It is frustrating that the Honda SuperCub is not really available in America cheaply, as it should be. As the single most popular vehicle on Earth (by number of its model in use), it should be sold in every hardware store and bicycle store for $400 each, rather than $1900 from two dealers via a secondary license via Sym of Taiwan, a company somewhat indifferent to shipping repair parts via the daily flights to Japan that thus daily come here. Taiwan has some odd people. Honda long ago upgraded the SuperCub to 110ccs and fuel injection and disc brakes and actual storage and won't sell it here. But they try and compete with Harley Davidson building huge bikes that don't sell either because they aren't real Harleys. I often wonder if Honda put a stupid relative in charge of their motorcycle division, someone who recently died, and so they're STARTING to pull out of the Stupids. Their 500cc commuter bike is good, praised for fuel economy and fun. Their new 250cc EFI engine is in a couple different bikes, but it needs to be in a UMJ (Universal Japanese Motorcycle), and they need to start selling more city cars here, though the Honda Fit being made in Mexico is a good plan. Narrow tires on that, so probably screeches around corners in a fun way. A neighbor has one. I swear those tires are about 8 inches wide. On a car that holds 4 people, it must terrify on these icy roads. Anyway, Honda seems like they're regaining Sanity, and I hope the trend continues with them selling both the SuperCub 110 EFI and the Wave 125 EFI, because those would SELL around here. Cheaper than Vespa, just as vintage in the Cub, and more practical on these roads full of holes.
The SuperCub, with its 49cc engine and 3 speed semi-automatic transmission and large diameter wheels, is capable on hills and rough roads very much unlike a Vespa. It has wide enough tires to deal with gravel and dirt, yet is light enough to be operated one handed. It's very practical. The local high school and college students should have them. The upgraded 90cc and later 110cc models gave it better hill climbing ability, which around here would be crucial. You can park it the same places you park a bicycle, and is only slightly larger. In Asia, these are used for deliveries, commuting, and mass transportation, even of some rather absurd levels of cargo and passengers.
The SuperCub is minimalist, and that's fine sinse in these times of enduring unemployment. You have to pinch your pennies. If you happen to be single, or just out on your own for the first time, buying a new car is a terrible mistake to make. Instead, seriously look at where you live, where you need to go, and see if you can get by on a bicycle. Not making car payments at $200-350/month means you can deal with life on Minimum Wage, Part Time, as all jobs are now.
Of course, if you have hills to climb, or a distance more than 10 miles each way, a bicycle won't work. If you can avoid highways, this opens the option of scooters and motorcycles to you. I realize that 2-stroke engines are dirty, polluting, and not the most reliable. They are cheap, however, and a 50cc is about 9 HP, which is enough to drag you up a hill, slowly, but faster than pedaling. With all the little streets, you can use them here to get around.
It would be nice if more Chinese scooters were CARB legal, but many places that sell them, claiming they are? They lie. Be VERY careful with that. Might be worth the expense to go through a dealer, just to make this their problem instead of yours.
If you want something more reliable and less work to maintain than a ragged and buzzing 2-stroke, a 125cc 4-stroke single works just fine. While the best deals new are mopeds like the MadAss, which will ship a crate to your driveway, used tends to be a lot cheaper. The best deals are street legal Dual Sport motorcycles or old Honda Rebel 234cc. The Rebel isn't meant to be kept more than a summer, just passed along, but the upside is they're very cheap and as they're a cruiser, they work on American roads. Just make sure you look after the brakes and keep spare drum brake pads on hand. On these hills, having brake fade with only two wheels could kill you. Still, if you ride SLOWLY and carefully, you can do so and be healthier than trying it on a bicycle. Both from avoiding a heart attack and from keeping up with traffic.
It is worth commenting that even with the huge size of California, you will miss too much of it if you go faster than scooter speeds. Racing through California is something everyone does, and thus miss most of it. My ex-wife had some good aspects of her personality, which lead to our marriage, such as the need for domestic exploration. We would get in a car and pick and road and see where it went. A good practice, since you end up finding many interesting things that way. Most people who ride them stick to city terrain on their scooters, but you don't have to, if you pick your roads carefully. A bigger engine and actual gears opens way more roads to you, just remember to ride slow enough to see what's around you. You don't have to race the traffic. Two wheels isn't about dominance. You already lost that to the first sports car that passed you.
And in local commuting, they are a joy. Park in an alleyway or on a sidewalk chained to a tree or railing, provided your local police aren't ridiculous. Many see handing out tickets as a way to pay for lunch, as revenue. This is crooked, and the difference between them and basic highway robbery is robbers don't have a union.
I would like for scooters to be cheaper, much cheaper, so people will buy them, so many that they aren't worth stealing because they are everywhere, like cheap bicycles. All scooters should be around $500, which is still 3x what they cost to make, including labor and shipping. There are cutting edge people in this town, riding scooters around, but not enough. Enough to be noticed, and not run over, and the drought and unemployment rate are actually great for motorcycling and scootering. And there's also those homebuilt sidecars, which I respect. But these need to be cheap. They need to be everywhere. The more on the road, the more cars will make sure to see them. You reach a critical mass of attention so they aren't run down. It stops being "Oh, well she didn't see him so its okay she killed the kid on the scooter" to the Jury in the Murder Trial and starts being "That's murder, Jail for life" kind of response and level of care. Narrow roads make these sensible commuting options once drivers remember that riders on half as many wheels are still just as human as they are.
