When Top Gear (BBC) did a survey to find Britain’s highest-mileage car (about 12 or so years ago), they couldn’t find one with 500,000 miles on the clock. However, someone did have a Volvo with a genuine 420,000-ish miles on it.

I used to run a 1989 Fiat Uno (1100 cc, 60 hp [when new], 730 kg dry weight). It would easily do 40 mpg on 95 RON petrol, it would tow a trailer with a motorbike on it, and its load space was hugely versatile (not only did the back seats fold down to make a larger load bay, but you could make even more space by taking them out altogether, a process that required only the undoing of three bolts). Its load space was quite conveniently accessible too.

Anyhow, when we finally gave up on it (due to a rusting body panel caused by living in Scotland for 3 years without washing the salt off the car), it actually went to the scrapyard under its own power. At that time, it had 193,000 miles on the clock. It was the easiest car in the world to maintain. All it needed was, every 6,000 miles, an oil change and a new air filter, plugs and leads; and, every 12,000 miles, a new distributor cap and rotor arm. That engine even survived a timing belt failure (Fiat cunningly designed the pistons to have little cut-outs in the top so they wouldn’t impact the valves). Oh yeah, and my partner and I actually did that timing belt change, re-setting the timing by ear. She changed the radiator and alternator herself when those failed, too (it started out as her car, you see).

Anyhow, I am currently enamoured of Japanese cars, particularly Lexus. Each year, Top Gear team up with JD Powers for a survey of car-customer satisfaction. For about the last five years (IIRC), the top three have always been Japanese (Honda and Lexus) and the bottom three have always been French (Renault and Peugeot).

Recently I test-drove the new Lexus GS450h. It has a big battery to drive its electric motor; and, for those rare occasions (*ahem*) when you need a little bit more, it also has a 3.5 L V6 petrol engine. Not only does it come with more toys than you can shake a stick at, but its performance figures are quite pleasing, too. 0-60 is 5.2 s; combined fuel consumption is about 30 mpg (which is what I currently get from my IS200), which ain’t bad for a car weighing about 1.9 tonnes. Top speed is far faster than you can go in Britain anyway.

Its chassis is very nicely balanced, and it doesn’t feel big or heavy when you chuck it through a few bends, either (which is something I was afraid of).

Plus, because it is a hybrid, you won’t have to pay the London congestion charge if you wish to drive it about our nation’s captial.

Yeah? Well, I guess you shouldn’t tailgate, then, should you? Are you saying you would be happy to live with that driver’s death on your conscience?

BTW, 1500 lb is around 681 kg, which applies only to the smallest of European cars. Most European cars (if you don’t count MPVs and SUVs) are about 1000 – 1200 kg.

Scott, I’d like to clarify that I don’t actually think you are “disjointed … pathological madman”. I think your argument SOUNDED pathological, but I can and should separate a perhaps tongue-in-cheek comment from the otherwise moral person making it. I’m sure you’re a decent person. I’ve made a lot of bad argumentative decisions, and I’ll make more, no doubt. Still, the “dripping under the door” comment utterly mortified me. I’ve seen many accidents (two locally in the past year) where an idiot in a pickup who doesn’t know how to drive defensively kills a housewife or grandfather in a Toyota and walks away with a sprained ankle and a ruined conscience. The idea that someone would use an event like that to promote buying a big truck REALLY grates on me.

If I let that disgust over the content of your post translate into attacks on you as a person, I’m sorry. Phil has a right to expect more restraint on these forums.

Obviously, you didn’t use the term “wimpy dude.” I happily concede the point. However, you DID use the phrases “your 1500 lb Euro Toy car” and “my 5500lbs of rolling thunder”; I will equally happily allow the reader to decide whether my (admitted) paraphrase was an accurate representation of your tone and purpose. That’s what paraphrasing is for.

To your second point, that I am a reader fed the “internet … into thier (sic) ivory tower where everything is kept in a constant state of labratory (sic) sterility”, well, I frankly only wish that were true, since I live in New Orleans, which has probably never in history been subjected to the particular insult of clinical sterility. In any event, the ivory tower criticism is a non-sequitur. Lots of folks in the south need, and use, lots of giant pickups, and I’d never think to tell them not to. Nor would I tell YOU not to, whether it’s because you haul around giant trailers or because you drive on muddy roads or … whatever. People can buy trucks for any reason at all.

