Shouzer

I was looking at cars recently, not with any real intent to buy, but just to see what interested me.  I thought to myself, “Hey, with those American car companies failing, maybe I’d see what they had.  Maybe I’d try to support them, even if only in while perusing.”

The problem, as I quickly discovered, was that American cars aren’t appealing–they just don’t look good, imo.  I have no idea how their build quality or reliability compares, and I probably never will.  If there’s not a single car that can make me say, “I’d like to be driving around in that,” there’s not a single car I’ll look into in detail.

I even figured maybe they’d have a some competitive hybrids or something, since that seems to be the way the world is going.  Well, you know what?  From what I saw, they don’t.  Unless I want to start paying $30k or something, but why would I bother with that?  I can get a brand new Honda Insight for under $20k.

Like I said, maybe American cars are all built better and are more reliable, but frankly I doubt it.  That’s exactly one of the reasons Honda and Toyota became so popular.  Even if that is true, though, they’ve gotta have some street appeal too.  Hopefully Fiat can change that for us…

This week, the Obama administration gave GM 60 days to establish a plan for viability and Chrysler 30 days to accomplish a merger with Fiat, otherwise, both would be forced into bankruptcy. In addition, Rick Wagoner was forced to resign from his position as CEO of GM, and he was replaced by Fritz Henderson.

Firstly, I think Rick Wagoner was a bit of a scapegoat here. He really didn’t do anything wrong to merit the forced resignation. Most of the damage done to GM happened before his tenure, and he has done some good things to turn it around. However, CEO of a company the size of GM is a rather unique position. Decent really isn’t good enough. Rick accomplished some good things, and had the economy not turned sour, he might have righted the ship over the long-haul. During the last few months of this crisis, he has not really shown a great sense of expedience in fixing the mistakes.

The new CEO, Fritz Henderson, did an employee broadcast a few days ago, and I was greatly impressed by him. He seemed to have a great sense of urgency about him, and he is clearly intelligent and tough. He is certainly more charismatic than Wagoner, though I don’t know how important that is for a CEO. It is obviously too early to judge him, but I would hire him for the job if I had the power to do so. So while Wagoner got a pretty bum deal, I think they did the right move by giving the job to Henderson.

GM was given 60 days to submit a new plan for viability. Really, though, this is a bit of a misnomer. GM has a lot of constituencies who negatively affect their balance sheet. These are the bondholders who fear they will have to take pennies on the dollar for the debt they hold; the union who fears their contract will be broken; and the dealers who fear the national network will be greatly reduced. The 60 days is not to create a plan; it is to get concessions from all of these groups. The threat of bankruptcy in 60 days is a means of holding the proverbial feet to the fire. Or else it is a means of forcing those concessions as GM obviously cannot survive without them.

GM has no negotiating power with these constituencies, and I think the 60 day deadline will provide that power. If some group is unwilling to give concessions, they will be forced to risk bankruptcy which seems to be an enigma. Without the deadline, they would have no incentive to give in, and this mess would drag on endlessly on the taxpayer’s dollar. The deadline hurts, but it has to be done.

I also think the deal they are giving Chrysler is appropriate too. Chrysler was gutted of its ability to make cars when it merged with Daimler, and now that they stand alone again, they are doomed. Sadly, the merger is their only real hope.

So, without going into details, my car battery was dead after I got back from running PuzzleCrack this year.  I took it out, got it charged, and put it back in.  Everything worked fine (some of my car’s settings were reset, but that’s to be expected), except for my power windows.

For some reason, I could control the driver window and both back windows from the driver’s side, but not the front passenger side window.  Similarly, the controls for my front windows both have two steps when you push them.  Pushing them to the second step causes teh windows to keep going until they’re all the way open/closed.  That wasn’t working either.

It’s obviously not a huge deal or anything, I’ve got a full warranty on my car for 100,000 miles, so I decided I’d just take it in and get it fixed.  I got to the dealership, explained the issue, and the guy told me to follow him out to my car.  He turns it on, rolls the driver window down all the way and holds the button for a few seconds, then rolls it back up and holds it again.  He then did the same with the passenger side.  Somehow that fixed it.

I’m not really complaining, but wtf is that?  I guess it’s a good thing to know for the future, but really…should you even have to do that?

My beautiful, sexy MR2 Spyder is dead. I have had a horrible month with it since I came back from Thailand. It’s like she was mad at me for leaving for a year, or perhaps she felt betrayed because I started working for GM.

First, when I came home, the engine was misfiring. I had to get new spark plugs, a coil was shorted out, and the crankshaft sensor was bad. Then, I started feeling serious cutbacks in the power. It turned out that the inside of the catalytic converter rusted out, and the honeycomb structure fell apart, blocking airflow. I had to get a new catalytic converter, which was luckily under warranty. Finally, as I was driving back to Detroit after my short vacation to Herrin, the engine started knocking. I limped it to the nearest exit, and then towed it to a dealer. They found that I had somehow lost 3.5 qts of oil, out of 4 qts total, and I had a sheared a rod. I needed a new engine. I was not willing to pay for the repairs, so I’ve spent the last week looking for a new car.

