Why didn't anyone tell me…

So if you haven’t seen the Fisker Karma, it is quite possibly the sexiest American car aside from the Ford GT (not Mustang GT, btw), and even then it’s a toss-up which you prefer. I’ll put aside the political and other nonsense surrounding the company and the politics and positioning, I’m just going to talk about the car and driving experience.

So first of all, the exterior. It’s stunning to look at. It’s as long as the family minivan, lower than your average Civic, and as wide as the white dashed stripes on the interstate. It’s really that big, which is something that’s lost in pictures. It’s menacing without being too aggressive, but impossible to miss on the road. It’s beautiful in its own way, and I don’t mean that as an insult. You won’t be confused for a small lithe Ferrari, but this isn’t after all that kind of car. The sparkles in the paint are made by glass flakes, which have a very very slight difference from metallic paint – every once in a while you get a slightly colored fleck in there where the light doesn’t come back pure white, and it makes it all the more beautiful for it. But mostly it just looks like paint. The size of the car can pull off a pure black if you want too – the reflections and size of the body panels can give you that mirror shine for large reflections that a black car needs. Having a top with the solar panel pieces means you can drive the vent fan while the car is parked so it won’t be as hot when you get back to the car, and having the top be black when the rest of the car isn’t is not a bad touch. The huge wheels are deceptive on a car this large – you don’t realize how big they really are when you see the car as a whole. When you stand a 6-year-old next to it, you realize they’re as big as the tires on many SUVs, but twice as wide.
The interior is another story. The one I visited was the eco-chic non-leather version. It’s soft to the touch like a short velour and can be rubbed to get that standing-up or laying-down look, but not too much. It’s not bad. The glass (acrylic?) panels on the interior are an interesting touch – one in each door and one on the center console. The eco-chic model embeds an imprint of a leaf on these panels, which gives them some sort of reason to be there. On the other models these panels would just be clear, which made me poke and prod at it, expecting it to open and hold something like my iPod. In reality it was just a decorative thing. The seats are wonderfully comfortable. For reference, I drive a 2008 BMW with their spectacular sport seats, and these hold up to that standard. They’re bucketed enough to let you feel stationary even in corners, and they’re tall enough to support even us over-tall Americans. I’m 6’1″ on a good day and there was room both in the seat and in the roof for someone taller than I. Looking at the instrument cluster display (an LCD instead of mechanical), it’s good looking, visible even in bright light, and shows you familiar things. It’s not distracting, but it’s my first experience with an LCD cluster.

The drive of the vehicle is a new experience. For one thing, it’s planted. In economy cars, the little tires are subjected to a lot of lateral drifting between settling in the contours of the road, the wind, and other lateral forces. The big wide tires and the massive weight of this car immediately tell you, “I’m not going anywhere you don’t tell me to go.” It’s very solid and inspires confidence.

As the driver of a proper overpowered sports sedan, let me tell you the equivalent 4o0hp in this car are Not The Same. It’s not that it’s under-powered or meek, but a car with this much weight needs the full 400 to move in any sort of way. Also, it’s not a track stomping driver’s back roads burner. It’s not bad, it doesn’t sag or display bad manners, but it’s too big and too heavy to make that 400 hp feel like a powerful sports car. What it does do is give you the confidence to merge with the foot down, pass with impunity, and surge silently around the world in quiet, effortless comfort. It’s quite an experience. I guess it’s a question of expectations. If you expected an M5, you will be disappointed. If you expected an Avalon, you will be absolutely delighted. Even the back seats are as comfortable and tall as the front – the interior provides more comfort and luxury than you should expect from what amounts to a first effort. It’s everything you could want from a daily driver – including the 62mpg rating.

Driving at low speed is CREEPY. There is NO SOUND. So much so that Fisker installed speakers (where you expect the exhaust to be) so there’s some sound coming out of the thing. You feel like the car slipped out of gear and the brakes failed when you first start moving, a feeling I’m sure would pass if you had it every day. Once you get above 40 or so, the typical road noise and transmission motion sounds take over and you feel like any other car, but that low speed experience will surprise you for a bit.

Summary

So if you want a sports car, this isn’t it. If you want a daily driver or grand tourer that is as beautiful as you can find, as eco-naut as you care for, and as crazy as you have ever imagined – this is it. It’s unreasonable in all the right ways, and even better, reasonable in the ways you want it for.

In Short

As documented before, my existing car, ever faithful, is aging. And I’m the one that gets the kids to school. The worries were piling up, and so help me, I wanted a warranty in my world. I don’t mind having a project car, but there’s only a place for that when I have dependable transportation.

