How eeeeeeevil!
Haha, I must apologize, my friends, for the picture in this post is a bit misleading. I won’t be talking about Cars, the main antagonist of the second part of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Instead, I’ll be talking about literal cars—specifically, the new one I got earlier this week!
At the beginning of this month my parents saw an ad for a BMW on Craigslist sold by a fellow nearby. We paid him a visit, took it for a spin, decided we liked it, and bought it! We just finished all the paperwork and everything for it on Tuesday, so I’ve been driving it around since then. Here are my preliminary thoughts on it…
It’s an older model, about 14 years old (made in 2000). The plus side is we got it reasonably cheep because of that, barely set us back 9,000$. According to the manual, it’s a 3 series sedan, 323i. If I was just going for a car for myself, I would have gotten a smaller one (or maybe a motorcycle 8) ) but since I’m leaving for grad school in September, where I walk around everywhere rather than drive, my folks wanted a car they’d use as well, so we went with this.
Overall, I’m very pleased with it. The previous car I drove most of the time was my parent’s hand-me-down Toyota Camry that…I don’t even know how old it is, all I know is that it’s green and we’ve had it since the mid-90s. It was a very good machine and served us well, but we’ve been having to take it to the garage a lot and it’s obvious it’s been getting on in years. The new BMW on the other hand seems to be working like a charm. It handles well, all the electronics (gauges, windshield wipers, moving the seat back and forth or reclining it, etc. are all digital) work, and it apparently has a ton of safety features like multiple airbags and such—though I haven’t needed to use those yet, thank God!
There are only two little quibbles I have with it. The first isn’t even a quibble, really, but more of a breaking-in thing. The new BMW’s brakes are great, but I need to put a little bit more pressure on the accelerator than I’m accustomed in order to get it to speed up a lot. However, I think it’s because I’m used to the acceleration of my old green Camry, which apparently had an accelerator pedal which was a little looser (I’ve driven newer models of the Camry and noticed I had to push harder on the accelerator as well). So I’ll have to get used to it eventually.
The other thing is that the steering wheel can sometimes lock after you’ve turned the car off. A couple of days ago after I’d parked, I hit the steering wheel as I was exiting the vehicle and pushed it to the left, and I didn’t notice it had been locked in that position until I got back in. The car won’t start if the wheel is locked, so I had to spend a bit of time un-jimmying it to get back on the road. It’s no big deal, but it’s something to be careful of. I dunno if other cars do that, my old Camry didn’t…
Anyways, this week was indeed more productive! I got a thousand words of Wayward Son written, which was better than nothing, but what really keeps me from being disappointed is that I got a *lot* of reading done that I wanted to do. Also, I’ve been having a lot of fun with the new car while I’ve been at it. Driving around gives one such a wonderful sense of freedom, and just yesterday I went to a local German place to celebrate my German car with some German food 8) Maltauschen is yummy! I oughta do a “Gunlord the Gastronome” review of that restaurant, but…maybe later. XD
Gunlord500 