i·mag·i·na·tion - Cars

Saying goodbye to an old friend

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:34:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

It's time to say goodbye to an good friend of mine, two weeks ago I sold my beloved 1982 Opel Corsa A to exchange it with a new leasing car. Why? That's easy - It's always about the money and comparing the costs, I had to face the fact that the new car will pretty much cost as much as the Corsa. I had gotten the Corsa about 2 years ago from my mother, when she bough herself a bigger car and it didn't take me long to start loving it. If there is one thing the Corsa never was, it is beautiful. Not only because I think the design is looks awful but also because of the color (white, eeeks) and rust. Despite this disadvantages there is a lot the Corsa had to offer, for example a big heart supported by a strong spine.

The Corsa never stopped surprising me in many different regards. Obviousely speed, endurance, consumption and durability. I also learned a lot about cars itself owning the Corsa. Together with my friend I did a lot of repairs on it and sometimes even did them all by myself. Things I can remember up to today are replacing breakes and wheel bearings, fixing the handbreak, exchange of the generator, rebuilding the ignition, exchanging the timing belt and as one of the last and biggest repairs replacing the cylinder head gasket.

This all taught me lots and obviousely made my love for the Corsa even grow deeper. Now that the Corsa is gone all there is left are the moments we shared together and that I'll never forget. Here are a few examples:

The day I bought it for 100 bucks from my mother.
The day the speedo indicated a speed of 200km/h during my trip to Berlin
The day the Corsa started back up after having the engine completely disassembled.
The day my roommate told me the Corsa wouldn't work and the fact that he didn't realize it simply ran out of gas.
The day I cleaned the Corsa for a last time, realizing that I'll miss it and how much I liked it.

In exchange for the Corsa I got the just released version of the Volkswagen Polo aka. 'Spineless piece of crap' as it misses the the heart and the spine to live up to the Corsa. Sure it is more reliable and got an aircondition but up to today I don't feel any love for it. It's tough to love a car if you know its antecessor was faster. (Yip, I do think it's all about speed, at least before the 200km/h barrier)

The good news is that I sold it to a friend and that I know she'll keep it in good shape and hopefully give it all the love it needs. So farewell little fella, you sure tought me what it means to have a friend you can rely on.

Beautiful Porsche 912

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:19:00 +0200

rev. 1.01

Here we go with one of the nicer shots I made in the Netherlands the other day. I found this beautiful Porsche outside a supermarket in Eindhoven on our way back to Germany. Doesn't it look beautiful? I am no Prosche specialist but judging from my short investigation I'd say this is a 1968 912 Coupe and without a doubt in a very good shape. I thought it was cool, that even the license plate matched the car colors. Haven't seen one of those in Germany forever, all in all I got the imporession that there were quite a lot of old cars in good shape driving the streets of the Netherlands.

Both pictures have dimensions of 1600x1200 and therefore should do well for all of those that would like one of this cuties as desktop background. I am running with the top one for quite a while already.

BMW 320 automatic - Rollin' with the Homies

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 12:55:00 +0200

rev. 1.00

Here it is the promised third reason for my lag of articles lately. Last weekend I rented the all new BMW 320 from one of our local car-rentals to do some travelling. In the end we made up to 1000kms on just 2 days. Around noon at Saturday I got the car and off drove my girlfriend and me to Hamburg, to do some shopping and eventually visit the theatre afterwards. Back home I picked up Hendrik to give him a chance to check out the car aswell and last but not least on Sunday my girlfriend and me drove down to Hannover to visit Philippe.

Ok, so what about the BMW. I wasn't so sure about the automatic but the 2.0 engine seemed alright and as it was either this or no car at all, so I thought I'd give it a try. The interieur was similar to the 118d which I already had test-driven a few months ago. I have to say that I don't like it too much, it feels a little bit too ductile and I liked it much better in the new VW Passat. Other than that the new 3 series BMW was allround surprising. I loved to drive it, I loved its agility and the way it made use of its power.

The car wasn't too fast when it came to top-speed as you can see in the image on the right side. 220 maybe 230km/h, it was one of the first cars I thought it isn't all about top-speed, I mean when are you able to drive 260km/h anyways? All that I used to think you needed the 260km/h for is noticable acceleration at 180km/h when you need it and this is exactly what this BMW was capable of without going all the way to 260km/h. Yeah, all it got was 230 but the way it got to the magical 200km/h border was fascinating and absolutely fabulous. If you pushed the pedal at 180km/h there was some serious acceleration going on, giving you the possibility to overtake anyone if necessary.

