Blog

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

I feel you, bro

Last time I was back at my parents’ place, my mother told me someone stole all four wheels off the neighbor’s brand new car. She woke up one morning, peaked across the street, and there it was: a Honda Accord tiled on cinderblocks. Why would someone steal wheels off a plain Honda Accord? Because the Honda sedan is ubiquitous. There’s so many of them on the road that the demand for spare parts (law of large numbers vis a vis collision accidents) must be equally sizable. That means a fresh set of (stolen) wheels (plus nearly new tires) should easily fetch many hundreds of dollars.

I do feel bad for the neighbor. According to mom, it’s some young adult who moved into the downstairs in-law unit across the street. The Honda Accord was the first new car he’s ever bought with his own money. Pretty exciting, right? I can remember that joy when I drove my Subaru WRX STI home from the dealership. So much joyful emotion that I nearly had an anxiety attack. Anyways, it has to suck greatly to see something so new and cherished (and expensive) being messed with by amoral thugs. That undercarriage is forever marred by being jacked up on cinderblocks.

I can empathize with that neighbor, too. It seems that particular block of Visitacion Valley is cursed for new cars. Back when my parents bought a brand new Toyota Corolla for me to begin college (many thanks), another set of thugs threw a cinderblock at the driver-side A pillar, while it too was parked on the street. It was a complete violation of the most precious object me (at the time, anyways). While the damage was fixed promptly, the car never felt the same to me since that incident. Sentimental value vanished alongside the purity of an unmolested new car.

Hopefully that neighbor doesn’t love cars as much as I do. If that Honda Accord is just an appliance to him, he’s going to get over the incident rather quickly.

People watching.

Car repair is expensive!

Recently my father got into a minor fender bender in this leased Toyota Corolla. As he was driving along on the right-most lane of a multi-lane road, a car to the right merged onto the roadway without checking the blindspot. A severely mangled front-end was the result, though thankfully the car was still able to drive straight. No injuries to the persons, which is ultimately what you want any time you’re unlucky to be in a car crash.

As modern cars get more and more expensive (average transaction price is well over $40,000 in the United States), it seems so have the cost to repair them. My father’s Corolla sustained damage to the bumper, headlamps, bits of the front fenders, and radiator core support. Rather minor in the grand scheme of things (no frame or suspension damage), but those items alone amounted to some $14,000 in cost from the body shop. That’s more than half the price of the car brand new!

A portion of that cost is the relatively expensive radar cruise sensor up front. Not only a new part is needed, but the car also has to be sent to a Toyota dealer to recalibrate the entire system. Hooray complexity, all in the service of ease and comfort whilst driving.

And because we’re still in the midst of global supply chain shortage of many things, it took a solid month from start to finish to fix the Corolla - for a minor fender-bender! We’re lucky because my father was able to get a rental car, so the extended repair length was not that bothersome. I’d imagine others aren’t so fortunate. That’s the true hassle of getting into an accident: dealing with the lack of a car or finding a temporary replacement while your own car is getting fixed. And also taking time from work to deal with the body shop, most of which are typically not open on weekends.

We’re just glad it’s over with now.

Pachinko.

Crazy car market

The lease is ending on my dad’s Hyundai Tucson, so we’re in the process of finding a new vehicle to (once again) lease. If you didn’t know, the automotive market is absolutely crazy right now. Due to the semiconductor chip shortage, the inventory of new cars is really low. In turn that pushes used car prices up sky high. This is a great situation if you’re looking to sell, but those looking to buy are in a world of hurt.

Those Labor Day deals you see advertised on TV? Yeah, they don’t actually exist on the ground. Markups are the norm, and you’d be lucky to find a vehicle for MSRP. We contacted the local Hyundai dealership hoping for an easy return and pickup transaction. Sadly, literally every car on their lot have additional makeup on top. The salesperson would not budge from the prices, even though we are turning in an end-of-lease car.

