Rental car review: Chevy Uplander
The Chevy Uplander is a cross between a mini van and an SUV, but is really just a minivan with an extended nose and a half decent engine. The performance is surprisingly good for a van with hard acceleration and no problem hitting highway passing speeds. The suspension is sort of amusing: the van seems to rock constantly in a kind of reassuring put the baby to sleep kind of way at the smallest bump.
The van has a ton of room and a good stereo. It is fairly comfortable to drive and not particularly fatiguing, but not exactly sporty or fun.
- Quiet - Not too bad but some noise from the huge cabin.
- Comfortable - fairly comfortable.
- Engine - a moderate engine, fairly responsive for the size of the vehicle.
- Suspension - ugh. Wobbles side to side.
- Basic amenities - everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo - acceptable but nothing great.
- Security - not very - everything inside is visible.
Rental car review: Ford Mustang
I got this car with plastic on the steering wheel, the back seat belts buckled, and 5 miles on the odometer. I very much enjoy mustangs: they’re fast and throaty and fun to drive and equipped with loud and amusing stereos.
They are small in the trunk and the back seats are pretty useless - definitely not where you want to stuff an large, elderly coworker. But the car is fun. Fast and fun.
The engine has more show than go - the sound of the engine is one of big power and extreme performance. While the car handles much better than most rental cars, it does not live up to the sound of the exhaust. A nice Audi or Volvo, for example, will accelerate faster, harder, and longer and take turns better, but never call attention to themselves while doing it.
On the other hand, actually going really fast is not always relevant: having fun is more to the point and the mustang is fun. It feels spry and agile and powerful and serves well to take years off the driver’s age. It’s the prefect car to cruise suburban malls, especially if one dye’s one’s hair or wears a toupee. If chicks aren’t the goal, then it certainly makes getting to work an exercise in regression therapy.
Aside from the throaty roar and sporty performance, road noise is poorly isolated but well compensated for by a loud, bass-heavy stereo typically equipped with a CD-MP3 changer that can hold 6 CDs (or maybe 60 albums) which means on older cars one can often find heavy metal compilations forgotten in the changer. Not so much classical.
- Quiet - Not very quiet.
- Comfortable - fairly comfortable.
- Engine - a great engine for a rental car, a lot of fun.
- Suspension - very good for a rental car.
- Basic amenities - everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo - killer stereo: loud and plays MP3s off a 6 CD changer.
- Security - small but secure trunk.
Rental Car Review: Buick Allure
The Buick Allure is similar to the Toyota Avalon in form and function, but isn’t quite up to the task. The Buick is a nominally acceptable American car, but Buick dashboards are (and always have been) these strange, broad flat things that don’t really appeal to me. The car is a reasonable four door sedan, neither particularly bad at anything nor particularly good.
- Quiet - generally quiet, but got a bit noisy on the 401. The AC system is a bit too zealous - it’s hard to just get a vent function on a nice day and the windows open are noisy.
- Comfortable - fairly comfortable.
- Engine - a moderate engine, responsive but not astonishingly so.
- Suspension - it works well enough but isn’t super agile.
- Basic amenities - everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo - it was good enough but the high frequency speakers point straight to the center and so it sound unbalanced (the driver’s side tweeter pointing at the passenger and being inaudible to the driver).
- Security - the trunk is large and secure.
Rental Car Review: Toyota Avalon
The Toyota Avalon is a very nice car - comfortable and large. The engine is powerful and the car is spry for it’s size, quite capable of zipping past a string of cars to make an exit.
We took it up commonwealth avenue in Boston, a street with a far, far less than perfect surface and it the suspension never got upset, nor did it get noisy in the car. While the car is roomy it is easy to navigate though narrow streets filled with stochiometric Boston drivers and pedestrians.
We found the stereo plenty loud and very quite good. The car came with satellite radio, which is kind of entertaining - a punk channel even - but doesn’t work all that well under trees or on narrow urban streets; just blacking out is a bit more annoying than the fade out of standard radio and we find ourselves tuning into the very fine local radio. The radio cover door is a bit over the top: why would you want to cover a radio? It isn’t for security - it’s just aesthetic and makes the radio hard to control when closed by the door edge is ugly when open.
- Quiet - very quiet, very silent.
- Comfortable - extremely comfortable and easy egrees. Well designed controls.
- Engine - fast, powerful and quiet.
- Suspension - very agile and stable. Never got upset.
- Basic amenities - everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo - excellent sound quality though the low frequency isn’t hip hop friendly.
- Security - a large, roomy, secure trunk.