Despite America becoming a future major oil producer, passing Saudi Arabia next year (which is not as awesome as it sounds because Saudi has been lying about its reserves since 1981), we will be exporting most of it for cold hard cash. That leaves little for us, and I suppose banning full time jobs via unaffordable health care, and overwhelming poverty for everyone is a way to cut down on oil consumption, we still like to get around. And pedaling only works on the flatlands. So scooters are the future. A pity that electric ones suck, but gasoline powered engines can be swapped for ones tuned to new fuels, or adjusted as needed. At $35 an engine, that is less than a tank of gasoline. Think about that. Entire vistas of upgrade possibilities exist because of that economy of scale. So the next time you think about upgrading your car to a Tesla, ponder the costs of just keeping the junker running and hop on a scooter for those many sunny days.
That's the upside of drought in California. Lovely weather for riding. Bad for boating and farming. Make the best of it. Endure. You aren't in charge, after all. What else can you do?
So did you know you can build a homemade jet engine out of spare parts and coffee cans?
It's not a great engine. Makes more heat than thrust, and tends to melt bearings so it seizes up. And keep in mind that the speeds these things go, if the engine fails, it explodes really spectacularly.
This one is really nice, almost professional level. Most are more about the melting.
They're very much about proper balance.
This one here is the best construction, with properly made CNC turbine blades and balanced. Nice. And proper bearings so it won't melt and seize.
Imagine one of these running, say, a pressure vessel to provide torque for a scooter, maybe with a pop-off valve, so it can provide the power to the wheel. Runs of natural gas or alcohol or diesel fuel or propane. Whatever. Turbines will even run off flour or sawdust, did you know? Most jet engine powered vehicles had direct drive to the wheel and really strong brakes to slow them down, which is really stupid. You can't use a clutch in traffic because they have too much torque. However, if you did this running a pump for something like a hydraulic drive, you could avoid the whole electric motor problem (rare earths, wheel weight) and focus on just using the available power supply and the CVT to get this to work. Would be really interesting compared to a normal 49cc 2-stroke. Probably more expensive and less reliable, and a 2-stroke doesn't actually EXPLODE when it fails, not like a jet engine does. So maybe that's a terrible idea. It is INTERESTING, however.
Many people here in the Foothills of the Sierras, here in the Gold Country on either side along the length of Highway 49, are quite familiar with dust. Most of the folk who move up here have money, and like the ambiance of being above the winter fog and summer heat, with nice views and a short drive to Tahoe, only an hour or two away.
The downside of this place is, if you depend on making a living, you live in poverty. Rich people didn't get that way by spending what they've got on non-essentials. Poverty people always rush out to buy the latest new thing so are the first to learn its not so great and costs money to store. Poor people are always surrounded by stuff and have no money for important things like paved roads. This makes them easy to identify because their cars are covered in dust and mud, their clothes don't fit, and they stink of patchouli if they can afford it, since it does a fair job of distracting noses from the stench of hemp oil from all the dope they're smoking to distract themselves from being poor and surrounded by junk. If only they'd give up the dope and used soap more. It isn't like soap is expensive. Sell the junk or throw it away, a bit further than the front lawn.
Poor people have cars covered in dust because they live down gravel and dirt roads. They can't afford to pave and don't want govt attention by calling crews to fix the holes they've got because those crews might see their pot fields.
Of course, what with the cost of tar being so high and pavement being full of holes, I can't help but notice the tiny old 1950's cars getting hotrod engines and buzzing about on the streets. You have to admire that. It's the rich old guys, retired mechanical engineers and suchlike, who build them. They show them off at the half dozen free hotrod shows they have in this town every year. One will be coming up in a couple months. Looking forward to that, I am.
I have to admire the tiny little unaerodynamic cars, the Morris Marina equivalents, and the short convertibles like the Bug-Eye Sprite. They rattle and squeak and are really slow everywhere, but they GO everywhere so it makes up for style with substance, if you see what I mean. You can drive a Morris Marina or a VW Bug or a BugEye Sprite to the top of a mountain pass for a picnic lunch because it will do it. It won't get you there fast, but it will get you there eventually. And the point of a journey is to see things, and if you're staring at the road because you're in a hurry, what's the point? The scenery is on either side. I keep getting advertisements from a web-seller of motorcycle safety gear, and I like the idea of a scooter since its a bike that pedals up the hill for you, but faster than that? Give me more wheels, thanks very much. In a little car, not very fast, you see more than one that's barely gripping the road you're slewing about in such a hurry. I admit to loving the sound of a 12 cylinder engine, and the pop of a turbo charger, but my first car was a VW Beetle and I used to slew that around with the best of them, out to Salmon Creek Beach just north of Bodega Bay, a road that routinely finds Jaguars and Beemers sprouting from the ditches and fences, almost as if they were growing there to start with. Imagine that, if you would, should that be their birth place, as it were, springing from the ground. Explains the organic curves and the bits of rust they all suffer from, and the tendency to lose grip on turn apexes. A fool and his money are soon parted, but a fool may sometimes sell with something not so terrible if used right. This is why rich people dress down and visit quite a few garage sales. You often find deep discounts. Funny how they get rich, isn't it?
I expect my old Beetle wouldn't terribly mind the local gravel roads and dirt, despite finding that stuff creeping under every crack. My Beemer had better ground clearance and didn't mind dirt roads provided I was slow enough. I'd rather take them with a Land Tractor like the Suby, as they are the True Car of California, not the Jeep, which breaks down everywhere and have more rust than you can comfortably poxify their description.