I saw the stock market crashing. My diminutive stock holdings were plummeting. I’d had enough. If I’m going to lose 30% of my value, I have more fun ways to do it. So I did. I exchanged the “day traders decided they don’t like you every day for the next 2 years” factor for the sure thing – automotive depreciation.

So I got this.

That was in August. I finally, after some 6 months of owning the car, took the time to do the full paint treatment (clay bar through wax) to undo the damage the previous owner had done to it, which was minor but very annoying. Incidentally, car paint should feel smooth and glassy, not like 320 grit sandpaper. While I was doing this, my neighbor came and asked me what I thought of the car now that I’ve had it for a few months. I figured the reply was worth a post here as well.

It is the last of the fire-breathing dragons. I have named it Smaug.

In short – it’s an absolute monster. I know it uses oil that costs 4 times as much as normal oil. I know the brakes are expensive. I know the tires are expensive. I know the “MPGs” are on the un-green end of the scale. I know that it’s ridiculous that the original owner put the extended leather kit and navigation and cold weather options in. Now ask me if it matters when you’re on a mountain road and nobody else is around. You’re in this fabulously outfitted, beautiful piece of artwork with a musical engine, more power than is safe or sane. It’s an experience I fear will be difficult for anyone to achieve. It really is a masterpiece.

This is not to say it’s without fault. It will blink you from cruising at 65 on the freeway to 125 without you noticing – which did in fact happen one day and shocked me. It does not have a lot of low end torque. It has a manual transmission which annoys me for daily city navigation and one day will need a very expensive new clutch. But I will take these lumps any day of the week, and I do.

This is the part where I wax eloquent about these, so feel free to wander off now if you don’t care.

Still with us? Cool.

I was not able to justify trading in the 1997 M3 toward this one. The trade-in value was, putting it mildly, insulting. Which is not the fault of the dealer, but of the way we assign dollar values to cars. The point being, I now own two silver on silver M3 sedans, separated by 120k miles and 200+ horsepower, and about 6 feet in the garage. This is a lovely sight and a reminder to all you schoolchildren about why you stay in college.

So why did I choose such a ridiculous vehicle? Many small reasons that add up. My first choice, and I’m not kidding, was a BMW 128i coupe, sport package, automatic. I was after something more modern, more efficient, more reliable, and equally fun. After the 1997 M3, the 128 is almost identical in many ways. Weight, size, power, drivetrain, trim. The problem was the door and seat count. 4 seats, 2 doors. Ugh – that won’t do. To fix that, you move to the 328i, with 5 seats, 4 doors, and are available used in plentiful numbers. But to find one with real leather, sport package, nav, etc. you’re in for a hunt. And if you want one that hasn’t been ignorabused (paint scratched by the machine at the gas station, leather never treated, smoker, etc. etc. etc.) you’re in for an even longer hunt. And the best leather in the 328 is not nearly as nice as the leather in my 1997 M3. The Dakota leather may be durable, but it’s just not as pretty, or as soft. And the suspension is different. Don’t let them tell you otherwise – it’s similar, but it’s not the same. And I do go into the mountains and corner hard. I can tell. But it checks the requirements list.

The day I went to look, I saw not one, but two used M3 sedans on the lot. The silver on silver that I’m driving today, and a lovely blue one with… let us say augmentations. Repainted and carbon-fiber fitted front bumper, updated computer inside, and a distinct hint that it had not been kept in its original condition, but “fiddled with.” There was something about it that I didn’t like, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was also a 335i with an automatic that was essentially the twin of the silver M3 I’m in now. And here’s why I didn’t choose any of those alternatives: compromises.

The point of this exercise was that I was tired of the compromise of reliability in exchange for not having a loan. I could get the 128i, in exchange for no loan, a warranty, and constant annoyance at the interior, the missing rear doors, and lots of seat abuse getting the kids in and out EVERY TIME I STOP THE CAR. I could get the 328i in exchange for less apparent power (power to weight ratio), decent mileage, no loan, bad leather, and knowing full well it could be so much better. I could get the 335 in exchange for a very small loan, bad leather, good power, known issues with the engine and fuel system, and knowing it could be so much better. Living with the “I just got something sligtly better but not what I wanted” every time I got in the car is just not worth it. If I’m compromising, do it to the hilt. Fix the old car pre-emptively, live with the lumps, and deal with it. And let the stock market lose 30% of your value in the meantime.