But I will certainly call someone out if their best argument for driving a Suburban (which, in fairness, you were presenting as a hypothetical) is that WHEN they fatally rear-end the driver of a sensible sedan, the sedan’s driver and wife and kids will be “mush dripping out the crack under the crumpled door” while the Suburban driver chuckles all the way home. Frankly, that comes across as the smug, disjointed speculation of a pathological madman. It made me sick to my stomach. Again, this was the meat of your argument, and it is a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE argument. I asked you to clarify in the vague hope that you were making a poor-taste joke. Your reply suggests that you were quite earnest.

Pulling a 6500 lbs trailer is a good reason to buy a truck. Being able to rear-end people with impunity is a BAD reason to buy a truck. Maybe the WORST reason. You presented it as a positive. That is my one and only point of contention with you.

As far as I can see, I paraphrased you very accurately, though if my putting the words “wimpy dude” in your mouth caused you pain, I humbly apologize.

That still doesn’t change the fact that you can’t pull a 6500lb trailer with a little econobox. When they start building a fuel efficient hybrid vehicle which can pull my tailer I will quite happily trade my current truck in on it. Like, maybe the 2008 Chevy Silverado Hybrid which is going to be hitting the dealership floors soon. Wait, thats still a huge full sized hunk of rolling death on wheels so I guess i’m still the devil incarnate… Wait, the devil doesn’t exist so I guess i’m ok:)

Of course Honda’s don’t really last forever, but for the money they are good dependable cars. Maybe some people have had problems with the Civic. Okay nothing is perfect. But in my personal experience, Honda makes a good car. That’s all I’m saying.

So, it’s a Swedish/American car, though I have one question. Why would you like to drive an American car if all things were equal Phil?

My family’s been driving Volvos longer than I’ve been alive. They tend to go and go and go without problems well into the 200,000 mile range, and thus three of the five car-replacements happened for non-breakage related reasons — family outgrowing 1 two-door car, an accident that resulted in higher repair costs than insurance would cover making it actually cheaper to buy a ‘new’ good used car, and totalling a car. The other two replacements were for the cars starting to break down such that repairs were more costly than replacement, but given that one had 310,000 miles and the other 250,000+, that’s not surprising.

Incidentally, the time the car got totalled is the poster child for why the family drives Volvos, and the European engineering Bill Bones was talking about: Brand-new teenage driver panics, steps on gas instead of brake, front to side-front collision, ending up with the cars both turning 90 degrees, so that we were on the street the teen had been on, and the teen was on the one we’d been on. You could literally draw a straight line from the driver’s side mirror to the passenger side headlight. The battery was a smear over the engine block. Passenger compartment damage? … The driver’s door needed to be jiggled and shoved hard to get open. Worst injuries received — whiplash and bruising.

Look at the fine print (emphasis on the * words):

“… 2005 H3 Hummer that’s *up on jacks*, its *mechanicals removed*. He *aims to use* the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two ….. second *will be* the [jet] turbine … turbine *will* roar …”

Not just bad science, that’s bad engineering. Let’s just sit back and wait till he has the “mechanicals” back in and the car off the jacks.

Try a litlte physics: How much energy does it take to accelerate a 5000-pound car to 60mph in 5 seconds? Now work out how much energy you get from how much fuel, and see if there’s any kind of match. Next, see how much energy you get from a gallon of whatever fuel, and see if it’ll take a 5000 pound car 60 miles.

I admit, I’m a pragmatist. If he can pull it off, then I’ll get my hat ready to eat. Until then, I’ll stick with what we know about physics.

A little more caution and a little less hype, a little less running for the magic butterfly, is called for here.

A big, heavy car is no protection against the deadliest of accidents, and even a Dodge Colt provides adequate protection against the rest.