If a Jeep analog were to be built today, an improved version I mean, it would be made from Aluminum, with all wheel drive from the smallest Subaru, still offer the no-doors and canvas top with rollbar thing, and allow you to lower and latch down the windshield, which was a nice feature the originals had. Bad in bug season, but they didn't go fast enough to really pop you so you just used sense rather than sue the manufacturer because you didn't put up the windshield in a light rainstorm. Drops sting, you see. They don't compress.
A modern Beetle Sand Rail is a very capable offroad vehicle, very light. Built it from raceframe tubing, cover in fiberglass, keep it light above all else. Bring back the original Mini which weighed a thousand pounds and had 14 inch wheels. Probably want slightly bigger motorcycle tires and a leaning suspension. Make it fun again. A car that close to the ground LOOKS FASTER when you're driving because everything streaks by in the peripheral vision. It's a trick, but who cares. It's fun. And Mini's make good rally cars. With roads losing their pavement, any kind of rally car is the car of the future, not electric ones.
And the original Fiat 500 with the canvas roof. Slow and poppy and loud but good fun with a girl squeaking and the gears grinding because their synchro gears were more suggestive then durable. Ital post-war was less than half paved, bombed out and shot up. They'd do fine on a patchwork road.
And the Lotus Super 7, and train the driver to end exclamatory statements with the words: "What-what!" and "By Jove!".
Why not? We've already got plenty of other cosplayers. Ever seen a Harley Rider? Look like a pirate dressed in black leather, some frilly crap, a bandana to cover the bald spot, and some kind of flags and skulls and maybe an eagle. And too much chrome, which turns interesting colors when it gets hot.
Unfortunately, with the end of pavement, that means narrow bicycle tires are done, which means people who ride them are going to either pay to visit paved trails at a velodrome or they'll get wider tires, probably knobbies, and shift back to mountain bikes again. Funny how that is. I'm still a huge fan of the Yamaha 125 and the Honda SuperCub. These are vehicles made for dirt roads and crap pavement and immensely popular in the real world, outside America. Its a fair bet that Obama's refusal to ratify/approve the Keystone Pipeline means the Canadians will sell their oil through Vancouver to China. And China and Japan both dumped $300Billion in US Treasuries a few days ago. A huge booming sound. The EU bought them at discount, but dump enough T-bills and the US dollar won't buy much foreign imports, including oil. The price of gasoline will be going up 50 cents a gallon over this, if not more. If China and Japan dump all their US Treasury bonds (aka T-bills), they won't have ANY REASON to play nice with us, and can stop selling us discounted things, start chiseling now that our industries are all gone and we're fully dependent on them for manufactured goods. Isn't that nice?
The good news is that the Yamaha 125 beloved in Central and South America? It is made in factories in Brazil. We could stand to import those and sugar-cane based ethanol. They'd be a good trade partner. Less trouble than China, that's for sure. Brazil has no ambitions of invading the USA, and has never threatened to nuke us into oblivion like China has. So that's an option worth considering seriously for basic post-pavement transportation. If the upgrade, made to fit the same bolt holes in the Yamaha 125 frame, were say, a twin or triple with water or oil cooling, a 4-stroke so its reliable, so much the better. A 375cc 4-stroke with oil cooling? Might be a very good vehicle. Would also work as a jalopy engine. Something like a Sand Rail or Mini could be powered by one.
Folks need to accept that the future of bad and dusty roads means going a lot slower, and taking longer to get there. Maybe more stops along the way. We're so used to going fast, to rushing. But this is a post-capital economy, where everybody with a job gets minimum wage, and can only managed part time hours because businesses can't afford to pay benefits under Obamacare anymore. 2.5 million jobs lost, and counting, since he forced that in. When the pay is pathetic, why take all the risks and waste the fuel being in a rush? Take your time. Get there whenever. Finish it whenever. Man(y)ana is too much of a hurry. It's the indifference to time and clocks which leads to using the South of Europe for vacations. It's hot, do it tomorrow morning.
People kid themselves about bicycle commuting in this context. Bicyclists are the main proponents of paved roads, initially. Trouble is, roads were quickly taken over by cars and drivers, which leads to those cars running down cyclists and killing them in the street. Putting yourself in their way, knowing this, leads to cyclist's stories about getting hit or nearly hit by a car, over and over again. That is not sane. Separate roads sounds like a solution, until you see all the dogs and walkers with headphones blocking them, strollers with children, people with cameras and its not a cycle road anymore. A nice place for a walk, however. I believe you should only cycle when the weather is good. Why bike when the street is icy, and why be surprised about getting hit by a car in those conditions? I see suicidal behavior way too often. I'd rather see a cyclist in tights riding for exercise than one in work clothes in the rain when they own a car and could be driving sensibly rather than DARING a distracted texter behind the wheel to hit them on their school run. Too much selfishness on both sides.
The biggest upside to a Supercub is they go the same speed as a school run vehicle, so they're not classified by drivers as "pedestrians weaving along side of road" and passed without thought. A 35 mph motorcycle or scooter is a vehicle, albeit small. But a vehicle, like them. A person. So they're inherently safer than a bicycle in traffic. Ironic, right? And a jalopy is physically bigger, still going 35 mph, and thus is a car, if a small one. Mentally, safer yet.
It is also important to remember that both vehicles are popular in countries with the same kinds of volcanoes as we have here, thus the same kinds of mud, which turns into thick soupy dust. When the pavement goes, cars will be slowing down, and bicycles will have to switch from sub-inch velodrome tires to 2-3 inch mountain bike tires to get some grip, probably with suspension to help with the bumps, but you can't really do a school run when the kids have to pedal their own bikes and you're merely an escort. Once more, alternative vehicles make more sense. Particularly since schools today, even Middle Schools, are full of drugs. The local one has 8th graders snorting meth and 13 year old girls getting abortions. And this used to be a really good area, too. Is this the benefit of socialization? Do we need school vouchers after all? It would cut down on the traffic, at least, and would be a lot more practical to have neighborhood schoolhouses rather than big central schools full of child criminals and run by more, from the teachers union.