Life is too short for that crap. I bought the M3.

About the Car

The power is delivered in a way that is probably best for any car with this much power. At low speeds an in the low rev range where you’re likely to spin tires because the car isn’t moving, you have sub-normal-ish car power. From a standstill a Camry that stomps the pedal will lead you for 50 yards easy. If you rev the engine higher than 4000 rpm, you get a lot of power very very quickly, so you better mean it when you do it. Also, you will probably shatter windows on surrounding houses, so use it sparingly. That’s where this car shines – the high RPMs.

After 6 months of driving this car, I still don’t ever take the traction control off. I’ve tripped the light in 4th gear on a gentle curve by stepping down too hard. And it’s not that the chassis is twitchy or that the tires are too narrow – it’s just too much power and I haven’t had time on a real track to learn the real limits, so I just let the computer keep me out of the insurance claim lines.

The engine sound is fabulous. It doesn’t do the American V8 muscle car burbling sound, it has something smoother going on. Also the default “stay revved low” mode is much tamer than the M mode, which my kids call “The Angry Button”, which remaps the throttle. The sound is even more pronounced then.

The car has a lot of configurable settings which follow your key around. The driving related ones are related to your favorite power/suspension/traction settings. The power settings are essentially lethargy and KILL. The suspension settings are a bit more subtle : Potholes, Smooth, and Glass. Traction control is Safety, Lunatic, and Physics Only. Honestly while trundling around town, I use lethargy/potholes/safety. If I go into the mountains, I’ll move it to KILL/smooth/Safety. I tried using the glass setting, but I suspect it’s useless unless you’re on a real track. It’s just so stiff that I found the car harder to keep track of on back-hills maintenance-free roads. I would say that the smooth setting is about the default setup on the 1997 M3, not squishy, but not so stiff. Also let me tell you – the traction control has improved mountains since 1997. It really is good. Also, with the M cars, you have one button to switch from sedate to fun – the M button on the steering wheel. It remembers what setting goes with which and jumps all three together. Good stuff. Also, those sets are tied to a specific key, so you can either split it among drivers, or have your track day key and your normal day key to keep 2 separate sets of less/more settings.

The handling is magical. I contribute this significantly to the default selection of tires, Michelin Pilot Sport II’s. But, the suspension is just fantastic. I would drive this car with a 220 HP turbo-four engine if I could keep the tires and suspension as they are. I might balk at weaker brakes, but I would totally skip the high power engine and keep the rest. It’s that good. I don’t need that kind of power, but I will not survive without that handling in my world. Dive into a corner and it will just hold and hold and hold, and the car will not roll.

You do tend to feel like at all times you’re restraining the car. You never really get the chance to let it really breath and soar. Even highway on-ramps, it gets to 65 in third gear happily, at which point you look down and think, “Well, rats. 6th gear then,” and hit the cruise control. Some day I am going to have to find it a place to really let go. I still want to install a full 5-point harness in it.

The interior is beautiful. I know it’s a luxury car, but I’ve seated myself behind the wheel of cars that claim that, and are significantly less sculpted and connected than this. The bonus with the M interior is the lovely, smooth, beautiful Nappa leather that is (was?) only available in the M series cars. It’s the same comfort and same seats as you can get in the other 3 series cars, but the leather is so beautiful. I don’t especially like the Dakota leather in the other cars, although I can see why it’s a great option for real leather that doesn’t show wear as much. I just prefer to take care of my leather and have the nicer grade material.

About the iDrive. Someone else has probably dealt with this in more detail, but I will just point out that it’s based on an optical drive, which is slow for navigation, inputs, and everything to deal with it. The iPod 6G does NOT like the interface, but the 1G iPhone does. I could use just the aux input and leave the control aspects of the interface alone, but haven’t. The “Replace the iPod interface with our own” is not good. There are duplicate slow menus in place of the smooth fast menus on the original device. It’s just annoying.  But it’s integrated  and I happen to have an unused iPhone 1G on hand, so I’ve gone with that. Keep in mind that the 2009 and newer cars have a newer hard-drive based NAV/iDrive/iPhone interface, but it’s not available to this car without a significant warranty violation. The voice control is surprisingly good, I’ll give them that.

Summary

One day, I’ll look back on owning this car and say, “I had one once.” If someone asks me how many MPGs I have, I can say, “It doesn’t matter” with a dazed look on my face. It’s a beautiful car to look at, it’s a beautiful car to drive, and it makes you happy to drive it. While you do feel like you’re holding back the car, at no moment do you think, “…and I HATE that.” Even entering and exiting parking lots is great. It’s a special machine in every way. If you have the self control to own one, it’s a wonderfully rewarding experience.