Which ought to be a nice profit maker for the dealership, because of the aforementioned high used car prices. CarMax is offering several thousand dollars above our lease buyout for the Tucson. We were completely willing to let the Hyundai dealer have this profit if they would simply give us a good lease deal on the next one. Shame. Instead, we're planning to sell the Tucson to CarMax, and pocketing the nice difference.

As for the replacement car, thanks to my brother’s contacts at a Toyota dealership, we are able to lease a poverty-spec Toyota Corolla at MSRP. Monthly payments will actually be slightly lower, which is nice. A compact sedan is indeed a step-down from the reasonably nice Tucson SUV, but that’s the best we can do in this crazy market. The goal was to not spend more on the monthly bill, and to that end, job done.

Once my dad retires, we’ll actually buy him the Lexus that will last him for the rest of his life.

Hollywood sunset.

Want to go faster? Buy a faster car

Car enthusiasts modify their cars to stand out, to show off their personality. Unless they’ve got a super rare, practically one-of-a-kind vehicle (no one’s driving around a 250 GTO every day, I’m fairly certain), people will seek methods to make their car easily identifiable inside a parking structure. Even drivers of mundane grocery getters like a Toyota Corolla are wont to spend money to make it cooler than it really is. I know this, because I had one.

More importantly, car modifications are done in search of more speed and better performance. On one hand it makes perfect sense because who doesn’t want faster straight-line speeds and quicker cornering numbers? On the other hand, if you count all of the money spent to improve a particular car’s performance (and looks), wouldn’t it be more prudent to, combined it together with the car’s original price, buy a different model that’s simply faster?

Then again, I would argue most of anything related to the automobile is based emotionally, rather than logically. How many times have someone asked us for car purchasing advice only to go and not buy the one we recommended? Look at the popularity of heavy sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks: how often are those drivers hauling around enough people and gear to justify the extra volume?

Obviously, purchasing decisions aren’t logical, and therefore I don’t expect car modifications to be, on the contrary, completely utilitarian. The ‘Hellaflush’ and ‘StanceNation’ styling trend that’s been with us for a decade now (and don’t seem to be abating anytime soon) - I totally understand it, even if it’s far from my cup of coffee.

I’m known for my pragmatism amongst my friends, so it’s no surprise that I’ve gotten away from vehicle modifying since moving on from the Corolla. Admittedly, the Toyota was much too plain and unsightly for me to not invest some funds to lessen the enormous wheel-gap and give it a proper set of wheels - among other items. Since then, my motto has been if I want to go faster, I buy a faster car. Granted, my subsequent cars are built on decidedly sporting platforms, so there wasn’t any immediate impetus to improve on things.

Presently I own a 911 GT3, one of the best race-car-for-the-road platforms in existence; because honestly, we’re simply chasing after that race car aesthetic anyways. Cars slammed to the ground, body kits, wheels tucked neatly within a wheel-well, and adding horsepower: these are all inspired by motorsport, the look and sound of pure-bred racing machines (that’s why we like loud exhausts).

Instead of modifying the WRX STI and then the MX-5 to chase that aesthetic, I bought an entire car instead. Problem solved.

No shots were thrown away today.

Farewell to my first car

A petrol-head’s first car is something special indeed. It’s your first moments of absolute freedom, the feeling of possibilities, the ability to take off and go anywhere. Upon getting your first car, the world is your absolute oyster; just grab the keys and go.

My own first vehicle was a 2006 Toyota Corolla sedan. It wasn’t anything remotely sporting or fun-to-drive, but back then I couldn’t care less. I’ve been dreaming of driving ever since I reached my teens; 16 seems so incredibly far away when I found out early on that was the minimum age to attain a driver license. Some things don’t change: the wait to purchase a Porsche 911 next year have been at certain times excruciating.

I indeed may have gotten my license at 16, but the Toyota Corolla did no materialize until college, a generous gift from the parents. The reason we elected to buy the typical compact sedan was because insurance was going to be astronomical on anything fast, and I had zero income to support that. Nevertheless, I adored the Corolla; it was equipped with the five-speed manual, upon which I learned the intricacies of driving stick-shift, and thankfully the clutch was super forgiving.

