Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Do we care about this?

Car enthusiasts like to lament on paper about the demise of steering feel when manufacturers switched from hydraulic power steering to electric in the late aughts. But I ask the question: do we actually want steering feel?

The golden standard of steering feel is probably the Lotus Elise. It’s got a completely unassisted rack that transmits absolutely every road and tire information to the hands. This braille-like texture is absolutely fantastic on a winding road. It’s freaking amazing to be able to feel through the hands the front tires gaining grip as I trail-brake into a corner. The Elise is an expert dance partner that allows you to perform your best, because you know precisely what the car is doing.

This however translates horribly onto normal, everyday roads. Because the rack is unfiltered, the steering wheel reacts to all the minute differences on the road surface. The car darts and move around as the front tires follow ruts and cambers. The driver has to fight the steering wheel steady at all times. A relaxing cruise on the highways with just a finger on the wheel is not a possibility in the Lotus Elise. Any extended drive to get somewhere gets tiring quickly.

Electric power steering flips that compromise around: you don’t get the tiny road and tire information through to your fingers, but filtering those things out means a calm tiller when steadily cruising. I’d say that’s the compromise that most drivers want.

Because the good sports cars are able to transmit road feel through the chassis. In my Mazda MX-5, I may not get much information from the steering wheel itself, but the car is so taut and nimble that the tiny vibrations transmitted through the body is enough to let me know what it is doing at a given moment. I am okay trading subtle steering feel for relaxed road manners on highways.

I recently drove a Toyota RAV-4: an SUV with an electric rack and no sporting intentions. Enthusiasts don’t realize what truly dead steering is until they get into one of these NPC cars. The RAV-4’s steering wheel provided zero information, plus I got nothing through the chassis because the body and suspension - as it should - soaked up everything. You wouldn’t say a VW Golf GTI has numb steering after driving one of these.

Electric power steering in modern enthusiast cars is just fine! Besides, enthusiasts tend to fit wider wheels and tires as first order of modding business anyways. Doing so immediately kills what modicum of steering feel there is. Add in lower suspension to the mix, and whatever the manufacturer engineered into the car is completely obliterated.

Which is why I say: car enthusiasts don’t care about steering feel. We just care about going fast and looking awesome. Nothing wrong with that.

Seems impossible

I did not realize it was possible to balance a wheel and tire package and not have to add additional weights.

The non car enthusiast of you may not know this, but when you go get a new set of tires, the technicians have to put the wheel and tire setup on a balancing machine. Because tires are not perfectly round rotationally out of the factory. (And your wheels, after many miles of battering, aren’t likely to be perfectly round either.) Guided by the machine, the mechanic attaches tiny grams of weights onto the inner wheel rim to make the whole thing roll smoothy.

I recently got a new set of wheels for my MX-5. Two of them were brand new, two of them were used from eBay. I bought tires from Tire Rack, then shipped directly to the local America’s Tire for mounting. (Both have been and remain excellent companies to deal with when it comes to tire needs.) Upon receiving the wheels with tires mounted, I noticed one of them did not have any wheel weights glued to it.

I flagged an America’s Tire staff person to inquire about the perceived discrepancy. Perhaps - this was a busy store on a Saturday - they forgot to balance one of the wheels. After checking with the technician who performed the job, the staff responded that particular wheel balanced with the tire without weights. Alright, I will take your word for it. Sorry for besmirching the quality of technicians. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.

If this were one of the brand new wheels, it wouldn’t have been that alarming. You’d expect a new wheel plus new tire have a higher chance of making perfect balance. But this was one of the eBay wheels off a 30,000+ miles wrecked car! It was initially kind of difficult to believe that wheel balanced out without any addendum.

Indeed that is the case. After mounting the wheels onto the MX-5 and taking it out for a spin, there were no abnormal vibrations. I mean, you’d know if a wheel is off balance, especially at highway speeds.

Death to black wheels

What do you do after you’ve just spent $38,000 out-the-door for a new sports car? Immediately drop more money on it, of course.

My 2026 Mazda MX-5 Miata Club is cursed with something I greatly detest in modern cars: black wheels. Why have a design at all when you can’t even see it? Much like black body paint, black wheels look great for the one second after it’s been cleaned. A quick layer of brake dust later and it turns into a black hole of nothingness. It’s unappealing, and I have no idea why it is so en vogue in the car world.

