Time for an Update

Oh dear! All these pictures of gorgeous open cars have influenced me. And of course, driving the Z car won me over completely! I really enjoyed driving the Nissan, but it was getting old, being a 2004 model.
And then we moved to a townhouse with a single car garage. Did I want to keep the Z as our "only" car? what disadvantages did it have in fulfilling that purpose? We didn't care about passengers, selfishly perhaps, but occasionally the recollection of the narrow shelf behind the MGB popped into my consciousness, prompted perhaps by the frustration of the Z car not having an easily accessible glove box for storing small stuff.
It did have a couple of useful boxes behind the seats, lockable if necessary, but to access each required moving the seat forward...something we found rather awkward, especially when the hood was up. You then had to duck & weave to see inside, & inevitably, what you were looking for was on the other side of the car.
And the navigation system, although probably state of the art in 2004, was really very low-res, with vast un-mapped areas in Van Isle. But curiously, I take exception to what those whiny automotive journalists - who are so lazy they blindly repeat each other in their copy - said about interior materials. I found the leather thick & pleasant to touch & the plastic around the dash, door & console to be reasonably pleasant both to look at & to use. Much was a mock carbon - fibre pattern but I preferred that over plastic pretending to be wood!

And I thought the materials quite durable, given the car was around 15 years old. Admittedly the stitching seams in the seat bottom were becoming stretched a a bit but everything else was still serviceable. Nothing fell off or rattled as we drove along - and remember this was a roadster, not the coupe. It remains in my memory as a wonderful car. Of course, tiny things niggled; the car keys tickled my knees when the seat was positioned comfortably for the pedals & wheel, but that's not much to moan about, is it?

Cars Is Cars

So, in the "automotive world" the big news is that Ford is to cease making cars. What? Steady on, I say, the Ford Motor Company is not going out of business, just rationalising its product. So sedan cars are being phased out, as demand for trucks & crossovers/SUVs continues to ramp up. Apparently the exception will be the 4 seat Mustang. Which isn't really a sports car, being more of a car with a sporting nature, for the most part. The only American real sports car is the Corvette, which, as we observed from a visit to a Corvette car show last weekend, has bloated from a lovely-looking & sensibly-sized vehicle into an aggressive over-the-top extravaganza.
We also observe that most motoring journalists are just hacks nowadays, regurgitating manufacturer-supplied blurbs, parroting each other without much originality. Gone are the likes of LJK Setright, an opinionated intellectual whose views weren't always sensible (he only liked Bristols) but at least were so beautifully written & thought-provoking that his stuff, in, say, CAR magazine, was the most entertaining as well as informative.
But back to Corvettes.

 It's not hard to tell which are the newer models & which date from the earlier, more graceful era.  Mind you, the level of safety & convenience are not at all comparable - the silver one below only had lap belts instead of the safer 3 strap belts we're familiar with nowadays. Also, the seats themselves were not bolstered as effectively. Still, I suspect the materials used were of a higher grade.
 I often wonder why cars have such appeal. It isn't really because of what they DO, so it must be either what they've DONE, in the past, like a classic racing car, or perhaps, it's just because, of how they LOOK.

Such as this Jaguar SS above. Surely no-one doubts that it's a beautiful car, but really, it is better looking than this, umm, is it a Bentley? Looks like a car from the late 1920s, whereas the Jaguar above dates from the 1930s.. it was called SS, from Swallow Sidecar, the original maker of Jaguar cars, but due to the War & the German organisation of the same name, the SS had to be dropped!

I waited for this

Waited nearly 6 months before our Canadian winter - mild though it is in coastal BC - was suitable for an open sports car. After all, there's not much point in powering the top down if it's raining as it often is during those long winter days. If you did, you'd get wet, although, perhaps surprisingly, only when you slowed right down or stopped, because the natural wind tunnel caused by the passage of the car mostly keeps the water out. But you gotta stop every now & again, so thus, our lovely 350Z stayed in the garage. Until now!
Suddenly our weather turned lovely & warm. It was time!
Down to our local ICBC office we went to renew the insurance & tax sticker, where we were processed by a pretty young woman with very bright green fingernails some 30 mm in length.
And then out on the open road again, & what a delight it was to be able to change gears myself, to judge the moment to stretch out my left leg to depress the clutch pedal, letting up on the throttle at the same time, & then snicking the leather-covered aluminium lever into the selected slot. And then pleasurably being aware of the powerful growl of the "naturally aspirated" - meaning non-turbo - six cylinder engine - one that is rapidly becoming a classic in these days of whiny fours supplemented by a hot & noisy turbocharger.

