The Truth About Aftermarket HID Conversion Kits.

One of the most popular topics I run into on car forums is the discussion of how to “upgrade” a car with aftermarket High Intensity Discharge lamps, or Xenon headlights. I find the discussion amusing, because the posters readily admit that they could have ordered their cars with the Xenon headlights in place before they took delivery, and opted not to do so in order to save a few bucks. They often find out later that not only are those aftermarket conversion kits not legal, and not DOT approved, but properly installing Xenon headlights after a car has been purchased is prohibitively expensive.

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Viola’s New Shoes

Viola came with Goodyear Excellence run on flat tires. These tires are great for summer driving, and I liked the traction they got in the rain. I felt pretty confident driving on them until the colder temps hit, and then I felt like I was skating on dry pavement so hubby and I agreed that Viola needed dedicated snow tires.

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Toyota Abusing DMCA?

I’m not sure how much stock to put into this article, that comes to you via /. But I will say this much, if this is true, then Toyota are a bunch of A-holes that are not worthy of the admiration of those thousands of folks who put up wallpapers of their Toyotas/Scions/Lexi.

I often have to wonder about the state of the world anymore, where people are constantly being forced to question weather they actually own a thing when they pay money for it, or weather they just own a license to use it. I would have a hard time spending the amount of money that it costs to buy a car, if I couldn’t take pictures of the thing and I couldn’t refer to it by its product name when telling others what I really think about it, and was only allowed to use it for as long as the company felt it was appropriate for me to use it. That would be precisely why I don’t buy songs on iTunes and why I still buy DVDs rather than downloading my video digitally via iTunes or some other service.

If I shell out money for a thing, I should be able to use it on whatever devices I choose, and fangirl about it in whatever way I find to be appropriate as long as that doesn’t violate the rights of the copyright holder. So if I take a picture of a debadged Toyota… okay, you know what, I can see Toyota pitching a beef, especially if I don’t identify the car as being a Toyota. But if I leave the badges in place and say, “This is my corolla!” Toyota needs to shut the hell up and call it free advertising.

If this is for real… the lawyers at Toyota really need to learn a hard lesson about alienating consumers and I’ll never buy Toyota again.

Motoring Love and Love Love.

I’m reposting this here from a post that I put up on North American Motoring this morning. It was in response to a thread where a guy was having issues explaining his love for his MINI to his girlfriend, who just could not wrap her head around it. You can find the thread here.

I’m not a huge fan of Subarus, but my mother is in love with her Subaru Legacy. My father bought her a brand new one for Valentine’s day in 2007 and while it wasn’t exactly what she wanted, (my dad added more options than she would have, etc), she quickly fell in love with this car. My mother called me squealing about how beautiful this car was when my dad brought it home for her, and how wonderful it was that he’d bought her a car for Valentine’s day.

Flash forward. 2 months later. My dad borrows my mother’s brand new baby for the first time to drive it to work because his car was in for its annual dent removal. 2 blocks up the road from their house, he rear ends a lady as he’s reaching for his coffee cup.

My mom had to go pick him up from the scene and when she saw her precious baby, she burst into tears on the spot. She still has not forgiven him for hurting her baby that day, even though he had it fixed and the damage was minor.

She will never let him live this down.

Flash forward a year, to me bringing Viola home. My husband was scared to test drive her, but I insisted. I refused to bring home a car that he would not drive. Within a month of me owning my car, my husband still hadn’t driven it and finally he got up the nerve when he wanted to surprise me when meeting me at the airport.

My husband was terrified of parking Viola at work, he was terrified that I would never forgive him if he hurt my car, so he refused to drive it for the longest time… and then I looked at him and said, “Dear, they’re called ‘accidents’. If you wrecked my car, I’d know you didn’t do it on purpose. That’s why they’re called ‘accidents’.”

Now, my husband drives Viola once a week, without fear.

It’s all about your attitude. Your spouse may not understand the MINI thing, but they will understand your love for your car. Your love for them should be enough to forgive them if they have an accident. Accidents do happen, and we should all be thankful when the ones we love walk away from them unscathed. That means our cars did their jobs in protecting the lives inside them.

Learning to Drive.

I used to love Japanese cars because they had all of these neat gizmos attached to them, and they ran for years and years without complaint, but I have since come to realize that I sacrificed so much to have the technology and the reliability. I sacrificed control, I sacrificed self-confidence and freedom, but worst of all, I’ve now proven to myself that James May was right. To paraphrase, he said that Japanese cars, while extremely technically advanced are completely soulless. I never understood that phrase until now. You see, I’ve never before owned a car with a soul.