My 2019 Volkswagen GTI also came fitted with black wheels, and I swap those out with the equivalent style painted in silver. The only trouble is I had to wait five months for the set to be produced and shipped from the fatherland Germany. Painful.

This fourth generation of the MX-5 actually were fitted with silver colored wheels from the factory. The 2016 to 2018 model year of the Sport trim had beautiful eight-spoke 16-inch wheels in silver. Starting with the 2019 model year, Mazda painted those same wheels in, you guess it, black. Yuck.

Because it’s been so long since it was officially fitted on a car, buying those silver 16-inch wheels in the year of 2026 was a challenge. Mazda’s own parts warehouse had only two brand-new-in-box wheels remaining, with no ETA of getting more from Japan. Naturally, I bought those two wheels. To complete a whole set of four, I went to our favorite used car parts source: eBay. I bought two used wheels off of wrecked MX-5s that were in reasonable quality. Not perfect up close, but suffices a few feet away. Beggars absolutely cannot be choosers here.

The 2026 MX-5 Club came stock with 17-inch wheels, so I had to buy new tires as well for the 16-inch set. Only car enthusiasts would swap out a brand new set of wheels and tires. From a utilitarian perspective it is a huge waste. Then again, no one said this hobby of ours is anything but much money down the drain. I’ll do it again.

All in, it was an additional $1,800 spend just because I didn’t like the black color of the stock wheels. Completely worth it.

The epitome of luxury

Maybe it’s just me, but as a car enthusiast, actually driving my cars can be stressful. Because I’ve spent so much money them, the wont is to keep them nice for as long as possible. And out there on the road there’s far too many variables beyond my control to contend with. Mathematically speaking, the best way to protect a car from Mayhem like Allstate is to lock it inside a garage.

I completely understand the car collectors that keep their cars in constant climate control, hardly driven. The outside world is a scary place.

It’s not that the stress is so overwhelming that it destroys the fun I get from driving. But it’s definitely a heighten sense of awareness whenever I am in my cars. I constantly scan the periphery for any potential dangerous actions by other drivers. Do this often enough and it becomes a sixth sense.

Until I get into a car that I completely do not car about. Like my parents Toyota RAV4 SUV. Driving that thing is the epitome of luxury because I can drastically decrease the diameter of the circle of awareness. It’s so much more relaxing to drive a normal, not-precious-about-it, car. The music playing the background is that much more soulful and enjoyable. And the at the destination, I don’t have to worry about finding the perfect, most out of the way parking spot.

I completely understand how car enthusiasts, as they get older, graduate to having a plain daily driver and relegate the enthusiastic stuff to the weekends. Driving a car you don’t really care about is a good antidote to the wild world of post-COVID crazy driving.

Shake shake shake

Follower of this website would have figured out I recently bought a 2026 Mazda MX-5 Club. I am back in the quintessential affordable sports car.

Part of the initial ownership process is fitting in a dashcam. With the post-COVID craziness on the roads still very much a thing, video footage is crucial should you have the misfortune of being in an accident. Furthermore, the MX-5 is absolutely tiny relative to the hulking SUVs out there, so if someone were to bump into me unsighted, I want them to get caught in 4K.

It really cannot get easier to wire in a dash cam on the little Mazda. There’s an existing gap between the windshield glass and trim for wires to tuck into. The A pillars are held on by a single clip. And beneath the passenger side dash is a hidden 12V cigarette port for power. It took me all of 10 minutes following this video to install a Vanture Element 1 Pro. Five of which was unboxing the thing.

By the way, you know AI RAM pricing has gone completely bonkers when the 256GB memory card I bought alongside the Element 1 Pro costs more than the dashcam.

A slight quirk with the MX-5 being a convertible is that the windshield shakes quite a bit. Obviously this is because there isn’t a structural roof attached to it. But this presents a problem for dashcams mounted to the windshield. Modern dashcams have G meters that automatically locks a video file should it detect a high kinetic event - say, in a crash. However, the MX-5 windscreen shakes so much and often, the Venture thinks it's in a one constantly.