Rental Car Review: Lancia Ypsilon
The Lancia Ypsilon is a surprisingly spry little car. It’s a typical Euro rental, a very compact little car with a manual transmission and a tiny diesel engine. But this little guy has a very turbo charged little mill that is quite zippy, even with four people in the car, very important in Italy where two lane mountain roads are shared by powerful BMWs, funny little farm three-wheelers, tractors, and large lorries.
The car is entirely functional in every important way: it is quiet, it is zippy, it holds four people comfortably, it actually holds some luggage. The lack of a trunk of any sort means you can’t store anything in the car when parked though.
We got the rental while taking a language class in Lucca - we picked it up in Florence and had no trouble driving it along the A11. We used it all week to commute between Pieve di Cerreto, where it made fine time up and down the hill, and Lucca. We had no trouble passing. We met a few couples in class and took them out in the back of the car, even a full-size Australian couple who fit just fine.
Quiet - Fairly quiet for a small car.
Comfortable - I didn’t try the back seats, but the fronts seats are fine, except for having the wheel well where your left foot should go.
Basic amenities - Power everything, but no outside temperature reading. I like knowing the outside temp.
Stereo - not bad for a single speaker solution.
Security - no trunk, can’t leave anything in the car.
Not a bad club, stylish and quiet but the liquor selection isn’t very good (limited, mostly well-drinks) though it is free and there’s food.
There is good free wifi with no hassle (not even a log-in screen, so you can use it with a skype phone).
The wine is called pimple.
Rental car review
This week i got a new Ford Taurus X, an interesting rental car. It’s an SUV type vehicle, oversized and overaccesorized, but a surprisingly pleasant vehicle that’s fairly easy to drive and comfortable.
Now the theory is that such a car would be good for off-road use or something since it has four wheel drive, but that’s really not happening. Better to think of it as a minivan with a nose and some extra weight in the drive train. Desipite the foolishness of SUVs in general, and especially given gas prices, the car had some neat features.
- I used the backup sensor in a parking lot - a good thing as the car is long and has poor visibility out the back.
- It has an outside temperature indicator which I like.
- The seat moves all the way back when you take the key out, and then back to where it was for us old people.
- The tailgate opens and closes itself, which is kind of absurd and overkill but fun in a gadgety way.
- The engine is fairly powerful (Canadian rentals seem to be more powerful than US rentals - my .ca Grand Am would spin it’s wheels embarrassingly easily, whereas my .ca.us Grand Am in LA was kind of anemic).
- It’s quiet and comfortable.
- The rear seats fold into the floor of the car - just like a mini-van.
- The stereo had an analog input and a 6 CD MP3 changer
- It has Microsoft Sync - more on that below.
(more…)
Carolyn and I attended Matthew Barney’s REN shoot at the ephemeral REN Chrysler dealership at the intersection of Rosecrans and Bloomfield in Santa Fe Springs yesterday.
It was a very impressive show, fun to watch and at moments quite exciting, though largely staged for the cameras. The former RV sales lot was converted to an amazingly convincing Chrysler dealership complete with stationary on the walls, sales targets, car dealers and pictures of the employees of the month.
The performance started with the synchronized arrival of sections of a marching band which aggregated in the parking lot. The effect was pretty cool, with timing and distance and location of the different elements spread over a huge distance and slowly coalescing, all lead by marching band leader (and composer) Jonathan Bepler, who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t seen in person for decades.
An iconic Chrysler Imperial was revealed as a funerary casket, a procession pulled by a few dozen strong men, as Egyptian slaves might have hauled stone blocks, down from the roof of the building and through the parking lot.
The imperial wended its way into a showroom to trade places with a gold firebird and then to its demise at the teeth of a deforestation machine, the showroom fitted with bullet-proof glass and lots of crickets for the purpose. The glass, amazingly, proved strong enough for the flying car parts and crow bars, but was not quite proof against the stabilizer feet of the gigantic excavator. We were perfectly located for that moment.
The remains of the imperial were ritually collected and we joined the staff in the parts department for the final procession involving scarabs, a beautiful woman, and a surprisingly large funerary drape, especially surprising given the orifice from which it was extracted.
The depth of detail of the performance was extraordinary. No simple write up can do it justice and I can’t imagine that even a small part of every carefully prepared element can make it to the final film. The details made walking through the performance an exercise in discovery - from post-it notes in the office, to the illuminated Chrysler signs as tunable Taiko drums, to the dealer tags on the cars in the lot everything was meticulously prepared over four weeks. Then a day later it was gone.
