Be Excellent To Each Other

Flightaware has a more complete track, but I can’t link it as I’m on my phone.

Ah, nice site. Didn't know that existed!
https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/ ... /EGCV/EGCV

Wasn’t that flight, mine was at 09:38 BST and was altogether far more erratic

MOT day!

Oh, let's have a sweepstake! I'm picking

5.3.4 b(ii)
- A suspension joint dust cover missing or no longer prevents the ingress of dirt etc.

A prize for anyone who choses correctly!

Registration plate lights.

Took the Porsche for a health-check and bore-scope test at a specialist up near Leeds. Wanted to rule out the possibility of any bore-scoring in the engine which would necessitate some very large rebuild bills.

The good news is, nothing to be concerned about in the bore-scope test, but there were a few things in the health-check that came out (and they were retrofitting cruise control for me too)

Total bill yesterday was £1,253 and the work that will need doing at some point in the future will probably be around another £1,500-£2,000...

Window washer fluid bottle empty of fluid

Ha! Filled that this morning!

Experience tells

Corrosion on coil spring

Car seat fitted, preventing seat belt check.

Furry dice too large, obscuring windscreen.

Insufficient MaliCoolant.

As an advisory, twice. Tyres discs and pads need replacing at some point before the next MoT.

All good.

Looking forward to my Squirt prize!

Oh wow, I didn't expect anyone to actually guess correctly!

Since this thread has bubbled up to the top again, two things happened in April relating to my Lexus.

Firstly, it had its 18th birthday, and secondly, it became the car I've kept for longest, ever, beating the previous record holder, my Subaru WRX STi.

I have been getting it serviced every year but beyond that I'm not even remotely precious about it. It gets washed when it rains, or perhaps a mechanical car wash once every six months or so if its lucky. There's still some red paint on the front bumper where someone bumped against me in a supermarket car park and I was just like, 'Meh'.

I bought a Bluetooth cassette adapter off Amazon for £14 that I can pair with my phone, and then stream audio from my phone to the car, the car just thinks it's playing a tape. It works very well. (Even in 2005, when the car was brand new, who the fuck was still listening to tapes?)

In reliability terms it's just a Toyota with a skirt on so it's bombproof, not a single thing has gone even remotely wrong with it and all the gadgets and gizmos still work perfectly.

Long term petrol consumption has settled to 33mpg, which for a 3 litre V6 is really pretty good I think.

Overall very good car experience, would Lexus again.

The tape deck adaptor may do the job, but you should notice a good jump in quality switching to something like this: https://amzn.to/3PphbeN

Fully impressed you got a tape player in an 05.

Is there any way to add an auxiliary in? Probably worth it if you plan on keeping it.

A previous owner had already fitted an iPod kit (with the olde style 30-pin connector), that has both an iPod and an AUX connector on it. The car sees it as a CD in the CD changer.

I've been using the iPod connector since I got the car, with a old 80GB hard drive iPod that Trooper from here at BEEX sent me many years ago (thanks Trooper!). However, the content on the iPod is a lot less 'dynamic' than something like Spotify, so it's basically just had my trance collection on it forever.

With the cassette adapter I have a lot more freedom in what I listen to, as it'll stream whatever audio my phone is sending, be it Spotify, a podcast, iPlayer, YouTube, or whatever, basically.

Sound quality wise you might be surprised how good the cassette adapter actually is. The biggest limitation with cassette audio quality is the tape itself (hence all the effort that was put into better tape formulations, Chrome, Metal etc, noise reduction tech like Dolby and suchlike), as the cassette adapter directly presents its head to the head in the car, so that is removed from the equation, and you get a pretty clean sound. Certainly plenty good enough for use in a car and my old ears (50 next year, fact fans).

I've used the tape adapters before and they're sort of okay but I don't understand, if the iPod kit also has an auxiliary connector why not just go into that?

My Chinese Hackers Huawei P20 Pro - (five years old in September!) - doesn't have a headphone jack. Also, that would involve connecting and disconnecting wires from the device anyway, which is a faff, whereas the cassette adapter is all fancy Bluetooth wireless and just pairs with my phone automatically when it's in range.