And although this particular photo was taken last autumn, when the first tinges of nostalgia were prompted by a rapidly weakening sun, our last week was both brighter & warmer than you see here.
We drove down the coast a bit, along windy lanes that were ablaze with flowering trees - dogwood, cherry & apple were everywhere & the ash & maples were already showing leaves in pale green. It was very pretty. We took a ferry over to Salt Spring Island & on our return, down to Duncan to see the lovely Flowering Cherry-lined roads all over town. Sitting in the park by the sadly abandoned E & S Railway line we could smell spring in the air, & see people in shorts & summer dresses, in anticipation of the longer summer days ahead.

The air was warm enough that we could sit on the upper deck of the ferry for the 20 minute ride across to the other island.

Soon To Be Topless...

...Because it's Spring. Not that you'd really notice, if you went outside, but as of this writing we've had a full month of spring. Which is a controversial thing to say. Seems like there is an OFFICIAL start of spring & a METEOROLOGICAL one as well. How an Official one can differ from a Meteorological one is beyond me - after all, what are the seasons but weather changes? Who looks at & reports the weather but the Meteorological/Weather Bureau? But still, in Canada, it seems that Officially (& illogically) spring starts at the Equinox, instead of the obvious change of seasons.
I say obvious because it's clear to anyone who pokes his head outdoors from time to time that winter is well & truly over by the end of February. The snow is mostly gone, crocuses are above ground & the grass is greening. Indicating a change of seasons - called spring. By the 21st of March, spring is already rampant - daffodils are out & the flowering trees are beautifying streets in temperate climes like coastal BC.

  This was taken in the last week of March in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria.

Doesn't this look like Spring, to you? It certainly does to me!  And yet, officially, it was still Winter!
Ridiculous, say I. And in most countries I would be in accord. It's apparently mostly a North American thing again. At least we can't blame Trump for that!

But this burgeoning season means Sports Car Weather. Yippee! I can get the Z car out, power down the electric roof, bring over the few items that I transfer from car to car & then we're off. Where to, I don't know at present, but we'll wander up & down the Island, stopping at places that randomly take our fancy, toying with the idea of the expense of venturing across to the mainland. We'll see.

Back In (or On) Shape

I want to revisit the discussion about vehicle shapes, because yet again, I read in a car magazine the oft-repeated moan about people choosing crossovers/SUVs to drive instead of "real" cars. I suppose the argument is that cars, being lower to the ground, are "better" to drive, on account of their being able to corner faster than crossovers, which ride a little higher.
But buying a car isn't just about g-forces around corners - it is a far more complex decision than that, being both practical & emotional. Some people really do need a vehicle with lots of seats for the family, but others, like us, really just look for front seat comfort along with some carrying space in case it's needed.
The trend towards SUV appearances is really a reversion towards a more practical layout of cars & away from the lower, knees-in-your-face set up that too many cars deliver.

Here is an example of the hypocrisy of motor journalists. BMW X6, like the Infiniti QX70 is much denigrated in automotive magazines because of its silhouette curving down at the rear instead of the square box back end that conventional crossovers display. Here's a picture of a popular SUV, the Chevrolet Equinox followed by an image of the BMW X6. You'll observe that while there is less room in the back for things like, say, furniture there's not much difference ahead of the B pillars. In the front where most people sit. After all, how often do you see these vast, 3 row SUVs actually full of people? Hardly ever, mostly it's just the driver, & companion. Very often, it's just a solitary driver.
Now see the Honda Accord Coupe - see how low it is? So I say "why shouldn't people want a graceful silhouette, along with a small amount of hatch space and a slightly higher point of access, instead of sitting almost on the ground & also having very limited storage space, for those rare occasions when a large box is carried?"
And finally, see the last photograph. It's a 1938 Chrysler, I think. Guess what? The fundamental layout is just the same as the QX70 or X6 - a rear-wheel drive layout & a curved back end that is both graceful & reasonably roomy aft of the driver. Of course there is significant difference in how the engine surroundings are shaped, & the windshield is more vertical than nowadays, but after that...not much difference. You sit higher than in a modern road car & the vehicle shape is not compromised by pretending it's a full-blown minibus or hauler of goods.There are specialised vehicles for that, but a nod in that direction can be useful.

