Blog

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

The mighty hatchback

Obviously to anyone with functioning eyes, the SUV body style is the vehicle of choice for most Americans. The commanding view outwards, the ease of ingress and egress, plus plenty of cargo space. I’d drive an SUV too if ferrying others and stuff is a common occurrence. I wouldn’t subject anyone to try to get into the passenger side of my Mazda MX-5. The UN Human Rights Council would classify that as torture.

Because I seldom carry people and things, I don’t own an SUV. Compared to vehicles types that are lower to the ground - sedans, coupes, convertibles, etc, high-riding SUVs do not handle as well nor are as fun to drive. They are as NPC of a car as it gets, which is just fine for non car enthusiasts. Again, I’d happily drive an SUV if a use case existed.

But sometimes I do need to play the UBER driver. That’s why I have the best compromise in vehicle-dom: the hatchback/wagon body style. It combines the fun driving dynamics of a sedan with the practicality of an SUV. My Volkswagen Golf GTI is the quintessential hot hatchback. With the backseats folded down, it can swallow a 65-inch television-sized box. IKEA runs, Costco runs, the GTI can do them all with ease. All the while offering enough performance and agility that many motoring journalists have declared that a hot Golf is all the car one will ever need, should one car is all you can afford.

The other day my friend arrived back from an overseas trip. I was on airport pickup duty. His family had seven pieces of luggage with them, all of which my GTI swallowed easily with the rear seats folded. Who needs an SUV? While I dream of an Audi RS6 wagon, my Golf GTI is indeed a lovely confluence of speed and practicality.

Adult realities

As a kid who grew up watching The Fast and The Furious, playing Need For Speed: Underground, and reading Import Tuner, I’m all about aftermarket car modifications. To turn an otherwise stock car into something uniquely to my tastes. Do we even buy cars without first thinking about what different wheels to put on them? The stock exhaust has got to go! We need more loud and obnoxious.

Of course, adult realities hit, and I’ve found that I can’t ever pull the checkout trigger on car parts, especially not overnight ones from Japan. How do I explain to my financial advisor (read: me) that I’m going to spend 10% of the purchase price of the car - immediately after buying it - on another set of wheels. There’s nothing wrong with the factory set, other than the looks. The sensible thing to do is to wear out the stock wheels - depending on how you drive, wheels can be a wear item - before even thinking about replacing. To get my money’s worth, if you will.

It’s not just finances (or lack thereof), too. Honestly, my Mazda Miata could use a fruitier sounding exhaust. Set aside the fact a replacement back-box is nearly $1,000; where the heck am I going to store the factory exhaust? I certainly don’t want to sell it or throw it away, in case I ever decide to sell the MX-5 and need to return it to factory specification.

Alas, as a renter in San Francisco making under six figures, living space is at a premium. I don’t have a garage to perform maintenance with, never mind hoarding redundant car parts. I’m just happy I managed to live on a block where street parking is super easy. No one’s mad you’ve parked in front of their house, or leaving cones out to reserve space. If that weren’t the case, I probably wouldn’t own more than one car.

So I resign myself to scrolling with envy on instagram. Kudos to those of you who can drop thousands on wheels, thousands on suspension bits, thousands on bigger brakes, et cetera and et cetera. Broke boy over here shall be content with driving factory-stock cars, spending money only on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Cheers.

New opiate of the people

It’s wild to see the protests going on in France. Driven largely(?) by the younger generations and their dissatisfaction of their immediate future prospects. France, like most mature Western democracies, is in lots of debt, high inflation, with no chance to austere their way out of it due to entrenched obligations that largely benefit the older generations. A financial quagmire that is robbing Peter to pay Paul. Peter - the younger generations - is not having it any longer.

This leads to the question: can similar protests happen here in these United States? The same combustible factors certainly exist here. Just this year our national debt crossed the 40 trillion mark, an unfathomable level of indebtedness. There’s fewer and fewer workers to support an increasing aging population dependent on social security. Inflation remains high thanks to that Strait of Hormuz business. The prospects here don’t look all that difference from France.