Considering the local pot growers will switch to opium when pot is fully legal, this is going to become common. We won't have paved roads, but we'll have track marked teachers? Nice.
The other curiosity of post-pavement world is the mosquito abatement folk find it somewhat more difficult to do their jobs, and the puddles and such from washouts and runoffs make for MANY mosquitoes, which means that Malaria will make a comeback. You may scoff, but Malaria killed more people in temperate climates than tropical. Archangel, in Arctic Russia, lost 12,000 one summer to a malaria outbreak. Telling survivalists that Malaria is coming back is a good way to make them really angry with you, btw. You can't really stock enough bullets to kill all the mosquitoes, and they never think about mosquito abatement in their "preps". Bad enough they only stock 60 days of food. Sigh. Malaria kills you just as dead as a bullet, and probably quite a lot more painful. As the money flows out of this place with pot-legalization, I expect the growers will start turning up at local clinics sick with malaria, bird flu, and eventually Dengue. They've already got STDs and HIV and various cancers. Free love, huh? Natural healing? Right. Oh well. I'm sure the Opium trade will fix things for them.
Enjoy your race car and your skinny tires while the roads still have hard pavement. It won't be like this forever. When you gradually shift into a slower pace and plumes of dust behind every vehicle on the road, you learn to shrug and laugh and keep your expectations grounded. This the Progress the current party in power has always wanted: peasants, slavery, autocratic rule handed town by a tyrant-king. You voted for this. You stood by and let it happen. It's the law now so shut up and deal with the consequences. Aren't you happy? Remember: it is going to get worse before it gets worse. You might someday be able to afford this:
No shower, and still paying rent for the parking space, which seems excessive for an electric plug and a large parking space on a back lot, and a hose running to a sink, but I'm sure they'll learn eventually. Considering what Obamacare costs, and how little you get for that unfunded mandate, I'm sure someone will be happy at all the ways the Jackass party destroys the Middle Class and creates more poverty. A few more years of this, we'll be like the Philippines. We can compare notes on evil govt. Won't that be nice?
So In the Forza 4 driving simulator I opted to buy the McLaren MP4-12C
I have to say Clarkson has it all wrong. This car is MAD. It tries to kill you on every corner... if you turn off the traction control. It is one of those cars where it has way too much power and not nearly enough tires to keep it on the road. Ever apex is an opportunity to die. Every single one. Even slow corners try to kill you in this car. And straightaways aren't much fun either since the tires are still skip-hopping over the pavement because they can't accelerate fast enough so are breaking loose. And being a rear wheel drive car, when it goes wrong, you have seconds to realize you are going to die and can't do a thing about it. The way to fix this is put much wider tires on it, like you see on a Porsche 911 Turbo and a Corvette. You have to. Otherwise this silly car will kill you. I can't say that's a good use of $220K. It is also, oddly enough, heavy. Or drives like it anyway. I've seen the videos of this thing being built. It should not drive like its heavy. It should not slip madly from too much power. Yet it does. This car is not that good. I'm sorry. If the simulator spec is right, it's no better than a Lamborghini.
Compare this to the Lotus Evora. This is a hotter engine update to the Exige, which is a hotter update of the Elise, which is no longer sold in the USA because the Elise doesn't have an airbag on the steering wheel. I really don't see why they didn't fix that. The Elise is a really good car. Best I've driven, as-is, in the game. With slightly stickier tires and a better air filter, and a better intercooler to help with temperature stabilization for the Turbo (I drove the Opel Speedster Turbo), it's perfect. Unfortunately, the Evora is more like the McLaren than it is the Elise. A little too much power, and the rear tires need to be wider. Once modified, this fixes it. At least you would think so. But NO, its crap. Really crap. I even tried changing front to rear tire pressures, which helps a little, but not enough. The Evora has too much power for its weight, and its balance is scarcely better than a Porsche Turbo, and why pay twice as much if you just wanted one of those?
You would think, assuming the spec in the game matches reality, that the car engineers would have corrected these problems BEFORE selling the car. But they haven't. Its crap. And it would kill you. Killing customers is rarely a good marketing gimmick, and far too many supercars will do that if you give them a chance. That said, I'm a bit more sympathetic towards idiot basketball stars who buy and wreck a supercar. Too much power, not enough tires, terrible brakes. Keeps happening to me in the game. Some cars less than others. I'm still a fan of the Fiesta, thanks very much. I am just now a bigger fan of the Elise.
One of Sir Terry Pratchett's characters of Discworld I am particularly enjoying is the proto-newspaperman, William De Worde. He was raised not to lie, but this makes him somewhat slippery about what he admits truthfully when answering questions or making statements. In a world of semaphore towers, called The Clacks (due to the sound they make), he's just invented the newspaper a couple centuries late compared to Earth.
Part of the reason the American Revolution was successful was due to the Press stirring people up. Had there been no press, there would have been no eager mobs to attack the redcoats and throw tea in the harbor and wave their torches, pitchforks, and squirrel rifles around. Squirrel rifles were only 30 caliber and would hit a squirrel if you aimed at one. This sounds unimpressive until you realize a soldier's musket would miss a human and the man next to him too, at 50 yards. Safest place to stand is where a musket is aiming. Strangely, armies carried muskets and wore bright red coats so you'd see them better. It was completely off to shoot them with rifles that would hit. And that's why America got its own flag and govt trying so hard to ban rifles. But I digress.
