joeware - never stop exploring...

http://blog.joeware.net/2007/07/04/925/

Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it.

The acceleration and handling is great. It looks really good. It sounds really good. Absolute joy to drive.

But there are points that annoy me where engineers just weren’t having a good day.

First and foremost that just completely annoys me… The cupholders are in the worst place imaginable, right in the console right in front of the transmission shifter… Hello, it is a 5-speed, you will be moving your arm all over that area and anything there will be annoying. A drink there makes shifting pretty impossible. I know some of my German friends may be thinking, it is a car, you should be driving it, not eating and drinking in it. But on a medium to long trip, I need a bottle of water and it is easier to pull it from the drink holder than having it tucked in somewhere else.

Second, the armrest on the door is in the wrong place, it needs to be higher. Alternately the window ledge on the door needs to be lower. I can’t find a single place to put my left arm while it is steering that is completely comfortable.

Third, when making some mods to my taillights I learned that the subwoofer for the Shaker 1000 system was put so close to the taillight assembly that I had to channel a yoga master to get the nuts off the taillight assembly to take it out. Now this is going to get me every time I need to change light bulbs on the passenger side of the car. Quite annoying.

Fourth, to change the fog light light bulbs you actually have to unbolt the grill… Come on people… I am a child of the 60’s/70’s cars… In those cars you reached in, twisted and popped out a light bulb. At most you used a phillips head screwdriver. If you have to chase around your garage looking for a metric socket to change a light bulb, something is wrong. How many engineers does it take to come up with a good design to change a lightbulb?

Fifth, I got spoiled by the jeep, a full time true convertible. The center console AND the glovebox actually lock with a key. That way if you leave the top down and walk away from the vehicle you can have those items locked and not worry overly much about things in there. Sure someone could force it open but that is always a problem. You at least keep the wimpy burglers out of it. No lock on the center console. I can’t recall right now if there is one on the glovebox as I never lock that as it only ever holds the vehicle manual and a bottle of Advil.

Now one possible idea that would be good to work out and implement… Black is horrible for dust, how about coming up with a system which alternates the charge on the body panels of the car a few hundred times a second which would actually result in dust being repelled. From what I understand, dust is electrically neutral but if you have something that has some sort of charge, the dust will get polarized and if you have a positive charged object, the negative pole of the dust will stick to the object and if you have a negatively charged object, the positive pole of the dust will tick to the object. So if you alternate back and forth, wouldn’t that result in pushing all of the dust away? I could see the car sitting there in the garage, it has a fine layer of dust on it. You fire up the car and then all of a sudden all of the dust just immediately leaps off the car in a puff as the current starts pulsing through the body.

Mods to date…

• Converted from 235/50ZR-18 BF Goodrich G-Force T/A KDWS to 255/45ZR-18 BF Goodrich G-Force T/A KDW NT
• Sequential tail lights
• Shorty (8″) antenna mast
• Painted mirror covers (yeah those stock mirrors look really cheap)
• Luminics Pure White Light bulbs for fog lights and headlights. I am ripping these back out, complete waste of money, they suck.

Mods on the table

• VIN etching on all major glass
• Zeibart paint coating
• 93 octane tune from Livewire
• Magnaflow Catback exhaust
• Roush 5 PSI Supercharger

     joe