I found this out because the dashcam kept making a locking sounds every so often. At first I thought it was the cabling rattling against something metallic, until I triangulated the noise back to the Vantrue’s tiny speaker. The solution? Turn off the G meter completely. Even at its least sensitive setting, the Element 1 Pro kept locking the video file. A nifty feature for sure, but completely useless in an MX-5.

Going off schedule

Last evening was the first time this year I was in a movie theatre. I’d forgotten what it is like to truly immerse and lose yourself into something. It’s wonderful. For those two or so hours I am absolutely locked into the world the movie is presenting. No smartphone, no distractions. You can momentarily forget about whatever that is troubling you out in the real world. Oh right, I got to do that important thing for work next week…

The movie I saw was the fourth Spider-Man movie headlined by Tom Holland. Kudos to director Destin Daniel Cretton on a fantastic job. We always love seeing Asians representing and making an impact in the wider American culture.

A Saturday night out to the movies wouldn’t be my standard cup of coffee. Because the later show times affectively delay my beginning hours of sleep. When you’re a serial life optimizer like myself, deviation from the practice can lead to not only the initial pain of going off schedule, but also the anxiety of the cascading effects caused by the deviation. Any true gym-rat can attest that missing one workout session can feel like a regression of all the recent gains, and a ruiner of subsequent sessions.

Declining to see a late movie with your friend simply because you’ve got a sleep schedule to adhere to is a terrible way to live. Optimization in it of itself is fine because I think that’s how we get to consistency. Then the habit becomes a self-sustaining flywheel. So perhaps initially you should be rather strict about working out at a specific time - all the time, or an absolute ban on certain foods because you’ve got diet goals.

It is then difficult to get out of that mode because obviously the optimization has given you positive results. Otherwise it wouldn’t have grown to become habits. So you feel like you cannot deviate. But it is crucial that once the flywheel is achieved, we allow some randomness and serendipity back into the schedule. A compromised night of sleep will be forgotten in a few days. The time spent with friends enjoying a movie is a pleasant memory worth remembering.

That’s the central theme I got out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day: it’s fine to work on yourself and go at it alone for a while, but eventually you will need friends and human interaction to have a fulfilling life.

That's a no from me

It’s been over a week since I’ve purchased a 2026 Mazda MX-5. Today the salesperson texts me to check-in and make sure I download the Mazda Connect app onto my phone. Strange! Why would the dealership be so concerned with a customer using an optional app? I say optional because, well, the car drives plenty fine without it.

We can all guess the reason: money. Modern new cars are fitted with 5G modems to support connected services in the infotainment system. A part of that ecosystem are branded mobile apps that allow customers to monitor their cars. In my previous 2021 BMW M2, I was able to check fuel levels, see the current mileage, and lock the doors. In Tesla cars, you can even see how fast the vehicle is going and what music is currently playing, right on the app.

If the end user has access to this information, so does the manufacturer. According the Mazda privacy paper, for my new MX-5, this includes:

“Driving Data”: driving behavior data, which includes the acceleration and speed at which your Connected Vehicle is driven and use of the steering and braking functions in your Connected Vehicle (Driving Data was collected for each driving trip and transmitted at each Ignition Off); and
“Vehicle Health Data”: includes Vehicle Identification Number (VIN); odometer, fuel level, and oil life readings; Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs); and data from the Connected Vehicle’s OBD system (“OBD Data”). OBD Data includes, but is not limited to, engine coolant temperature, fuel injection volume, engine Rotation Per Minute (RPM), and the status of doors, hood, trunk, and hazard lights (Vehicle Health Data was transmitted at each Ignition-Off).

That’s a lot, isn’t it? Automakers can swear to high heavens they are not doing anything nefarious with the collection information, but the truth is in the incentives. My salesperson wouldn’t bug me post sale to install the Mazda Connect app (he also tried during the purchase process) if Mazda wasn’t putting on pressure to do so. Mazda obviously puts high value on that data, and what else if not for exchanging it for monetary gain? I would not be surprised if my declining to install the app will hurt the salesperson’s commission.

But I am definitely not installing the Mazda app. I used the BMW app with the M2 because I didn’t know any better. Just like how Apple refuses to create a backdoor for their iPhone encryption, I want to eliminate any possibility of unintended consequences. Even if I can trust Mazda with data from every time I drive the MX-5, the risk of hacks and beaches exists. It’s safer to not turn on the spigot to begin with.