Pratchett fills his novels with snark, particularly snarky wisdom. Chock full of phrases people know to be true but rarely say that way because it always makes someone angry. In his novel "The Truth", which is about the invention of the first daily newspaper and how amazing moveable type is when information had to be paid for with actual money, in that peculiar transition period of the Age of Steam, we have the first newspaper of the city of Anhk-Morpork. Anhk-Morpork is the capitol of Discworld, which is flat, rests on the back of 4 elephants standing on the back of a giant sea turtle. What is the sea turtle standing on? "It's turtles all the way down," of course. Down to what? "Turtles all the way down." No further answer is required, and makes a good code to describe insanity. "What wrong with her? Why's she screaming?" "She's turtles all the way down." See?
Mr. De Worde is a minor character in Monstrous Regiment, which is about women in the military and how cultures and religions attempt and fail at stunting the achievements of women they're bound to oppress. That's the trouble with Oppression you see. Ambition is a gender-spanning problem. It leads to all sorts of social ills like women choosing not to marry or maybe have careers of their own.
Mr. De Worde also has a photographer who is a vampire whose flash tends to disintegrate him or make him scream in agony due to the light. Makes a great joke, since he keeps taking pictures. He IS a photographer, after all.
Being the first public news reporter makes an interesting story. Private news being gathered by private spies, you see, and subject to assassination, which has a Guild in Anhk-Morpork. Assassins have rules, you see. And a certain style.
Terry Pratchett wrote 50 novels and suffers from Alzheimers which is expected to kill him. Both he and his doctor are both surprised he remains alive at this point. He was knighted by his queen for his work promoting Great Britain and is the second most-read British author. Considering his stories are full of humor and can be read in short bursts, that makes perfectly good sense.
I hope he gets a chance to invent the railway train and possibly the steam powered car, since cars did so much for cleaning up all the horse excrement in cities, cut down on flies, and made is so common people didn't have horse poop all over their boots all the time. You may think horses are romantic, but horse crap isn't.
I've been driving on a simulator via my Xbox 360 using the Forza Motorsport 4 game and a wireless wheel. No pedals or paddleshifter, unfortunately, so its not as pure a driving experience as I'd like, but it was cheap. Anyway, I beat the game days ago and I've been fiddling around buying cars and driving them. Found a very good one. The Opel Speedster Turbo is one of those cars which is mid-engine and actually means it. In the game, most mid-engine cars are too powerful and badly balanced so they try to kill you as you come out of the Apex of a turn. If you performance drive, this is where your Ass saves your life, because your ass feels an uncomfortable tickle through the car seat if the back wheels start to get loose as you accelerate out of a turn. This causes you to let off the throttle and then either get used to it or buy some better and stickier tires. Yokohamas sold well in Beemer country for this reason.
Now, in a rear wheel drive car you're mostly front engine cars, but the rear engine ones like Porsche tend to be much nicer, much faster, and go wrong backwards which sends your Porsche into a ditch or wall or tree. You don't always see what kills you in a Porsche since you're usually facing the wrong way with this oddly terrified expression on your face. Ahem.
Mid Engine cars tend to be overpowered and very carefully balanced. The Noble M400, which I like a lot, and the M600 which Clarkson likes more and costs quite a lot more, is just a faster version of the Lotus Elise, basically, with a bigger engine and built in a shed in Suffolk or something like that. Just imagine Clarkson saying it.
Proper mid-engine cars keep the weight between the wheels and the power near the driving wheels such that gravity is helping the power get to the road, rather that acceleration lifting those wheels off as the weight shifts back onto the rear, as you see with Front engine and front wheel drive cars. Lots of wheel spin from cold starts. The good Mid-engine cars are:
Lotus Elise (famously good), Exige, and Evora (mad)
Noble M400 (good) and M600 (mad)
Toyota MR2 (underpowered)
Porsche Cayenne and Boxster
Any Lamborghini (mad)
Many Ferraris (civilized) except F430 (mad)
Opel Speedster (rebadged Lotus Elise Turbo)
Vauxhall VX220 (rebadged Lotus Elise Turbo)
Pagani (all mad)
McLaren MP4-12C (mad)
and quite a few others like them. I will point out here that the Lotus Elise got rebadged into the Vauxhall VX220 and the Opel as well. There are only slight differences between them. The trick with a midengine is these cars can't be upgraded much because it screws up their power balance and makes them try to kill you. The Pagani and Lamborghinis are famous for this. Cars where you can't put your foot down without suddenly breaking the tires loose from the pavement aren't fun to drive, even in a game where you can hit a button to undo the last 2 seconds of terrible crash. Some cars are so mad you don't realize you're about to die for 5-8 seconds so you have to backup several times to get far enough to have the tires properly contacting the pavement again. In the real world, you wreck and probably die.
I'd driven the Lotus Elise in Forza 3 and found it to be a car that keeps trying to murder you. Same with the Vauxhall VX220, which is odd since both are supposed to be the same car, only the Vauxhall has a turbo. So far, the ONLY mid engine I've really liked that isn't a mad dog is the Opel, since it takes a lot of bad driving before it tries to kill you.
I will say that the Ferraris are surprisingly civilized, as if their creators valued repeat customers. The Ferrari V12 has a wonderful sound revving with the turbo charger spitting and flames shooting out. The Opel is a bit more of a BURR sound with pops from the turbo, something I'm finding as a more civilized version of the Zonda. And the Opel corners the best of any Class C car I've tried.