Another remarkable feature of this car is its stability and its silence. Usually my girlfriend is beating me up when I am forcing my small Opel Corsa to go 180km/h, she also did that when I drove 200km/h with the VW Passat but this time it wasn't a problem. I was going 200km/h and more whenever I could and she never complained - quite the opposite is true - she enjoyed it. For an impression check out the picture of Hendrik to the left, I took the picture at high speed and as you can see, he's not only obviousely grinning but he's also steering with nothing more than one hand.

Feature wise all of the cars I drove are very much alike, the BMW didn't have cruise-control but on the other hand it had a navigation system, in the end I guess it's all up to you and what you're preferences are, it's just good to know that everything is available in case you need it. I loved the drive, outside it was 30 degrees celsius all the way and we were going high speed at chilling and relaxed 17 degrees. The BMW really surprised me, now all I have to do is give the new Audi A4 a try to figure out my personal winner of the so called middle-class.

VW Passat FSI - Where did all that agility go?

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 23:23:00 +0200

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Last Saturday was supposed to be a full day of work at the university for my girlfriend which was why I left our car to my roommate who was about to drive up to Hamburg with it. When my girlfriend called me shortly after she left in the morning, telling me that her study was canceled I was happy knowing that we would get to spend a whole day together. Shortly after she arrived back home we thought about what to do and suddenly decided to trying renting a car if we'd find something acceptable (price wise) and driving up to Luebeck.

As it turns out we found something acceptable, the all new VW Passat. I had only seen it from the advertisements so far and a few times on the street - I knew I didn't like it too much but now that I got the chance I was anxious to testdrive it. The one we rented came with an FSI engine, I had never driven one of these but knew they were designed for saving fuel. I am pretty sure I had the 2.0 FSI version but sadly I forgot to check.

As mentioned I don't think too good about its design, I did like its atecessor and I even think it is superior to it. The front of the new version looks way too much like the new Audi A4 while the back is looking okay but is way too high if you ask me. The back doesn't just look high - it is. The rear window is way too small and parking backwards was a pain in the neck, especially because the car came without park distance control.

Inside it was cozy, the Passat came with most of the features I already knew from driving the new A6 or the BMW 118d. As said I missed the PDC, even the BMW had it and it there it really wasn't necessary. The controls and instruments looked very clean and beautiful. Wanting to start the car I had to realize that it seems like the usual car keys are history, not one of those cars had driven in the last months had a key anymore you needed to turn, it's all about pushing a button now.

Despite the BMW the Passat came with a navigation system with a pretty nice big screen. Sadly I very soon had to realize that it was one of those crappy Navigations systems that only work when the CD is inserted - meaning you're not able to listen to your own CDs anymore. This resulted in the complete ignoring of it. Driving the new Passat felt good, as long as you didn't want to accelerate too much and too fast, this is where the FSI came out and sometimes made me wonder if I would have overtaken myself with my crappy Corsa. I also felt that the car wasn't too stable at top speed, I once got it to 190km/h and thought that it was way more flattery than the BMW at 210km/h.

All in all the Passat felt like a nice car but nothing I'd ever spend any money for. I don't like it's design, I definitely wouldn't go for the FSI and a navigation system like this is useless. Now this might sound like I was a little dissapointed but be assured that the opposite is true. I was very happy to get to drive the car and surely it was a whole lot of fun for a Corsa driver like me - still I have to say that I rather go for the BMW than the Passat even with being aware that the BMW is a smaller class.

BMW 118d - Born a little too slow!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:41:00 +0100

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My employer gives their employees the chance to lease a couple of different cars, sadly the offers aren't really cheap but in case you manage to find a car that does attract your attention and your willing to pay a certain amount of money for it each month, plus the fact that you don't live too far from your workplace, which would make the lease priceless (stupid tax calculation) there actually is the possibility that you could get into the preference of driving a brand new car. For a few months now we have a new car on the list of cars to choose from - a BMW 118d - and since it was a whole new product line, BMW chose to send us one of them over to let the employees testdrive to maybe win some leasing-contracts out of it. I took the chance and signed up for a drive and so last Tuesday I was handed the key for an 24-hour testdrive.