I think a big buffer against potential small-scale anarchy that exists in America is the ease of credit. I would say easy credit is the new opiate of the masses. As social media can attest, it’s rather easy to attain the finer trappings of life entirely on debt. That lever is as large as it can comfortably fit inside a monthly balance statement. A new BMW M3 is imminently affordable when it is financed for 10 years at an enormous interest rate. The $1,000 Disney vacation is only really $250 when Klarna allows you to split that payment into four.

Should that lever become too burdensome on the other end, there’s bankruptcy to discharge all of it. A reset button like spawning anew in Call of Duty.

Now imagine if credit isn’t so freely available - if at all, and bankruptcy requires more vigor than writing a check to an attorney. The imbalance in our so-called K-shaped economy would be felt acutely. A whole class of people who cannot attend a Taylor Swift concert because there’s not mecahnism to put that $1,000 on a credit card. There’s going to be some disgruntlement! Perhaps violently like the ones in France currently.

Free-market capitalism cannot survive a lower class that feels completely neglected. I gesture at the various revolutions in history. Good news for the US is that we’ve implemented just the thing to satiate the lower rungs of the economic ladder: widely available credit, and bankruptcy back-stop. Mix in with all the gambling-adjacent products like prediction markets and the actual stock market, there’s enough hope and facsimile of abundance to temper any pitch-fork fantasies.

Think with your dipstick

It’s been a year since I’ve bought my 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI from Carvana. (Here’s everything that was wrong with it.) That means the car is due for its annual oil change. In the last calendar year, the GTI got driven only about 3,300 miles. A surprisingly paltry amount, though granted I do not have a car commute. On mileage alone an oil service is premature, but for cars that don’t get driven much, fluids are changed according to a time schedule. As it is specified in the maintenance manual.

Great news for me, the Golf’s EA888 engine has a top side mounted oil filter, and an oil dipstick. This means I do not have to get under the car to perform the oil service. To get the oil out, I used a fluid extractor: the legendary Mityvac 7201. By shoving a tube down the dipstick channel into the sump, the oil gets pumped up and out with zero spills. The Mityvac can also reverse direction, so filling the used jugs with old oil cannot be any simpler.

Here’s a YouTube video showing the process.

I think every internal combustion car should be like this: top side oil filter and an oil dipstick. It makes changing the oil with an extractor a 10 minute procedure. The fact that not all engines are designed this way is a crime against humanity. (Plenty of new cars don’t even come with a dip stick.) I don’t care how secure the pair of jack stands are, and that a wheel has been shoved under a frame rail: getting underneath a car carries some risk. Especially for peasants like me lacking in garage or driveway. Public streets are often uneven and unmaintained.

But perhaps it’s all a moot point because of electric vehicles. Would our children even know about changing oil and getting gas when they grow to be adults? It’ll be a thing lost to the history books, like rewinding VHS tapes, and printing out MapQuest directions. Wrenching on cars will be reserved for old curmudgeons like me who can’t seem to let go of our gross polluters.

Hopefully the Mityvac that I bought will still be going strong. Because it was not cheap! Cheers to the spirits of buy once, cry once.

Meanwhile, the MX-5 has a dipstick, but *bottom* side oil filter. Going to have to get under it when the time comes.

Brace yourselves

Word on the street is that El Niño is super strong this year, and that means it will be an especially wet winter here in California. Great news for water reservoir enthusiasts, but not so great news for people like me who walk to work. We’re going to need a bigger boat.

The past few winters have not been all that wet, so I’ve kept delaying buying some proper rain gear. Regular shoes get absolutely soaked when walking in the wet, so rain boots are in order. The beauty of ChatGPT is that I can simply ask it for the best reviewed boots for walking in the rain. I can see why review websites detest and block A.I. access because they are absolutely getting their lunch money stolen. When people don’t need to visit your website to know the results, you lose out on advertising revenue.