Horatio Hornblower series. I’ve been through the Master and Commander series a number of times now, and some have said that H.H. series is supposed to be even better. I’m not done with the series yet, I’m in three books already, and what I find is that it’s similar in some ways, but mostly it’s only one-sided. It’s the hero stories, the action stories, the idealist stories without the realities of life. There are no months of blockade duty, no drastic mistakes, Horatio never loses entirely, etc. In the Master and Commander books, the characters are human. In Horatio Hornblower, they are ideals. So I can see it appealing more to some people, and I am certainly enjoying myself, but it will never quite compare to the masterpiece that is the Master and Commander series to me.

The Dresden Files, the whole series. Currently in book 7, which name I can’t be bothered to look up right now. This was suggested by a friend of mine at work, and have been fun reading. Not serious reading, but fun. I bring this up because someone had an incredibly awesome idea I’ll have to outline later, but on the orthagonal graph of good vs. bad, awesome vs. sucks scale, this one is bad-awesome. It’s funny and light hearted, but it’s no Master and Commander. I hold them in the same realm as Michael Crichton and Dan Brown – taken in moderation, they’re fun and remind you why you read. Too many too close together and you get annoyed and hate them. I love the little quips and the silly things they do to make things keep from getting boring, like the war cry, “POLKA WILL NEVER DIE!”, the ego-saving “chlorofiend” which he always has to explain means “plant monster”, and so on. It’s silly fun reading and I’m looking forward to finishing the series. Just no faster than one every two months.

Last weekend my wife and I went to Candlestick Park at San Francisco and took a Car Control Clinic with the local BMW club chapter. Let me just get this out: IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! I highly suggest it.

There are three activities that each take two hours. Braking and steering while braking where you are told to get up to 40 miles an hour and then slam on the brakes so you get within 1 foot of the line of cones, then steer around the cones at 40 miles an hour and slam the brakes on afterward. Slalom, where you weave in and out of the cones, one side fast, U turn, one side slower, U turn, repeat. Then the skidpad, where you go in an oval without steering – using the throttle to steer out and in.

I’m well into the driving simulator thing, so I’m familiar with the theory and have spent a great deal of time pretending to do these things, so doing them in real life is what I’ve been pretending to do for ages. My heart didn’t race, I didn’t lock up, I knew exactly what to expect, but I was feeling the whole experience for the first time really, and really it was a blast.

The only regret I have is that we learned that sunblock can expire. Both of us got thoroughly roasted from the neck up (it was only 65ish all day). But I’d do it again in a moment. What a blast.

So it’s finally happened. For the first time, my car has decided it can’t actually go. It’s a fuel injector problem (so saith the computer, so it must be true). A little fiddling around with other bits has pretty much proved it as well. The engine runs, but it’s clearly a misfire – wobble wobble wobble sputter sputter. The service desk at the nearest dealer (my regular folks having gone for the weekend) says don’t drive it just in case it makes something else happen, so I have to overnight a part because none of the locals keep that bit on hand. No meetings on Monday for me!

This is on top of me learning that the transmission is slipping intermittently and won’t pass the next smog (16 months away and counting). A transmission rebuild with a 3 year warranty is $3800, Factory rebuilt is $5500, not including tax and so on. Yay. So I’ve already got the replacement car itch when this happens. Ole car, you’re not making a very good case for yourself.

Just the same, it’s so much cheaper overall to just keep fixing Old Stiggy, and I have the math that tried to disprove it.

Short story – at 20 kilomiles per year, keeping the car I have, even if I do replace the transmission and fix pretty much everything wrong with it, works out by far the cheapest solution over the next 7 years, INCLUDING an engine replacement. Note that most of the cars on that chart are used, not new. I was trying to prove that it’s getting too expensive to keep, but it doesn’t work out that way yet. But if I get stranded too often, I’ll stop caring what my retirement fund thinks of the decision.

Grr. I guess you can reach me at home until Tuesday or so. I guess I’ll be re-gluing the headliner, flushing the brake fluid, and waiting for the FedEx guy.

We’ve mentioned in the past that we’re preparing for the 24 Hours of Lemons, a much less pretentious racing series than that thing in France with the shining carbon fibers and titanium bolts and so on. Ours is more duct tape and welded steel. But one of the side effects is that you come across a whole category of otherwise useful bits of material that you wouldn’t normally encounter. Like a pair of perfectly good bucket seats. Well, one perfectly good bucket seat, and one trashed drivers seat with suspicious stains that might describe the previous owner’s last exclamations.

