Monday, October 31, 2005

Concerning $1,250,000 Cars

I read an article last night in Car and Driver magazine about a dozen or so four cylinder "tuner cars". It was a comparison in two classes. In one class, the front wheel drive class, we had a Focus, several Civics (of course), a Mini and a Neon- excuse me, SRT-4. All were fast by most standards, but FWD is not the class to be in, if you really are serious about putting power to the pavement. The other class, rear wheel drive and all wheel drive was the quick bunch as you would expect, with a couple of cars reaching 60MPH in under 5 seconds. This class consisted of Evos (Mitsubishi Lancers), Elises (Lotus that is), an Sti (Subaru Impreza), a Miata, an Audi and Toyota pickup (yes, you read that right.) most of these were purpose-built speed machines from the factory, but tweaked and boosted to within an inch of their lives. The price of a car similar to most of these would be somewhere over $50k, with some reaching nearly $100,000. Too rich for me, but fun to read about.

After reading that article, however, I flipped to the cover story. It was a test drive of the new Bugatti Veyron. Practically every one of this car's statistics is a superlative. Highest top speed of any production car (253MPH), most expensive production car ever ($1,250,000), highest horsepower of any production car (claimed 1001, but this figure is also claimed to be a bit conservative), 16 cylinders, 8 liters of displacement, all wheel drive, 4 turbos. No expense was spared.

It was easy to come to the conclusion that if I somehow came into a huge amount of money and could drive anything I would want one of these. Imagine driving around in such a capable car. Then I started looking at the numbers. 0-60 blows past in 2.9 seconds. Imagine merging on to the highway. From a dead stop (not that you ever would from a dead stop) to merging on to going so fast that the windstar in the left lane looks like it has suddenly shifted into reverse and floored it would take about 5-6 seconds if you decided that you wanted to really open it up. You might even get to shift before backing off the gas if traffic was light.

Now, imagine driving around town. I can only imagine what it must be like. You'd most likely pick 2nd or 3rd gear and ease off the brake (I think I recall that it has no clutch pedal) the enormous amount of torque that the 8 liter, 16 cylinder engine would have even off-boost should get you going along with traffic. That pedal on the right (I've forgotten its name now) won't be required.

Aside from at the track, I can't imagine such a fast car being anything other than an exercise in self control. I can't imagine that being much fun. That's not the sour grapes talking, either. I think I'll just keep on daydreaming about Lotus Elises- the plain non-tuned ones.

Happy Halloween!


Happy Halloween!
Originally uploaded by cafn8.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

It's Finally Here!


It's Finally Here!
Originally uploaded by cafn8.
Actually it didn't take long to get here at all, but it's nice to be able to actually hold something in my hand. The "it" I'm talking about is our new DSL equipment. As anyone with a TV knows, the phone company has been pushing very hard lately to gain new customers for their DSL service. The price is certainly competitive. At 15 bones a month, it's actually much cheaper than the dialup I currently use (don't look at me, I'm ugly) Yes, that's right. I still use a good old modem to connect to the internet (that's when I'm not using good old GPRS.) it's a big blow to my geek cred every time I tell someone that they shouldn't send me those big files because I still have dialup, or that I've been putting off setting up a network because I need to figure out which computer to put the modem on and how to dial it up to share the glorious 56k with the other computers. This service, while not the fastest option, should solve my home connectivity woes.



I'm not counting my chickens yet, though. Up until recently, every time I checked for its availability, I was disappointed. Since we don't have cable TV, and would rather not pay cable prices, that left us to rely on dialup service. It struck me as a bit odd that the moment the prices came down, the phone line was suddenly ready- or so I thought. It turns out that we actually have to wait for our line quality to be verified. Good grief. This doesn't look promising.