And Then It Was Summer

In lovely British Columbia by the sea, summers are reliably dry & warm. Something which surprised us on moving here 4 years ago. We'd expected the West Coast's reputation for rain to persist all year, but instead, for perhaps 5 months, we get very little rain. So little, in fact, that water restrictions are usually in place by July.
It seemed a waste to drive around in an enclosed car, even with the sunroof open, as we were doing. And so, towards the end of a hot, sunny summer, my eye was magically directed towards a sports car. A real "sports car", not a "sporting" car like a Mustang or Camaro.
It only stood out from the other cars in the used car lot because of the lovely orange paint, & because it was mounted on a ramp to show off the elegant lines.
I really didn't know very much about the Nissan 350Z, except that it was the same rear wheel drive platform that our Infiniti was based on known as FM by Nissan, meaning "Front Midship". By this they mean the car is rear wheel drive based with the engine in the front but being pushed back as close to the middle as possible, thereby allowing the wheels to go ahead of the engine. This gives both more foot room, as a narrow inline engine takes up less side to side space than a transversely mounted one, as well as more even weight distribution. Even in a V-shaped 6 cylinder engine, the actual block is much narrower than the top - see this photo on the left:

If the engine were turned around transversely, all those cylinders lined up would take up much more room, which is what happens in front-wheel-drive cars - they sacrifice some "spare" width of the engine area to gain it in the longitudinal area. Space is saved, but at the expense of a little foot room. Following this philosophy, Nissan's Infiniti brand emulated that of BMW.  That orange colour is lovely,isn't it?

But, I thought, it was a coupe, not a "proper" open sports car like the 1972 MGB that I'd once shared with my ex. Still, I took that car for a decent spin around the area & was very impressed. The manual gearbox was a delight, the seats were quite comfortable & the engine, the same VQ350 as in older Infiniti FX35s, was a beautifully sounding delight. So I checked around. And found a lovely, low mileage, 2004 Roadster in terrific shape. And as well, equipped with almost everything - including navigation & lovely leather seats. These latter were a trifle worn, but I put that down to patina! The engine is the same as in the FX35 - a CUV replaced by the FX37 we had before. This model sold for almost twice the price of the base coupe! This is it here - yes, we bought it! I know, it isn't that lovely orange paint, but apart from that...it's perfect! The actual colour is named as grey, not silver, but there's not much difference between the 2 cars we have when set next to each other.
This Z car just aches to be taken out on the winding roads of Vancouver Island & has even been across the mountains into the desert-like interior of the province.

Talking About Shape

I mentioned in an earlier post my thoughts on the trade-offs that accompany front-wheel-drive cars. But there are undoubtedly benefits, too, those being more cabin room resulting from the absence of the rear drive train & differential. Usually too, the engine is mounted transversely instead of inline with the drive direction, allowing what might be called a "cab forward" design.
But I cannot see the advantage in a fwd platform being adapted, as most good machines are nowadays, to four-wheel-drive. If you have to have drive to the back wheels, that power must come along the passenger space to the back axle, thereby negating one of the main benefits of front wheel drive.
I have 2 main objections to the prevailing fwd layout in most cars - the first is the possibility of torque steer, which I observed directly in the Audi 80, despite its modest power, & also the lack of foot room in the front which arises from the space that a transverse engine consumes by the way it is mounted in the car. In every fwd car I've driven it seems to me that the pedals are too close to the driver because the wheel arches intrude. They have to because the transverse engine mounting places the engine ahead of the front axle. So the wheels arches have to move back. Observe the layout in these pictures of older cars - the A pillar - the pillar surrounding the windshield is more vertical than a modern car admittedly, but look at the angles - see how the pillars are aimed behind the front axle. The front wheels are not intruding into the driver's foot space.
Now look at this picture of a competing Lexus RX350. The A pillar is aimed in front of the wheels, which means that the wheel arches will intrude an amount. This is one reason why "prestige" car manufacturers like Mercedes, BMW & Jaguar, (& of course Bentley & Rolls Royce) stick to rear-wheel-drive. See in the older cars here - a green Pontiac & grey Alvis - there is distance between the leading edge of the front door & the wheels? That used to be space where your feet went, but now, as below that space has been consumed in the interest of "package efficiency". Meaning that although the overall vehicle is smaller for its given passenger space, it comes at a price.

In yet another photo of the QX70, it's easy to see the different approaches - the A pillar of the Infiniti is aimed behind the front axle, giving a reasonable amount of space between the leading edge of the door & the wheel - despite those wheels being 21" in diameter!
Certainly there's more back seat space & more room behind the driver to carry stuff - the Acura MDX, which is about the same overall length as the QX70S - even has 3 rows of seats! Why on earth would an older couple need all that? In fact, I have never seen these CUVs with 3 rows carrying any more than just a couple in the front. Should any prospective purchaser really need seating space for 6 or 7 people, my thoughts are that they instead buy a minivan.