Lines? What lines?

(Outside Officeworks, Highett)

No time to park properly! Emergency stove purchase!

(Outside Clive Peeters, Braybrook)

My old car wasn’t always a 15-year-old bomb. Once upon a time it was the latest in finest automotive excellence.

Even the colour in the ad matches mine!

(Thanks to Tim C for posting this and other fascinating old Aussie commercials onto YouTube)

My car is so cool, I can park anywhere I want.

The solar hot water upgrade meant I postponed the car upgrade for a few weeks. But I’ve been looking at what I might get.

My current car, the aging and increasingly unreliable ‘93 Magna, has a theoretical City consumption of 10 litres per 100km. Although I don’t drive much, downsizing should reduce consumption a little bit.

Despite GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz’s remarks about global warming being “a total crock of s***”, following some comments on one of my previous posts, I’m quite enamoured of the Holden Astra. Evidently the 1998-2005 models are a good buy: good build quality (good things come out of Belgium — eg Tintin, chocolate, and the Mannekin Pis), good safety rating, and the 4 or 5-door models are probably about the size I’m looking for. I like the cut of its jib. Fuel consumption is 8 to 8.5 litres per 100km, depending on manual or auto.

Other possibilities:

• VW Golf — my sister’s buying one, and I think she’d like us to drive twin cars… I don’t doubt it’d be nice, but I think it’d be more money than I’m keen on spending for my low-distance driving — one review says you might as well buy an Astra! — 8 to 9.5 litres per 100 km
• Ford Focus — I quite like the styling, but the safer late-model versions probably aren’t in my price range. Yes they sponsor my footy team, but I don’t feel strong loyalty because of it — 9 to 9.5 litres per 100 km
• Mazda 3 — only average safety rating — 9 to 10 litres per 100km, so no big saving on fuel.
• A Peugot 307 or a Mercedes A-series would both be nice, but are probably too expensive for me, for anything decent.
• Prius — like the one I’ve driven, but cost can’t be justified for me, unless somebody’s giving me a $30K contribution towards it.

I’ve also been told to consider buying an auto instead of a manual. I prefer manuals (even if the first hill start I’d done in ages last weekend scared me half to death), but it’s been suggested to me that an auto may be better suited maintenance-wise to driving short distances. Anybody got any opinions on that? Most of the Astras out there are manual.

Meanwhile, I’ve found that Ultratune Roadside Premium Assist is only available to vehicles less than 12 years old. 247 Road Services doesn’t seem to have that restriction, but maybe I’ll leave it until the upgrade… it’ll be an extra impetus to get on with it.

Help our kids by eating a Parma — from today until next Thursday, $2 from every chicken parma served at 77 pubs around Melbourne (PDF list) will go to the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday appeal. Yes, more than ever, superparma.com is sadly missed.

I can’t give you a picture rivalling this carpark mishap in Brighton, but I did snap this one the other day.

No, the car didn’t have a disabled sign. And there was plenty of other (legal) parking a few metres away.

“What is this ‘One Way’ of which you speak?”

(Picture snapped on their second revolution of the car park.)

Well I got the car to the service place yesterday morning to get the smoke looked at, and the guy said he was 99% sure what it was, blah blah blah stuff I can’t remember, it’ll be about $600-650 to fix.

Dammit.

I ummed and ahhed for a few minutes. On the one hand, I’d like nothing better to do than to offload the car ASAP and get something nicer, and I don’t want to spend up big on repairs on a car that’s worth bugger-all. On the other hand, realistically it ain’t gonna happen tomorrow, so I need this car to keep running, and obviously I can’t have it putting out smoke like it’s been doing.

Especially not with a PTUA sticker on the back bumper.

I could keep feeding it oil (the smoke is from oil burning off), but he said that would have other consequences.

So I told him to go ahead and do it. Nothing else I could do. It ended up being $634.

Interestingly, a search of Drive shows Magna sedans from that vintage on sale for $1950 to $3999, so while it’s not worth much, it’s maybe slightly more than bugger-all. But given most of those are dealer sales, any money I’d get is probably not that much more than today’s repairs cost me.

Still, at least I can offload it before the 220K service, which I was told will be a biggie… though yesterday’s work covered some of that.

So… anybody want to buy a car?

PS. 10am On school run this morning, steam coming out of bonnet. Ring car place, go to car place, they look. Radiator cracked. Estimated cost $150 - blarrrrgh!

PPS. 11pm. Actual cost $287!!!

My car is smokin’. But not in a good way.

It’s just coming up to ten years since I first got it. And it’s a ‘93 model, so sometime later this year will be the car’s fifteenth birthday.

There’s a strange rattling noise when I start it up (rumoured to be an issue with the balance shaft chain — whatever that is), and worse, it’s putting some smoke out of the exhaust when idling, or accelerating from a stop. This isn’t a good look for anybody, let alone me.

It’s going for a service pronto, but I wonder (yet again) if the old beast may be reaching the end of its useful life. While I drive about a third of the Australian average of 15,000 km per year, it’s no good if it’s polluting more than it should.

PT is just not up to scratch for some trips for now, and the car sharing companies aren’t even considering the burbs like mine yet. And while I should make more trips by bike, it ain’t gonna happen just yet. And the theory of doing any necessary car trips by taxi isn’t as good as the reality.

So I think it may be about time to upgrade the ol’ rustbucket.

Last time I pondered this lots of helpful people commented. So once again, I’m pondering Corollas, Golfs, Civics, Vectras, Peugot 307s, that kind of thing. Safe (4 stars or higher?), economical, trouble-free.

Sigh. Damn expensive business though, isn’t it.

Cars. Money pits.