Fast forward to post college, and I itched for something quicker on the feet. In came a 2013 Subaru WRX STI, bought with my own money this time, and the Corolla got bequeathed to my younger brother. He also cut his teeth in learning the manual gearbox with that car, and suffice it to say the clutch did not last much longer. I was glad the car stayed in the family, because in some distant future I had intentions of getting it back (no doubt my brother will upgrade at first opportunity), keep up on maintenance, and driving it from time to time for nostalgia.

Unfortunately that was not meant to be. A few weeks ago the Corolla’s notoriously weak C59 transmission completely shattered its third and fourth gear. My father was commuting on the car, so a reliable fix was needed very quickly. To fix the gearbox would cost roughly the same as the entire worth of the car, so instead we chose to lease a new Hyundai Tucson, and the Corolla got put out to the pasture.

A salesperson at the dealership my brother worked at bought the entire car for spare parts. Must be nice.

In an ideal world where I have a garage with proper space, I would’ve kept the Corolla and simply worked on it myself bit by bit. Being the first car I ever owned it was somewhat sad to see it disappear into the ether as a parts car for someone else’s revival project. Circumstances prevented me from being one of those car enthusiasts that kept their ur-auto in perpetuity because it was indeed something significant, even if the car in a vacuum, isn’t.

I think the next order of business after buying the 911 would be leasing a warehouse somewhere far and cheap; a place where I can work on cars at leisure. Hashtag goals.

Circa 2017, when the Corolla last looked as I had intended.

Circa 2017, when the Corolla last looked as I had intended.

Turo turned me on to automatic gearboxes

A few weeks back I helped my younger brother move in back to UC Santa Cruz. This year he’s living off-campus so there’s plenty more to bring, mainly the stuff that belongs in the kitchen. His MK7.5 Golf GTI hatchback can fit quite a bit of stuff, but in the end we also needed a second car to haul to all.

Unfortunately, my first ever car, the family’s 2006 Toyota Corolla, gave up the ghost the same weekend. The car’s utterly weak C59 manual transmission (third gear has had a grind since I can remember) shattered a few gear internally, and it was making the most horrible noises when driving, akin to a racing car gearbox with straight-cut gears. The lever refuses to go into third or fourth gear, and we simply weren’t confident it can make the 130 miles round-trip to Santa Cruz.

We needed another car quite quickly, so to the Turo app we went the night before. 50 bucks on the credit card later the following morning, and we had ourselves a 2017 Honda Civic to use. What lovely convenience it is to be able to rent a car in that swift a timeframe; the traditional route would’ve found us at the SFO airport rental car complex because it’s be the only spot open on a Sunday. Not to mention it’d cost considerably more.

The Civic had an automatic gearbox obviously, because why would any sane person lend their manual transmission car out to a stranger. I did the driving duties, and it was the first time in the longest time I’ve driven an automatic car for an extended period. Perhaps it is because I’m getting old, but as an avid advocate of the row-it-yourself gearbox, I found driving the auto Civic to be an absolute pleasure. Automatic transmissions are actually okay!?

I get it now: in normal everyday driving, not having to do the clutch and gearstick dance at every intersection is a godsend for comfort. In a car with an auto ‘box you just push the gas and go. Manual transmission fanatics sticking to their dogma of daily-driving a stick-shift car being no more difficult than a car with an automatic gearbox are fooling themselves; I use to be that guy, but having driven to Santa Cruz and back in that Honda Civic, my position have changed completely.

Bay Area traffic isn’t going to get any better, mind.

I don’t think I’ll buy another manual gearbox car as a daily driver ever again. The bliss and ease in letting the car shift itself, particularly in traffic, is worth the “car enthusiast credibility” sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong: on an empty winding mountain road in a proper sports car, a stick with a clutch is still the choice for pure driving enjoyment.

Or you buy a 911 with PDK and get the best compromise of both worlds.

Look at the stars, look how they shine for… you.

Look at the stars, look how they shine for… you.