I love this car because she has a soul. There is a life to Viola that makes her unique from every other MINI, and now that I’ve driven more than one MINI, I can safely tell you that there is no other car that is quite like her. The other MINI I drove was the same model, same year, everything was the same about the car, except the color and the leatherette seats… and I emphatically hated driving that car. That car, while still doing what I expected a MINI to do, was not Viola. It had a personality that did not mesh with mine. It was like the kid that you tolerated because you had to sit next to him in class, but otherwise, never would have said a word to. So, obviously, I take it personally when someone cuts in front of me on the freeway, or honks their horn because they want me to do something that puts Viola in danger simply because they are in a hurry. Thankfully, Viola and I have a rapport and I know what her limits are so that when push comes to shove, I can steer her out of danger.

Tight steering is a beautiful thing when you experience it for the first time, and when it comes to tight steering, Viola is both relentless and unforgiving. I can actually turn my vehicle into the lane I am turning from–this is a completely new experience for me, since the Toyota Corolla has a turning radius that roughly approximates that of your average household vacuum cleaner. Because the steering is so tight, driving the MINI requires concentration and thought on my part. I have to interact with it, and be a part of the process. I am no longer just a variable in the equation. This should mean lots of good things, but it also means some bad things too because now that I am paying more attention, I notice what other drivers are doing more and it scares me.

Most people seem to wander aimlessly behind the wheel of their cars. They operate them as if they had the auto-pilot switch flipped on. They’re checking their lip gloss in the rear view. They’re on their cell phones talking to their wives. They’re flipping switches, pushing buttons and turning dials. I’ve seen more than one person reading a newspaper and drinking their coffee while having one index finger on the steering wheel. All of these extra-curricular activities behind the wheel are inherently dangerous. Any time you are doing something behind the wheel of a car that is other than being behind the wheel of a car, your awareness of your surroundings is cut in half.

I thank God every day that Viola handles as well as she does, because I have been in more near misses since purchasing this car, and I believe now that half of the problem is that I am noticing how people behave when they drive. The other half of it, is that people really just don’t care about other drivers when they are behind the wheel. I humbly submit my experience from today as proof.

While driving down the road with my daughter and a friend of hers in the car, a blue Lincoln was heading the opposite direction down Mission street. In the middle of the road, this driver decided suddenly that he had gone the wrong way. Rather than pull up to the intersection and make a legal U turn, this man decided it was in his best interests to flip a three point turn in the middle of the street and proceeded to do so. In the process of doing this, without signaling, without caring, the man backed his car into the lane that I was driving in. If I hadn’t jogged to the right, my car would have been totaled and I imagine that I and both children would have been seriously injured in the accident, even at 30 miles per hour. This man did not know, or care or even remotely consider that I might have children in the car. He was too busy being self-absorbed. He was too focused on the fact that he was lost and had gone the wrong direction and his need to get where he was going superseded my safety and the safety of the children in the car with me.

What’s really shocking is that I see this sort of behavior on the road every single day. Every time I see someone take one of these risks that puts me, or another driver in danger, I just want to shake them and say, “One of these days, the other driver will not be a better driver than you, will not have a better reaction time than you do, will not be a safer, more aware driver than you. That other driver will be talking on their cell phone, or checking their lip gloss when you decide to do the wrong thing because you make a snap decision that the risk is worth it to you. What if it’s not worth it… to them? What if they have a brand new baby at home that needs a father? What if they have a pregnant wife in the car that is heading to the hospital to deliver their child? What if there are children in the car that would have otherwise lived long and normal lives, if not for you and the decision you made behind the wheel of the car that day?”

The solution to this, of course, is that none of us should ever have to think about those things because we should choose to be safe motorists. We should consider the needs of others, before we consider our own needs, and not even at a level of who gets into the wal-mart parking lot first, but out of a certain respect for something much more basic.

Life.

Suppose that you chose to be aware and involved in the process of driving your car. Suppose that you stopped merely operating a motor vehicle and became a driver. Whose life would you save by lane changing one afternoon? Which kids would get to smile as their dad walked in the door because you made the right decision and chose to pay attention?

I don’t imagine that the guy in that Lincoln cared about any of those things today, but some day, he might. He might choose to wake up and stop putting himself before others. Someday that guy might wake up and decide to become a hero. Some day, he might read this blog and know exactly who is speaking to him and realize that the crazy redhead behind the wheel of the silver MINI Cooper spared him from injury and spared his car from damage today by knowing that she could trust her car to move as fast as she turned the wheel.