You'd still be plugging it in but USB to headphone adapters are easy to come by. It would sound better than a tape adapter or FM thing.

How kind, but wasn't it a bit of a trek for you?

Today I have bought a Leaf to go with the MX5, turns up in about a week.
Look at me being all environmentally concious and shit.

Which one did you go for?

2019 64kwh 3.zero special edition

Noice. Not heard of that edition before, sounds similar to mine (e+ Tekna) -- I think it's 62kWh rather than 64 though, in my case at least, don't know about yours.

Does yours have the auto-driving ProPilot stuff on it?

It does, and you're right it is 62kWh.

As far as I can work out the 3.Zero is a Tekna plus a couple of blue bits of trim. Nissan don't make it easy to find out. It has the ProPilot and leather seats etc... Only option it doesn't have is the self park, but I don't think anyone ticked that box!

https://usedcars.nissan.co.uk/en/vehicl ... button_srp

This is it. 2700 miles!

Fucking hell, that's a steal. I paid £28,000 for my 2020 e+ Tekna a year ago -- which also doesn't have the self-park. On the ad, it said it had 21,000 miles but they screwed up somehow because it only had 8,000 on it when I got it. And they didn't wind it back, they must have just noted the mileage down wrong.

//edit: If you want to get wireless CarPlay, this is what I use: https://www.carlinkit.com/carlinkit4.0-cp2a

I ended up paying £19,950 for it. I was looking at a hyundai kona, but the residuals of the leaf are a lot better. £299 a month for the leaf on pcp, whereas a cheaper kona was coming out at an extra £30 a month.

Is the in car stuff crap enough to need the carplay? I was just going to rawdog it

Next decision is do I want a charging point, or will the 3 pin in the garage do me well enough for my sporadic usage? I expect so...

*cries*


The built-in navigation isn't great, and the user interface for the system in general isn't the best, but you'll probably be alright with it.


Personally I'd go for a charging point. Using the 3-pin EVSE wasn't so much of a hassle on my original Leaf (the 24kWh one) but with the *much* larger battery you're looking at potentially 24+ hours for a charge off a standard plug.

I'll see how I get on, my usage is going to be local trips a couple of times a week with a 120 mile round trip once or twice a month, so I expect i'll probably be fine with a long charge time. My long trips are never straight after each other.

I did look at a cheaper mk1 leaf, but the 120 mile round trip to go see my dad made that annoying. 200 mile range in the mk2 e+ turns it from a "I need to think about this journey" to a "I don't have to care about range" mindset, which is a huge difference for me in choosing to bite the bullet and give electric a go.

Yeah, I've only ever suffered range anxiety once* in the new Leaf and that was on a carefully-planned journey** from Glasgow back down to Shropshire, starting from 12% battery.

First charging stop was relatively close, and I didn't have any anxiety until step-son piped up that he'd left his fucking Switch Lite in the hotel room by accident so we had to drive back to get that.

Completely threw out the entire journey, it took us nearly 9 hours to get home with the charging stops that day -- and also meant we missed MeatUp 2022.

* Not strictly true, there was another time recently where we had to drive to Birmingham Airport first thing in the morning, and the car had 80 miles of range on it. I decided to charge it overnight so there'd be *plenty* left for the round trip, but the fucking fuse destroyed itself during the night so it didn't charge at all. We got to BHX easily enough, but the journey back was a little hairy.

** ABRP (http://www.abetterrouteplanner.com) is your friend for long journeys.

I forgot about that! And then we argued about whether or not you should be refunded and I can't remember who won.