I asked Hendrik if he'd like to join me and he did, as he written already (faster than me, as usual). I also asked my dad who was interested aswell and so Hendrik and me left work early, to go pick up my dad and drive up to Hamburg, not only to hunt the car over the autobahn but to visit a couple of interesting stores in Hamburg also. The BMW is a pretty interesting car, that comes with a lot of neat gimmicks - as there are Rain-sensing windshield wipers, park-distance-control (back only), cruise control and a six speed transmission. These

210km/h at quiet 3300rpm

are all things I didn't expect and so I was a little surprised to find so many. I also wondered about the space inside the car, it definitely was bigger than my old Golf IV used to be. Driving the BMW was mostly a pleasure, even though it was a diesel. The 118d drove up to 210 km/h as you can see easily in the picture on the right side, which seemes ok but the way it gets there is a bit, well slow. The car isn't accelerating too well between 130 and 180 km/h. I don't care if the way from 180 to 210 km/h takes some time but it definitely would have been nice to see a bit more agility before reaching those speeds. Other than this rather small downside I thought the BMW is a splendid car and compared to one of those new Golf V's it isn't even that expensive, especially when bringing so many fancy gimmicks with it. Oh, one additional thing - if you check out the picture above you can actually see what the 6th gear is for, the BMW drove 210km/h at just a bit over 3300rpm.

Hamburg itself was pretty interesting, we went to 3 different stores. A store selling beamers, an Apple store and Saturn. We drove up to the beamer store mostly for Hendrik and my Daddys sake since they are into the beamer business. I used to say that beamers doesn't fit for me, mostly for 2 reasons. The picture and the noise, plus re-decorating your whole appartment sucks, but I am gonna leave that aside. Well, after my visit to the beamer store I have to correct my opinion. Beamers don't fit for me because of the noise, because the picture actually improved a lot and I saw a beamer (iirc BenQ PB7220 (~2000 euro)) that actually could replace my TV picture wise. But they're still way to noisy and there is no way around that, as the clerk told us aswell. Even if you'd be willing to pay 5k euros for a beamer there is nothing actually silent enough to be bearable, still it was a very interesting visit and it was a pleasure to find out that thay actually managed to display such crisp and colorful pictures.

The next store in line was the Apple store where we mostly just gazed at the beautiful Cinerama displays and Powerbooks. No Mac Mini until February, so I gotta make sure to visit them again in a couple of weeks. An interesting thing is that the Apple store actually had one of such neat 'Hifidelio' players in their store. Those are high quality hdd-players which fit perfectly into your stereo rack and play pretty much every file format you can come around - including my precious OGGs. I had been given the URL of a collegue already a year ago and all that I could see back than was the announcement of the player on their homepage, the player got released to the public in december 2004 so it's a pretty new thing. Now that I was able to get my hands on it, I can confirm its high quality and that in case it does play my oggs as I would want them to be played (including showing the proper tags), it would be a perfect fit for my hifi rack. The 80gb drive is easily enough, especially when I can insert whole OGG dvds into the slot of the player. Well, next time I am going to Hamburg I will take one of my ogg dvds and figure out if it truly works as I would want it to. Of course the player is everything but cheap - but it's, like the Apple products, very solid, beautiful and (hopefully) functional.

The last stop of our tour was Saturn, there it wasn't too interesting - nothing real new. I had a look through their tripods because I am in bad need of one and I eventually found one but I decided not to spend the 200 bucks and check back with ebay and a few other stores before paying their price. The only money I actually spent in Hamburg I left in Saturns CD-department, for a new 'Korn' and 'Tori Amos' cd, as written previously. Afterwards we picked up some subs at 'Subway' and than made our way back home. A very nice and eventful Tuesday as I would call it, despite of some others... ;)

Berlin, Blogs! and Big Brobot in 4 hours

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:34:00 +0200

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I don't remember if it happened before of after I had opened my eyes on Tuesday morning, I had tried to forget about it, but there it was again. Today was the day those famous bloggers would give a reading in Berlin. I had thought about driving there last week, but didn't quite make up my mind whether a 700km drive on one day with my rickety Opel Corsa would be worth it. I've been reading Emily's blog for quite a while now and I always thought it would be nice to hear her read one of her own articles someday.

I hit work at about 9.30am and started reading through the list of partcipants to finally make up my mind and maybe prepare my boss that I had to leave work early today. After I read that Anke would read some of her articles aswell I thought, well, why not go there? I don't think there are many movies Anke and me actually agree on and I know for sure that I have left Ankes blog slightly enraged more than a dozen of times, whenever she abolished one of the movies I really worship. (Irreversible was brilliant) While we probably shouldn't go to the movies together, I still thought it would be interesting to see and maybe talk to her.

