone and get some dictation done on the long drives.

I went to look at Saturns on the web. Nothing doing, the website requires flash, and that doesn't work in 64 bit mode on my machine.

No car for me this christmas. I'm certain I'll have flash working by next Christmas, and maybe then there will be a vehicle out there I can like.

¶ 8:45 PM

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David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.

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