- Smaller, lighter cars brake better, turn better and stay out of trouble better. That’s Physics. That’s real. That’s the difference between crashing your wheeled phallus and stay out of trouble.
- European cars are designed to fit EuroNCAP security tests. EuroNCAP are volunteer tests, but nobody would buy a car with less than 3 (out of 5) stars. Many American cars began wiht 3 stars, then mobed into 4, and now that they’re designed in Europe some American cars get 5 euroNCAP stars. Actually euroNCAP tests are goign to be hardened so the 5 stars ar more dificult to get -thus pushinh builders into making safer cars.

The point is, EuroNCAP measures what happens to the passenger in a collision. The car may be totalled, as long as its engine doesn’t smashes your legs, you’re not trapped by a collapsing door, and the tail gets annhilated in its deformaiton to absorb the energy which otherwise would sling your neck and break you a vertebra.

Europen cars are built with a hardened frame to protect passengers and a deformable frame to absorb impact energy. This means they get smashed so the passenger is not smashed.

This said, your chances to survive to a crash are higher on a smaller lighter euro car than on a big american car. The car may be total wreck -but, once you begin turning kynetic energy into work, better be the work of smashing your deformable frame than the work of smashing your bones, or pushing things (like an engine) inside the cockpit…

Plus, you and your massive wheeled phallus will need 40% more distance to avoid the collision, any collision, even not rolling over a pedestrian.

And by the way, if I had to murder someone with a car, I certainly would use one of those big american cars where the craneum splatters on the engine cowl… with a European car, the bastid may just fly over my roof.

As is so often the case on this blog I made the mistake of forgetting that so many posters here have the internet fed into thier ivory tower where everything is kept in a constant state of labratory sterility. Unfortunatly, I live in thr real world where, like it or not, it does rain, snow, sleet, freeze the roads with black ice and people do speed, tailgate, get road rage and drive under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Because those things do in fact happen, some people like to factor them into thier choice of vehicles they drive. Some people feel perfectly safe in a Volvo. There’s nothing wrong with that. Volvo has a fantastic safety record. Some people are perfectly happy driving a Clio. There’s nothing wrong with that either. The newer Clio’s that fill this island from top to bottom are actually a decent looking car. Unfortunatly, I regularly have to pull a 6500lb trailer and I can’t do that with a Clio or a Prius so I have to have a truck. Since I’m single and I move every few years because of my job its not practical for me to have two vehicles and it would be even less practical to rent a truck every time I had to pull the trailer.

If you could quote the section where I used the phrase “wimpy Dude” in my first post I’d appreciate it. I know I’m far from the smartest person posting to this blog but I do have enough social skills not to say something so openly argumentitive. Someone typing something like that would appear to just be flexing his E-peen trying to goad someone into an e-slap fight… No thanks.

I know it wasn’t the intent of your post, but my first reaction when reading this was, “I’d better stay away from big cars, they get into too many accidents!”

I’d rather have something small and light that can avoid collisions in the first place. In the 33 years and nearly 500,000 miles I’ve been driving the Alfa, I’ve had quite a few close calls, but always managed to maneuver out of the situation before impact with one exception.

In 2001 I was in the center lane of a freeway and there was a college kid in an Oldsmobile 88 a few hundred yards ahead of me in the lane to my right. On the shoulder ahead of him I saw a car and a service truck. The truck was still stopped but the car was starting to move. I didn’t like the look of things so I glanced over my shoulder to see if the lane to my left was clear to move over. In the one second I looked away, the car from the shoulder pulled straight out onto the freeway like he was on a city street (i.e. no acceleration, just straight into 70 MPH traffic going about 10). The kid in the Olds mashed his brakes and swerved to the left directly in front of me. As I looked back from my over-the-shoulder glance, I saw the tail of the big 88, nose down hard on the brakes less than 100 feet away and I’m closing at something like 40 MPH!

After three decades of driving this car, it’s pretty much wired directly into my nervous system. I didn’t have to think. I just snapped off a lane change that Mario Andretti would be proud of, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. My right front fender planed along the Oldsmobile’s left rear corner like Titanic scraping the iceberg. The fender was pushed in so far that the tire was now out in the open and the leading edge of the passenger’s door was rolled up, but everything still drove fine. In fact, I drove it that way for about three months while waiting for a donor car to show up at the local Alfa dismantler that could donate a fender and passenger door.

