My Prius.
First, my Prii (Twila now has the 2002 Prius and I have the 2004) are maybe the best cars I have ever owned. Their only competition are my rotary Mazdas, maybe my VW bugs, my Simca (more to come about that), my '54 Ford. My GTO and my Corvair weren't good cars, but they have emotional value. Anyway, the 2002 Prius is great fun to drive, and the 2004 has a lot of good features. So, it isn't technically correct to say that I won't mind leaving my Prius behind.
The problem with my Prius is that it is horrible, disgusting, foul, loathsome, abominable - take any word that you'd use to describe the Bush administration or Republicans in Congress and you have the idea - at driving on snow or ice. Maybe it's because the engine is small and doesn't put as much weight on the drive wheels. Whatever the reason, it sucks. So I decided to order a Subaru Outback, which has all-wheel drive. I ordered it from the factory, because that saves dealer accessory installation charges, which are a lot. It seems like the Outback is taking a long time to arrive from Japan, which is frustrating when I'm making multiple attempts to get up a minor hill in my Prius. But I'm in Zen mode.
Talking about driving on snow and ice reminds me of something. When I was a lad in Syracuse, NY, I frequently went to a nearby parking lot when it had snowed and the roads were slippery. I'd get up speed and then put my car into spins and slides and practice getting out of them. That taught me a lot about oversteer and understeer and how to control a car. It was fun, too, of course. I'd be all over that parking lot, spinning and sliding and yelling "YAHOO" out the window. A lot of times people who were trying to park to go shopping got annoyed with me, but they were unwise, because my increased driving skills made it much more likely that I wouldn't plow into them someday.
3 comments:
Durf -- finally, something critical to blog about! How can you say that the Corvair wasn't a good car? It was the best car I ever owned and the coolest. Really, for a kid in high school to have a convertible to run around in (I had a '63 Monza) was the best. Even if I did have to know how to replace a fan belt, carry a spare generator and be able to put it in, and have two 50 lb. bags of sand in my luggage compartment. -- Trish
My Corvair was a 1960, I think. It was red, and I thought it was hot. The entire death trap thing was overblown, IMO. One thing I really liked, living in Syracuse, was the gas heater. That car would warm up in minutes! One thing I didn't like was stopping for oil more often than I stopped for gas, but it was a lot cheaper then.
We had a used '64 Corvair which ran well for a couple of years until my dad decided we had to replace the seals. We spent my senior year in High School rebuilding the engine. Just before I left to go to college, we tried to quickly finish the job. Unfortunately, we reinstalled both rotors for the points 180 deg out of phase. When we tried to start the car (in our garage) you never saw such bucking or heard such backfiring! But most impressive were the flames shooting out of the carburetors! It looked Like a Great White concert, not that we could have known that at the time. Fortunately, the engine died before it set the house on fire.
My dad and a couple of my brothers rebuilt the engine again, and it ran great. So, they took the car out for a test drive around the block. Unfortunately, they didn't have a NASA QA guy to check that the Eye of Newt Talisman had been applied. This meant that nobody checked the engine mount bolts, either. Which is why the engine fell out of the car as it turned the corner and I never saw that car again.
The only thing unsafe at any speed about that car was the family who worked on it!
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