Yesterday, I purchased a 2006 Saturn Ion. It’s only got 22k miles on it so it’s still under warranty for almost a year. Plus, the dealer does a lifetime powertrain warranty. This alleviates my worries about my engine melting down again. It’s also got a manual transmission, which I pretty much require in a car now. Here’s a pic:

The lesson I learned from that MR2 is that having a beautiful car really isn’t all its cracked up to be. I sort of forgot about how much I loved it until something really bad happened. It’s not like I got massive enjoyment out of my daily commute, and I rarely took it out on country roads for pleasure cruises. A week or two ago, a terrible human being of a woman in an Excursion backed into me in a Walmart parking lot. She later told her insurance that we backed into each other. That meant I was going to have to pay for the repairs. It was a minor scratch, but it was a big problem because much of the intrinsic value of my car was its looks. Yet, as I said, until that happened, I rarely derived any pleasure from the way it looked. Basically, I got no added benefit from it, but the bad stuff was magnified.

So I went the opposite direction with this car. It’s a stripped down, economy car. It’s about the most practical thing I could buy, which is about the polar opposite of my last car. We’ll see how it goes.

Kyle, this problem in my life plus the current lack of material has kept me from writing any Tales of Awkwardness this week. Now that I’ve gotten it sorted out, I’ll try to come up with something.

The Focus is no more. Scott you can finally stop making fun of my car, as I am no longer driving the Focus.

It had been having some difficulties for the past two months or so–it would randomly loose power when driving–and the people over at Ford could not figure out what was wrong with it. They had since mid-September up until a week and a half ago. So, now it’s become the new delivery car–I know, it’s strange that my parents won’t let me drive it, but they are willing to let the delivery person for the pharmacy drive it, oh well….I mean, after all I did get a new car out of this so who am I to complain, really?

I’m driving a VW Jetta….it’s a great car. Here’s a picture.

It’s quite comfortable and a hell of a lot easier for friends to get into because it has four doors as opposed to two. It’s also a lot roomier than the focus was.

There is a new fully electric sports car created by a company in Silicon Valley.  Here’s a story.  I’m not a huge fan of electric-only vehicles because the batteries have not been good enough up to this point to make them viable.  However, high capacity Lithium Ion batteries are starting to find use in the automotive sector.  We actually tried to get one for the car we built.  I could see electric only vehicles finding a place in the auto market, especially as a commuter vehicle.  Having an insanely quick sports car that was all electric like this one would just be awesome.

The ChallengeX competition finished up last Thursday. We ended up getting 10th overall which I was pretty happy with considering we didn’t have our first test until 3am the night before it shipped. We had a few little Dur-Dee-Dur’s that cost us some pretty big points as well, but I really didn’t care how well we finished. The biggest mistake was when someone forgot to put the fuse back in for the engine cooling fan which resulted in our engine overheating in two of the major events. We also had some major problems with our transmission leaking and breaking down. On the up side though, we did well enough that GM is going to give us a new transmission-electric motor combo so we shouldn’t have those problems next year. The thing they are giving us is pretty sweet. It has two electric motors and a transmission to tie them together with the engine. Plus, it has a 2 speed transmission in it as well, so it sort of has 2 transmissions. It’s kind of hard to explain without getting into some major jargon. Basically though, it will replace our 2 electric motors and our homemade transmission plus give us two speeds instead of one. All of this in a package about the size of one of our current electric motors. Oh, and I forgot to mention that is has more power than our current setup. They originally did not want to give it to us because they thought it would give us too much of advantage over other teams, but I guess we got enough people pulling strings for us that it finally went through.

I had to give three presentations on the last day of the competition. The control strategy presentation, given by me and one other guy, was the biggest point event of the competition. They had 13 corporate big-wigs in this room trying to rip holes in our presentation. I felt pretty exhausted afterward, but I guess we did decently because we got 6th place in that. I also gave 2 presentations for sponsor awards, National Instruments and Freescale. I gave the NI talk basically myself although there was a short demo by another guy, and the prof wrote a paper that we had to submit beforehand. We got 2nd place and $750 for that. I was pretty happy with that. The Freescale award was a disaster. We tried to Captain Planet it by having 4-5 guys talk about different stuff. They were not impressed, but to be honest I don’t even know why we tried to do it. We hardly used there stuff at all. So they ripped us a new one.