Had I been driving a “lead sled”, like, say, another Olds 88, I would have simply plowed into him, at high speed and most likely caused a huge mess for all the others on the freeway.

- Jack

PS – The guy who caused the accident just motored away, probably unaware of the grief he caused.

Well stated. My attitude is that “there’s always something bigger.” Sure, your Suburban will take on a standard sedan, no problem, but will come out second best against a semi. And the big truck is no match for a train. I’d rather have something small and light that can avoid the impact in the first place.

> a design philosophy pioneered by – surprise, surprise – Volvo.

Actually, surprise, surprise, it was Rover in the mid ’60s. Saab had a head start in the early ’70s with their aircraft design research (ever wonder WHY the key is on the floor?) that was incorporated into the 99, but Volvo was close behind with a slightly different tack. They went with more mass and larger crush zones on the 240 series.

- Jack

Mine has 228,000 so far. About another 10,000 or so to catch up to Neil and Buzz, and then some people can start conspiracy web sites about how my car is OBVIOUSLY A FAKE and I could never survive the radiation from the Van Allen… fan belt.

Or something.

You can’t, not without sacrificing practically all of your cargo space. A turboshaft engine isn’t exactly dinky, and neither is hydrogen fuel storage at the time being. You can fit one into an H3, sure, but there isn’t much you can’t fit into an H3 short of maybe WW2 heavy tank diesel engines.

I hyperbolize for effect.

From the article,

He laughs. “Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

Yes, he clearly believes that he will get 60mpg from a hummer

It’s ironic. My Civic was built in the USA. LOL. But it was also built to HONDA specs, which are much more stringent than GM. I have a superior at work who informed me of this as he used to work for one of the Big Three companies and was aware of the specs.

I’m glad that someone here in North America has come up with a design that might cause a motor revolution. It’s definitely a long time coming..

But I think the true point of the whole thing isn’t that he *expects* to get 60Mpg out of the Hummer – but that he DOES get (According to the story) twice the factory mileage (or better) now. Apply this technology to the vehicle you drive now and see how you react.

Lessee.. what else..

Oh.. Big car vs Small car. Sorry – definitely big car wins. In April of 2006, there was a snow storm.. I was driving my 1995 Lincoln Continental (more in a bit) down highway 36, heading toward Denver when I hit a terroristic bit of slush. All of a sudden, I was doing 45 miles an hour… backwards down the highway. I eventually hit the jersey barrier at about 30.

Right behind me came this Acura.. hit the same slush at about the same speed. He hit the wall a few feet down from me. I drove away and had some body work done. He called the tow truck for his totaled car.

Over the years, I’ve been hit by 5 other drivers, and hit one other (who ran the stop sign and pulled out in front of me). In virtually every instance, I turned the key and drove away – the one exception being when I was broadsided by a drunk mailman while I was driving my boss’ VW van. I have ALWAYS owned some form or other of lead sled, and will continue to do so.

Now – why do I insist on big cars? Not just for safety reasons. Because I tend to not fit into small cars. I’m 6’6″ tall (more, if you add any kind of sole on the bottom of my shoe). There are no known Japanese cars I can drive. There are no known economy cars I can drive. In every instance, I either cannot get behind the wheel (or easily move my foot from gas to brake) or the roof is too low and I look like Quasimodo after a drive.

I’ve tried a LOT of cars. I’d love to burn less gas money. I tried the Prius and the like. It’s just not happening. What IS on the horizon is a motorcycle. Probably the BMW R1200RT – but that’s a year away. For now, I’ll just have to make do withi 25Mpg highway and 10Gpm city.

It’s worth it to be able to get out of the car and not crawl to the house.

Fast Company is.. questionable at best. I was given a subscription, and a fair number of the stories I read were… optimistic, IIRC. Within just a few months of getting my first issue, the magazine had a decided track through the house.. mailbox to dining room table (mail sorted here) to trash can. I’d rather read the New York Times or the Post.