The other surprise I've found is an all wheel drive Volvo S60. Who knew that would be fun? With some weight stripped out, and a few tweaks to the power via sport air filter and upgraded cooling and slightly increased turbos, its actually very quick and sounds nicer than the Subaru does. It also has the power to pass other cars on the straightaways. And that's very nice.
It's a little mad, as a race car should be, and would probably kill a person who drove it seriously, since I've noticed in the game that when an all wheel drive car breaks loose, you can't regain control. All wheel drive cars become angry ballistic bears that crash into the nearest upright solid object. The weight is just too fatal and the tires can't be spun back into grip again. Perhaps Subaru drivers could comment on this.
Front Wheel Drive cars are very good about letting you dig the ass back into alignment by using "More Powahh!" and lots of rubber smoking on the pavement, at least in the game, but I couldn't say in real life. I don't drive cars quite so dangerously, thus I remain alive.
So I don't know if you knew this, but there are cars powered by motorcycle engines. The original Fiat 500 was a 2-stroke 500cc motorcycle engine. So was the original Saab 92, which looked neat but was actually really awful, as James May explained in his review on Top Gear.
Motorcycle engines are small and rev high and can be geared in such a way that the vehicles they power will do the job, provided the vehicle is light and the driver isn't in a hurry. There is such a thing as TOO LIGHT and NOT ENOUGH OF A HURRY, however, Mr. Clarkson.
I'm pretty annoyed with the weight of modern cars. Yes, they're very safe, and built to survive crashes with really terrible closing speed energies, head ons at 80 mph each, or 160. Realistically, you'd die from that, air bags or not. The energies exceed your cellular structure's ability to hold together in your brain. You'd be scrambled eggs and not in a nice way. Yes, there are motorcycle powered cars that meet this safety standard. Like the Smart 4Two.
That sounds amazing, right up till you find out that they're really expensive, more than most bubblecars, and owners tend to rev them to death, using the "drive it like you stole it" mindset.
This leads to Yahoos replacing the little efficient motorcycle engines with a Hayabusa engine and doing burnouts, as above. It rather defeats the purpose.
However, as poverty grows and roads are left to erode, and they are, make no mistake about it, speeds will come down and suspension travel will become a serious requirement again. I see a future for Subarus that won't be shared with vehicles using ridiculous rims that dent in every pothole. Even Jay Leno has commented about this. California roads just aren't what people want them to be. They are becoming more like the Baja 1000 and less like the smooth LA freeways of the 1990s.
As roads get slower, crash speeds drop so the need for 160 mph head ons is lost. Eventually real freeways will max at 60 mph, 10 over, because the road surface will be so full of holes going faster is suicide, and 50 mph when there are chunks of road flying out the size of a coffee cup? Not too bright. It becomes really dangerous and some of those bumps will flip a car or cause a pileup at speed. Enough of those accumulate, the foolish drivers cease to be a problem to others because their cars are wrecked and they've died. This is why a light vehicle with a nice bouncy suspension and a small engine makes sense again. I would like to see laws passed allowing these experimental vehicles on California roads and highways, going around CARB instead of through them, which generally murders innovation and has stopped my favorite motorcycle from being allowed on the roads here (The Suzuki TU250X).
Yesterday, as a test, I used Forza Motorsport 4 to drive some nasty 70's musclecars. Big and loud, and a suspension so bad you kind of barged your way around hoping to stay on pavement some of the time, and really worse than the Koeniggsegg. These cars were terrible. I'm amazed anyone survived driving them in the real world. Of course, in my childhood lots of people DIDN'T survive on those twisty roads, so Jeremy Clarkson's smug accusations towards Detroit are largely justified. Just remember he's equally insulting towards British cars of the same time period.
While the Honda Civic was originally powered by the 4 Cylinder engine they put into their highway cruiser motorcycle, Suzuki built Triumph's 3-cylinder water cooled triple into Geo Metros and their own tiny cars and jeeps, now gaining ground as Ford's Eco Boost diesel, of all things. I have to wonder if that engine will ever go into something lighter and more fun that isn't shaped like an Egg? One can hope.
Detroit tends to be a little too precious with their economics while continuing to make 70's Musclecars and Trucks nobody can afford to drive so don't sell. Why can't they build a small sports car cheap? The nearest dealer has a line of new Chargers and the other one has a line of new Mustangs and gasoline is headed up 50 cents a gallon again. A commuter car only needs to hold a couple bags of groceries. And leave out the fake back seat already. Stop pretending it's a family car. They're doing the right thing with the Ford Fiesta and if the Focus lost about 500 pounds it would drive more like a sports car and less like a short station wagon. I consider that important. The kick in the pants from the Fiesta's power to weight ratio and manual transmission is part of what makes it fun. Station wagons are hard to cool on a hot summer day, drive like they're heavy from all that high weight from the passenger compartment to the tailgate, and many people around here put a roofrack on it to show they're sporty type, ignoring that the rack puts so much drag on the car they've lost 3-6 mpg showing off.
But a bubble car doesn't have to suck. The Ford Fiesta scored Car and Driver and Road and Track car of the year. It has a 200 hp, manual transmission straight 4, with a turbo. Fun. Not exactly motorcycle, but most straight 4 engines are based on motorcycle 4's back in their history. When you go further back, there are more examples.