Don't miss out on the 2023 MeatUp, folks! Be smart like GazChap and get your ticket now! https://meatupfestival.co.uk/

</shill>

Quick clarification before we both sound like assholes - I wanted to refund GazChap, and he didn't want me to - not the other way around

I've done about a 100 miles in it today, initial thoughts:

It's nice to have a car with auto everything again.
It's amusingly quick off the line.
Range has been spot on so far.
Single pedal seems like a bit of a gimmick, i'll give it another go but meh.
Why doesn't it start in full regen mode on deceleration, why wouldn't I want that?
Eco mode is crap, all it does is limit the throttle, which i'm perfectly capable of doing myself, thank you very much.
200+ mile range means you can just drive it like a normal car and not give a toss about eekling out the last mile.
Cabin quality is a lot better than I expected. The radio/nav screen is getting on a bit, but the rest is all pretty good stuff and feels nice to use.
You can turn off all the lane assist, lane warning beeps and all that crap, and it stays off. No need to do that every time you start it.
It being so silent played havoc with my tinnitus! My brain needs to work out this a quiet place now and adjust accordingly.
I can set it to not charge for a specific time period in the day, which is perfect for my "agile octopus" electricity rate, that varies unit cost during the day. (4pm-7pm is peak time)
It's deeply uncool and I love it.

I've spent so much at the garage in 2 visits on the last two Thursdays (and need to take Helens in for a wedge of stuff soon) that one of the owners gave me his old performance air filter and fitted it, for free. (He's got a massively upgraded seat Leon, so parts bin compatible with the superb).

He even let me up to the mezzanine level of the shop while he dug it out, which I assume puts me quite high up the "whale" chart.

Placebo effect says marginally snappier throttle response lower down and a slightly larger kick towards 3k rpm.

Being a second hand filter that needs cleaning and oiling periodically I'm now on a deadline for buying a racingline r600 airbox, which is good for my brain.

Going to be so much simpler when that Ford Ranger Lightning I want arrives (or is even announced).

It's all designed around efficiency, that's why the default mode is eco and lifting off sooner is more efficient than later and slowing the car down with aggressive regen. I tend to just leave it most of the time now, there's a "kick down" at the bottom of the accelerator if you ever need it and it's easier to just chill and waft about smoothly with that throttle map.

It's either the filter or the new less-burnt transmission and 4wd fluids but the car is definitely way peppier at the low end and 2800rpm where it lets boost build instead of bleed.

Time to buy that fancy racingline airbox, for science.

I was absolutely sure I'd looked into installing a "turbo muffler delete" and it was easy. So I got one of those too.

Then I watched a "how to" (Deutsche auto parts on YouTube) and... Apparently I did not, because I am not confident in doing that. Not one bit!

On the upside the installation involves removing and reinstalling the airbox and feed pipe, so I can optimise the garage labour charge by just delivering it all to them, and save on hand wash and kitchen towel!

Car makes louder grr tss noise.

Mrs Z’s RAV4 D4D mk2 took just under £300 to get through its MOT and get aircon re-gassed. As old family motors go I can’t recommend these old 4x4s enough. School runs, tip runs, camping - the dogs bollocks. 124k 19 years young.

Toyota reliability! Also featured in Lexus. They do famously make the most reliable cars in the world, after all.

Round my neck of the woods the entire agricultural economy appears to be run off the backs of old RAV4s and those little Suzuki 4x4s. All beat up to hell but hauling trailers full of hay bales and fence posts around.

Ziggy Gonad?

And the scrotums from Mars

A mate of mine at work is in the HORSEY COMMUNITY - (via his wife and daughter who have a horse, SPOILER ALERT - horses are INCREDIBLY expensive things to own) - they have a horse box to put the horse in, and they have to get to quite a lot of out of way locations towing the horse box, with a horse in it.

In this community durable, reliable off-road vehicles are highly prized. My mate is a competent mechanic and quite happy fixing things. They went through a Land Rover (one of the modern wanky style ones) and a Mercedes ML which both kept breaking (both of them had a few years and miles on them, they weren't brand new). And I don't mean they broke occasionally, I mean there was ALWAYS something needed doing on them, if it weren't for the fact that he was just buying the parts and doing the work himself, it would have cost them a fortune. (One of the repairs took him most of a weekend.)

When the Mercedes decided to eat something on the rear axle, leaving his wife and daughter stranded, they decided enough was enough.

I was like, 'Why don't you just get an old Toyota Highlander or something?' and he was like, 'Have you seen how much those things cost?', because of course, everyone in that community wants them because they know they don't break, so they never really get cheap. There's a reason old Mercedes MLs are cheap.

In the end they settled on a Nissan Navara which is proving to be much better, if not the gold standard of a Toyota.