Driving a car that makes you get involved in the process really is a completely different universe that is something entirely other than simply sitting in the cockpit of a corolla. The stress that has come from my noticing and becoming more aware of other drivers has been enough to make me want to take up drinking, but I know that I will grow accustomed to it in time.

It’s just that I’m really not sure that I should ever accept it.

Life Behind the Wheel of an Evil Genius.

It has officially been a month since I bought my MINI Cooper. Viola is an evil little car. I have broken no laws behind the wheel of this vehicle, but boy does she tempt me toward the dark side. There are several twisty, windy back roads in the area that I have always wanted to find some official means to have cleared and make it legal for me to do 90 mph on them for even just ten minutes, but I never had a car that was capable of taking those turns at 90… before I met Viola that is. I haven’t tried it, so I’m not 100% sure, but every bone in my body tells me that this little car could take those turns at 90 without having the passengers leaning to one side of the vehicle, but this is just one of the many evils that she tempts me with.

The other day, I was at a stop light parked next to a Mistubishi Eclipse Spyder. There is a horrible irony in this, in that a friend of mine recently told me that he would love to have a Spyder. Dave, you’re far cooler than this guy so please take no offense. The driver of this car looked like he was all about looking cool, and he revved his engine at me and stared at me and smiled. This informal invitation to race seemed stupid to me. I’ve never raced someone before, but I figured that as long as I kept it legal, it was okay for me to test what my car could do from a dead stop on dry pavement. So when the light changed, I didn’t floor it and in spite of this, the Spyder seemed to be lacking in forward momentum. Maybe his car needed work, or maybe he had crappy tyres, but the Spyder had no acceleration out of the gate. I just calmly stepped on the gas, and calmly accelerated to 35 mph, and by the time I got there, dude in the Spyder was half a block behind me cursing from behind the wheel of his car. God, I love my MINI.

This is the first car I have ever driven that has reminded me of my childhood wish to be as cool as Shirley Muldowney. I got to watch her race at the drags when I was a kid. My dad took me to the drags every summer, and I hated it at first, but when he told me about Shirley Muldowney and I saw the pink dragsters, I immediately became fascinated with them. Funny cars, not so funny cars, fast cars, chutes popping out the back as the engines roared so loud that I thought my ears were going to bleed… and I hated the waiting between the races and I hated the noise, but watching those cars tear ass down the strip with my dad will always rank up there with my most fond memories of him.

Luckily for me, there’s a local racing park here where I can rent time and take my car out for some legal racing, and I have never thought that I might do such a thing, ever, because I saw accidents on tracks when I was a kid. I know how dangerous racing is, even if you’re just doing time trials for fun on a Saturday afternoon, with no one else on the track with you. It doesn’t matter, racing is dangerous. You have a 2100 pound machine, in the case of the MINI, moving at high velocity with steering that is on a hair trigger. If your foot slips off the gas and onto the brake, you’re spinning out and possibly spinning into a wall. And still… part of me is extremely tempted to start doing time trials with Viola… because it would be so damned fun that I have a hard time imagining anything better than setting my hair on fire while behind the wheel of her on a Saturday afternoon.

My car being an evil genius is also about more than just the bad things that she tempts me to do. There’s a rhythm that you get into when you’re behind the wheel of a car that you love, there’s a certain synergy that happens between man and machine that leaves you feeling a certain way about the machine when you’ve finished your turn with it. When I got behind the wheel with Viola the first time, on the test drive, she was a show off. She’d been the dealer demo and you could tell that this car begged for more out of life. That little loop around the dealership was so familiar to the car it was almost as if you were riding the thing on rails, but there was something there, something more. Something that said, “Get me out of here!”

After the paperwork was signed, that is precisely what I did. On the drive back from Tacoma, I learned exactly why my car is an evil genius. Not only does she tempt me to break the law, but she inspires me to tell everyone that I can about her. She intends for MINI Coopers of all shapes and sizes to become the only car in the world, and certainly, for as long as I drive her to me, she will be the only car in the world. Yeah, I have access to two other cars, but nothing else will be my MINI Cooper.

Introducing, Viola.

I picked her up yesterday. She’s incredible and this is the first time in my life that I have ever been in love… with a car. Now I understand my Dad’s obsession with that mustang when I was a kid.