The Citroen 2CV was also a tiny 2 HP engine. They built the doors wrong so the windows only open with flaps and you can't really lock them, which turns out not to be much trouble because nobody sane wants to steal one. This is the car from which you get the term "lemon law" meaning Bad Car. They are hard to kill permanently, but rarely reliable enough to trust so are scattered around Southern France.
Most "City Car" class vehicles are powered by motorcycle engines. They only really seem to be used in Tokyo and London, since Tokyo has no room to park and London is populated by communists taxing each other and hogging parking spaces with electric hybrids etc. Very silly.
The thing is, you don't have to have a motorcycle engine powered vehicle that sucks. You can have something fast and fun.
Lots of tiny little cars can be powered by motorcycle engines and rev high or not as the operator decides. Who wouldn't want their own Opel Cadet if you can't go faster than 40 mph because all the roads have gone to gravel and dirt anyway? It is all very interesting. People think "Oh that will never happen. I won't allow it!". We know those kind of blowhards that are nowhere to be found when the bill is due. In the real world, tar is expensive and that's what roads are made out of, as well as gasoline, and gasoline has a better markup. So someday you'll be able to buy expensive gasoline but won't be able to find any paved roads to drive on. And someday is sooner than you think. Worst economy since 1931.
Most smart phones and all tablet computers will allow you to read a book. Amazon and Barnes and Noble will sell you a discounted gizmo to do that, since you're basically paying for a credit card to buy electronic books they don't have to print but sell to you anyway. They just provide servers to handle the money and storage for the download. DRM does its thing but $10 for a digital book that can be lost in a hardware failure or accounting problem is a little off-putting. And databases hate me for some reason. I never should have insulted that budding programmer back in Junior High. How was I to know he'd end up a major architect in databases?
However, and this is important, both services and the local libraries, all point to online archives for literature of free downloads. Project Gutenberg is famous for this. Lord of the Rings is an old series by JRR Tolkien (note that the Summer Knight was named Ronald Ruell in Jim Butcher's novel) is now public access and open for personal download. You can view it on your PC through Adobe Acrobat or any word processor, rather than pay for a tablet or electric book reader. You can also listen to the entire Silmarillion, all 15 hours of it.
I prefer to call them electric books rather than ebooks because it is funnier, and pronouncing "e" by itself is the kind of sham technology nonsense which annoys me after 18 years of IT work. "I" and "T" being pronounced individually as well, and deeply annoying when my primary customer's most common demand was "Ah juss wannit ta work!". If you have ever worked in IT, those are the words you dread because it is the gap between ignorance and expectation. In IT, problems are either caused by ignorance of simple operation or the tip of an iceberg of damage requiring hours of effort to repair, which will not be appreciated or understood by the plaintive whining of the "customer" who can't believe how seriously buggered it all is thanks to their downloading Whack-A-Mole spyware.
I have been pondering purchasing an electric book, such as the Kindle Paperwhite. It's just over $110 at the local office supply store, which is cheaper than Amazon sells them for. The upside is 8 weeks of battery life. The downside is no audio, no expandable memory, and no proper OS, though for reading only it is dandy. I could buy a tablet, which is bigger, heavier, and much shorter battery life, but does a ton more things, however tablets don't have a full OS so much as the expanded credit card business which a basic reader mostly avoids. Apps, such as found on Apples and Androids, are mostly subscription with a monthly charge, leading to a death by a thousand cuts. If you have many friends and no sense of personal pondering or individuality, you must be constantly affirmed by texts and facebook nonsense and proving you've been somewhere. The downside of such things is they're heavier, bulky, and not as convenient as something smaller. The reader, the Kindle, is 6 inches and small enough for a larger pocket. That said, since I've found that there's a huge archive of free books online, to protect Western Culture through literature libraries of noteworthy parts of our development.
I can put audiobooks on my tiny MP3 player, which uses AAA batteries from my Insulin pump, where they found first use, and yet retain sufficient power for about 10 more hours of music or books. I've got the Hobbit on there, read by an actor in 1974, the same recording I had as a child my mother gave to me and my brother when we were kids. Found all 13 CDs of the Silmarillion too, which may end up painfully long. I've never bothered with it before. We'll see. I long thought one of the strengths of LoTR was that it referred to past events without explaining them, which is an immersive setting technique in good writing.
I also found Unbeaten Tracks of Japan by Isabella Bird. This is 150 year old travelogue of an English woman in Japan, who apparently was only healthy when she travelled. Japan of 1878 is a very odd place, if you didn't know, and remains odd today. Years ago, when I first understood just how crippling my Diabetes would be, and how limiting it is, I swore that when I was cured I would backpack the Pacific Crest Trail, up the Sierras, from San Diego to Canada. Japan is mountainous like California, and I'd be seeking the same kind of solitudes and all the places that aren't Tokyo. Why go to Japan and do the same thing when I don't speak the language and haven't done the same here? Listening to life in Japan reminds me of what I haven't seen here yet and I ponder that while bicycling the various roads would be painful and slow, scootering it would be about the right speed and level of exhaustion to satisfy. I say level of exhaustion because travel is about seeing things and being tired enough to ponder the day's vistas. Google Earth is good for this, for overview, but on the ground its best done slowly so you can see the people and stop for every visual curiosity. And since I speak English, I'd be able to communicate with my Fellow Californians on such a journey, far better than I would in Japan. So in a way, the travelogue makes me want to explore more at home. I suppose I could take my car and meander down the mountain into a neighborhood with mansions I've glanced through. And by down, I mean that as downslope from here, closer to the creek.