I started my new job in Detroit last Monday. I finally got a computer on Friday afternoon. I have yet to get a GM user/pass or the software I need to do the work they want me to do. I didn’t do any real work until Thursday at which point I started assisting the guy I’m going to work with. I basically just made some cables and connectors. That was good because I did not know how to do any of that stuff, and he taught me some good tricks. I was transferred to a new position the week before I came here, and they did not tell me until I got here. Honestly though, what I am doing now sounds basically like what they said I would be doing. I am working in a different location than I thought I would be though, Pontiac instead of Warren.

I am going to be working on a controller for a piece of equipment that tests seat belt anchorages. It sounds like a pretty decent assignment. The department where they do the testing is pretty cool. They have a bunch of hydraulic machines set up to do tests like that on various parts of the car. For instance, there is a machine that slams the doors on the car repeatedly to test the latches. They had big machines that shake the chassis, powertrain, suspension, etc. to see how they will hold up under road conditions. The idea is they take the car out on the test track and get real drive cycles, and then they bring the parts into this lab to test them under the same drive cycle to get repeatable test conditions.

My apartment is really nice. It is a 2 bedroom/2 bath with walk in closets in both rooms, huge overstuffed suede couches, fully furnished kitchen including dishwasher, and washer/dryer. My roommates are pretty cool as well. They thought I was coming in about 3 weeks ago so they were pretty shocked when I showed up. Two of them were gone home last weekend, and the other one came in about 3:30am Saturday night to find me sleeping in his bedroom in the spare bed. I guess he was a little freaked out. The area around the apartment is pretty upscale as well so it should work out well.

i should have figured microsoft would have come up with my own idea before me. oh well. at least they didn’t kill me and take my idea like tim robbins did in antitrust.

I went out to my car yesterday, and there was something on the windshield. My first thought was that I’d gotten a ticket for something ridiculous. Luckily, that wasn’t it. What it turned out to be was a piece of paper that said:

We <3 Your Car

“And would like you to debut it in the 2005 University of Illinois’ Homecoming Parade on Friday, October 21. You would drive a special guest through the parade route.”

Now the first thing is that I obviously don’t go out to my car very often. Like I said, this was yesterday so I was more than a couple week late. But the second is that they know a sweet car when they see one. It was pretty cool; it made me laugh.

Wow. Sucks for that guy.

I went up to Chicago this weekend for the Mazada Zoom Zoom driving experience. They set up what amounted to an autocross in this big parking lot, and they let you drive their cars for free. There were four events: an instructional course where a race car driver rode along with you in an RX-8, a precision driving event where you drove a MX5 miata around a tight course and tried to keep some golf balls in a bowl that was mounted on the hood, a match time event where you drove a 3 or a 6 and tried to match an exact time around a course, and a speed event where you tried to drive a MX5 as fast as you could around a course. The whole thing was a lot of fun, and I would say my driving improved over the weekend.

We also stayed at one of my roommate’s sister’s house, and she had a halloween party on saturday night. Through some unfortunate circumstances, there were only 4 guests there, myself, her brother, one of our other roommates, and one of her friends. So the party kinda sucked. Basically, I just sat there and watched people get drunk.

Unfortunately, there were no good meals to report on. I’m actually a little perturbed about that fact. Seems like to me, if your going to be in Chicago, you should be able to find a good place to eat. Actually, there is a back story though. We got done with the driving at about 12:30 and set out in search of lunch. We decided to go downtown and look for a restaraunt, but the guy who was driving decided he couldn’t find any parking places close enough to anywhere he wanted to eat. We probably passed about 500 restaraunts and several dozen parking garages. I really don’t know what the deal was. We ended up driving back out towards where we were staying and eating at this place called Benigans. We got there around 3:30. So we effectively drove 3 hours to eat at a chain restaraunt. Well, if we hadn’t gone through downtown, the drive would have only been 1 hour, so you can adjust for that.

After all that complaining though, I really did have a good time.

Al got me the video he took of me revving the engine on the Camaro. It’s pretty pimp. Once the video starts, it takes a couple seconds for me to actually do it. I didn’t realize he was recording right away.

Revvin’ It Up.

[Edit:] Oh, btw, I forgot to mention that the rims on the car are actually 17″ Chrome Corvette ZR1 SS rims. They look pretty nice, imho.

I figured I should post some pics of the new hotness, since Hark requested it. For those who aren’t in the know, it’s fully loaded. That means, t-tops, power windows, power seats, leather seats, cd player, and bose speakers. It’s a ’96 Camaro Z28. The Z28 means it’s got a 5.7L 350 in it. It’s a beast. As soon as I can, I’m going to post a video of me revving the engine. Hehe.

BTW, these pictures are actually lot bigger. Just check the actual images if you want the full-sized stuff. Oh, and thanks to Al for the pictures. Hot sizzle, Al!

[Edit:] Sorry, the picutres are down. Too much bandwidth was being used.