Nevertheless, ChatGPT pointed to the XTRATUF Men's Ankle Deck Boot. A waterproof yet breathable lightweight boot that isn’t too cumbersomely tall. For the less than $100 I paid on Amazon, I think that’s a pretty good deal. What’s important is that I need to have a regular pair of shoes to change into once I get to work, because the XTRATUF doesn’t look to be that comfortable for eight plus hours.

El Niño also brings strong winds. I need an umbrella that can withstand some headiness. No more $15 units purchased at the local Target that flips over at the slight hint of a breeze. I need a sturdy stem that can withstand some bashing. My friend put me onto davek umbrellas. Indeed, $120 for an umbrella is a different tax bracket sort of steep. Hopefully this is a buy once cry once situation. Davek’s got a lifetime guarantee, but as we know, the promise is only as good as the solvency of the company making it.

I think I’ve sufficiently braced myself. Winter is coming!

Let the ego lose

I’m somewhat of a connoisseur of dashcam videos on YouTube. Watching them helps me learn from the mistakes of others, if you will. I must say, it seems like half of the accidents caught on camera can be avoided by one simple device: the brake pedal.

Drivers hate this one trick!

Too many times, the entire collision can be avoided if the non-offending driver simply used the brakes. Slow down. Avoid the accident. I get it: braking is bruising to the ego. Why should I slow down when it’s the other person who is not following the rules or acting stupid?

Instead, the onus is put on the offending driver to course correct, to realize their mistake in split seconds, and avoid the accident. In an ideal world, sure, we all wish that’s the case. In the real world, that is giving up our agency. The only person you can control is you. Try as you might to influence the action of others, that action belongs to them ultimately.

Remember the goal is to get to the destination safely. Let’s say the ego won. But by not backing down, the other car failing to yield hits your car. Now you’ve got to deal with insurance, getting the car fixed, and wasting a lot of time. God forbid there isn’t bodily injury, too. Worth it just to satiate the ego? Absolutely not. Avoid the accident; let the other jerk win.

There’s a huge sense of justice in American culture. That rule-breakers ought to be punished properly. Often times then when we get behind the wheel, we feel like the last stand before the fall to anarchy. We want to police bad behavior on the road. Speeding in the fast lane? I’m not moving over. Cutting in line at a merge? Not on my watch! I dare you to crash into me.

Not me. I’ll take a bruised ego and chip on the shoulder to preserve a clean car. As the saying goes, the cemetery is filed with people who had the right of way.

Check your tire pressures

With gas prices back at all-time highs, what strategies are we doing to mitigate some of the hurt? Pump the tires a bit higher than the stated pressure on the door sticker? I actually did that once a long time ago driving to Los Angeles. I filled up the tires on my then Toyota Corolla to 40 PSI (I think the factory specified 30 PSI) and enjoyed fantastic gas mileage for the 300-mile drive.

Higher PSI, lower rolling resistances, better miles per gallon.

Granted, do normal people even check tire pressures regularly? Us car enthusiasts check often, because the consequence of low tire pressures is oversteering your BMW M4 over a curbed median (very inside joke). On a serious note, optimal tire pressure is important because we care about road-holding, handling, and tire wear. Tires on less (or more) than specified pressures are negative on all three points.

Even if a car’s handling doesn’t tickle your interest, it’s still important to ensure proper tire pressures because of the lost fuel economy. On my Golf GTI, 2 PSI less than the standard 39 PSI is enough to lose me about two miles per gallon. At a time when a gallon of premium 91 octane is over $7.00, that can add up rather quickly.

In my experiences, tires lose about 1 PSI per month. Therefore once a month pressure check should more than suffice. That’s what I do. Don’t wait for the TPMS warning system inside the car to notify you of low pressures. Because by that time, the tire - if not punctured - is already grossly under-inflated. Digital pressure gauges are cheap and super long-lasting. I’ve had this unit for over twenty years!