If I were using a convergence device, I'd have to carry a tablet on my hike to take pictures. Instead, I have a camera that slips into my pocket, has its own battery, and a proper mechanical zoom lens so the pictures are sharp instead of fuzzy or covered in dust or scratches since most cellphone and tablet cameras suffer from those ills. Wrapping a tablet in a case ALSO increases its weight, which rather undoes the value of making it light in the first place. If I do settle down and buy the Kindle Paperwhite, as I think I shall, I plan to just use it plain, as I do with several of my gizmos. Plain is good enough, provided you're careful instead of a moron. I'm not a moron. I am careful. My stuff lasts.
I can see the point of an Android tablet as a reader with more stuff it can do. I can. And that's fine. I just don't think I need one. The idea of carrying a tablet on a hike so I can have GPS or a camera is laughable to me. I have to wonder if other people do that more than once? There's one born every minute. I'll stick to a regular PC for writing and data processing projects. Its more efficient and less likely to break or get scratched or wet or stolen. Be sensible.
If you like steampunk, you're a Conservative. You might not realize that's the underlying message, but it is. A lot of people these days are going through pretty severe future shock. Few people realized, back when being progressive meant following a man with a funny mustache in Germany who planned to bring technology and order to a chaotic world for the greater good, that those same ideas and demands would continue like an in-bred 5th column today and result in apocalyptic visions of disaster like Elysium, the ultimate end of Obamacare: 2 tier health care. Nice.
Steampunk was utterly different. Steampunk is pre-plastic, so all plastic stuff is either wood or cast iron or brass. This makes it heavy and requires maintenance and its not the most durable but its also expensive enough in labor that someone gave a damn about it when they were manufacturing it, so Steampunk has art on it. Not just simple plain beams or covers. People cared about their work. Art Deco, like these Decopods, is all about beauty AND function, and nevermind how long it takes to make.
This is an example of steampunk, more or less. Harley Bikers are getting into diesel punk, though their Rat Bikes are mostly just ugly and often loud, and wrapping fireproof bandage cloth over exhaust pipes is not a great look. Same with hard-tail frames with no rear suspension. It makes you go even slower or wreck even faster. I wish they'd think hard about their choices and maybe start building hot-rods. Hot rods are usually pretty. Rat Rods aren't, but nobody admires them either. People admire hot rods. That's the sort of dieselpunk people can get behind.
Steam punk is neat because there's often lots of steam powered stuff, clothes that fit, with buttons, trains and biplanes and early radios and horsedrawn buggies and early jalopy cars. Art deco and the relevant mix of gingerbread and modernism made for some really odd art, especially in stained glass and tile.
The downside to cheap labor is the man who makes the ornate AND functional part takes longer than the one making the purely functional and it costs a lot more. We're still obsessed with cost when so many people only care about showing off. Top Gear is about showing off how little you care about money. Most of the viewers will never own a supercar, even a used one that breaks down all the time. Many will own a sedan or hot hatch, however, and those are fun. They make them ornate and pretty, much as Harley Owners fiddle with their bikes to make them unique chromed art pieces they can ride around the country, showing off. Years ago, when I was working Retail in the Bay Area, I met one of the original chopper builders from Livermore. I've since seen him on the highway headed out of the Bay Area at 95 mph with his friends weaving through traffic. His bikes work, though their quality varies with build. They're as expensive as a supercar, $100K. But they're reasonably unique so could potentially be an art investment.
Steampunk is also in favor of airships, which unfortunately have a ton of important flaws and that is why they aren't used much in the real world. Pity. Biplanes, however, are. Biplanes, or planes with an upper and lower pair of wings, have twice as much lift as a monoplane, and go half as fast. The upside is sometimes having twice and much lift and slower maneuvering is a good thing, such as with crop-dusting. As I'm a fan of Silver Spoon (anime) and No-Rin and Moyashimon, all of which are about agriculture schools, something Japan hopes young people will go back to doing since most of Japan's GDP goes to importing food from California, rice specifically, because Japanese rice is usually Calrose grown about 40 miles west of me, it would help Japan's economy if they grew more. Most of Japan's rice paddies are empty, fallow. They don't have the people to do the work, probably because it doesn't pay for beans. It SHOULD, but it doesn't. If Japan mechanized their rice growing like we do, they could be feeding themselves and export some to China and Korea as well. Folks who can pay. Steampunk isn't about rice farming, but since the combines haven't been built yet, there's no reason they can't be fancy and ornate works of art, or rice can't be planted by biplane they way they do here.
Isn't that cool? Now imagine you did THIS for a living instead of stood behind a retail counter smarming at people you'd rather light on fire. A better life could be yours.
Another good area for future employment of the steampunk variety, beyond the obvious Bed and Breakfast hotels with frilly maids and valets, is proper first class train stewards. You see, heavy rail passenger transport doesn't have to be miserable, filled with measles infected Patient Zero vectors, like a recent train on BART.
First Class can be nice. Depending on qualifications and services, a steward may end up a very well paid job. If you're going to be smarming, you may as well be paid enough to do it properly. Financial incentive is win.
It is somewhat ironic that the town I came from has a fair bit of rail-based steampunk going on there. Festivals with the defunct railway that hasn't been torn up for scrap yet. When I was a fresh high school graduate, they were still shipping lots of lumber out of there, roaring through town rather faster than is safe, but still, few were killed. People were more self aware of danger then. ADD and ADHD wasn't the universal answer to stupid people. Anyway, folks dress up and display penny farthing bicycles and rail-scooters. Its fun.
The essentials are fitting clothes and mechanical rather than electrical gizmos. Good times. Better than today in many ways.