The last repression was taken when a collegue from work brought in the idea of renting a car and driving to Berlin, a splendid idea. Why didn't I think of that earlier? If I could get a somewhat nice car the driving would be fun and the time would just rush by because of a) an exciting car and b) speeeeeeeed. With that idea in mind I told my boss that I had to leave early today and left my workplace at 2pm to walk over to the nearby car rental store. After convincing the girl behind the desk that I was in need of something fast and exciting, and learing that I was one year to young to rent and Mercedes S-Class

Audi A6 Quattro

Limousine she came up with my perfect match. An all new Audi A6 V6 3.2 Quattro. Sweetness. The price seemed bearable and so a decision was made. Minutes later I left the place in my shiny new Audi, drove back home to get a bunch of cd's and change clothes. At 3pm I hacked the location of the reading into the navigation system and at 6pm I hit Berlin. It took me a while to get into the city because the navigation system wasn't aware that one of the major streets into the city of Berlin was closed, the second problem was that when the navigation system told me I had arrived at desired address I couldn't quite find the location the reading was supposed to take place. What I forgot was to remember that the flyer of the reading actually said 'Volksbuehne', without this knowledge I ran up and down the 'Rosa-Luxemburg-Street' and eventually asked 2 girls that seemed somehow like they belonged to Berlin. Yup, they knew the way and I finally found where I would have to be in about one hour. Stumbling back to the car, still a little deranged, Emily crossed my way. Well, I wasn't aware it was her because I only knew her from one rather blurry picture, but the idea crossed my mind that it could have been her.

Back in the car I switched on the navigation system and typed in the adress of Big Brobot, a store two friends of mine had recently opened in Berlin. After I had explained to them that I've always been a friend of making such quick spontaneous trips like this one, I did some shopping and left them pretty soon again because it was time to get to the reading. When I entered the room it was pretty crowded already and after I got something to drink I had a look around and figured out that the girl I had seen on the street before had been Emily, I also tried to catch a glimpse on Mrs. Elfengleich who I had read would be there also but I sadly didn't manage to track her down. Mabye I should have taken a closer look to her picture before driving out to Berlin.

I sat down and felt a little drawn back in time, I felt like participating in one of those chatter-meetings I once had attended to about 8 years ago, but after I lighted the first cigaret I've had in 3 weeks I realized that it was just because of me and the fact that I was sitting there all alone, surrounded by people I either didn't knew at all or just knew virtually. Once the stage got occupied about a dozen people started taking pictures, sure I had thought there would be some people taking pictures but I felt like everyone was trying to finally take a picture of the person they had tried to picture in their minds for years. Yes, I had brought my camera aswell but once I saw all those maniacs I didn't feel like taking any pictures at all.

The reading went very well, I laughed a lot and found out that there were quite a few blogs I should add to my daily reading. One thing that bothered me was the fact that the reading and all the questions felt a little rehearsed but I guess they wanted to give the attendees a chance to prepare, still I would have liked it better if it would have been a little more spontaneous. Another thing that anoyed me were all those \*blog\* words, I disliked them forever already and now that someone was sitting there using the syllable -blog- about twice in each sentence it really got to me. But those are only small scratches on an otherwise flawless evening. After the reading had ended I staid for a while, talked to a couple of the bloggers and left Berlin at about 10.30pm knowing that I had a 350km drive ahead of me. I got back home fast, the highways were mostly empty and so the Audi had to show what he was able to deliver. He did very well and at about 1.30am I was laying in my already bed, exhausted of a very thrilling and intresting day.

(No, they weren't sleeping, but I only took one single picture and that's it!)

Ignition!

nospam@example.com (Lewe) — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 23:34:00 +0200

rev. 1.01

I know you're probably wondering what I am up to all the time while neglecting my weblog so badly. Today it was my car, I've had issues with the Ignition so I put myself together and bought replacements for the (suspicious) faulty parts. New sparking plugs, power cables and a new distribution cap. I am not much of a mechanic, not at all actually, I am interested in it but when it comes to it I have no clue. It makes me very happy to be able to tell you, not without a little pride that I was able to get my car back up and running. Yeha! I guess a couple of you guys are laughing now and thinking that probably anyone could have done it, but I know a lot of people that would have brought their car to the garage for this kind of job and would have paid a fortune for it, I already paid one just for the parts, so I don't even want to know what they would have had to pay. On the picture above you can examine my work, the new parts are the blueish cables and the cap their plugged on, the sparking plugs you can't see because they're of course screwed into the engline itself but I can promise you - they're there and doing a good job.

This really made my day, and I spent the rest of the day just by being happy and complimenting myself. Feel free to send congratulations and presents my way and if you got the feeling I could fix your car, contact me but make sure you got the money to pay me for it. :)