Anyway, the seat has to go to make room for things like safety equipment. Combined with donated office chair base and… voila! The most comfortable eyesore ever to roll into your home office.

So there’s no good way to say this. My car has acquired ants. Not hundreds of thousands, but just a couple hundred total.

I don’t want ants in my car.

Late last night I finally put ant poison around the rear windshield where they seemed most active and this morning they’re just gone. But what I want to know is what were they eating? I don’t eat in the car, I don’t let the kids eat in the car, this is not the grocerymobile usually. There shouldn’t be any spills going on. Are they eating the spare? Did they find some long lost biscuit that fell into the suspension? Seriously guys, go back into the ground where I don’t have to kill you.

Transcribed from an email to my family, but suitable here as well:

Saturday, as I’m sure you all know, is/was the 24 Hours of LeMans (the real one, in LeMans, France), which is still running and will end in about 5 more hours. Audi has lost two cars to spectacularly devastating crashes, with both drivers walking away. A Porsche driver was not so lucky and was taken to the ambulance on a gurney, no word yet. The Audi – Peugeot rivalry is in full swing, with the lone remaining Audi driver in front of the three Peugeot drivers. Hot stuff, but I have to sleep. Just the same, a 24 hour race has spent something like 4 hours under the safety car speed limits (they had to rebuild a wall from one of the crashes), and that’s a LOT of time. Formula 1 is in Canada this weekend, so it’ll be weird to think that we could actually watch it live (until Austin or South America again). Practice 2 was good, even the accidents aren’t hitting walls, and the course looks fast. We have qualifying to watch still, which I tend to like better than the actual races. I’m odd like that.

I spent the day washing our car and van. My car still draws respectful comments from neighbors. However, and I’m still not sure how, it’s been covered in ants. I have a couple theories. One is that the tree at work I’m parking under is leaking ants, and the other is that I did see an ant on the ceiling over my car in the garage. Maybe they are falling off the ceiling onto the car and never quite finding their way off again. Just the same, I’m tired of them, and so is Child Two. But after the washing, perhaps they’ll go.

Evening had us go out to see Pirates of the Caribbean IV, which was a laugh; a definite apology for the last two. Babysitter was Child One’s school teacher, who the dog adopted, then forgot, then adopted, then forgot… what a stupid dog. We had fun, came home, checked on the race, and here we are around 1 A.M.

What a great day!

(Monday after race resumes)

Turns out that all the drivers in the multiple heavy crashes seen during the race fared pretty well (have to check on the news yet this morning), but what an incredible race. The P1 class drivers were mere seconds apart after 24 hours – HOURS – of racing. What a race.

I haven’t written about my home ESXi server in a while, and remember, this is a good thing. Mostly it just works and I get along. The previous hardware combination if you remember was the following:
ESXi supermicro pizza box. Internal SATA non-raid disk for the VMs. Adaptec 3805 card passed through to a CentOS VM so I can monitor and adjust the RAID.
An old desktop box holding the 3ware card, running NFS and acting as an external datastore and generally a fast really big disk.
Not what I set out to do, but the ESXi drivers for the 3ware card required sacrificing chickens, and then they didn’t work. Mostly I just left the core2 and 3ware setup powered off and once in a while when space got tight, boot, shuffle, then off. I considered it the low-electricity way to get around the problem, and one day the single internal drive would go poof, and I’d have to restore from month old backups. Oh well. That’s the price I decided to pay for having RAID management software. BUT…
ESXi 4.1 just came out. Guess what’s inside. 3ware drivers! And guess what else? 3ware/LSI decided to hand out the CLI monitoring/management software! We’re in luck! It’s not quite as pretty as having the web interface, but I’ll take it.
I was able to set up RAID6 for the VM datastore (remember to autocarve the disks!), so now I have a degree of confidence in using it as a backup solution for the various macs in the house (yay FreeNAS!), the speed is great, and I’m only powering one CPU, 17 drives, and 3 PSUs. All things told it’s 17 TB across two RAID6 units, one high speed dedicated for media streaming and the other high speed for manipulating the things that make the rest of the house go. Total wattage seems to be around 200 between the three, and if it isn’t, don’t mess with my view of the world. I’m down one CPU/PSU and network switch to power to make the same things happen in my world, and that’s better than nothing.