Knobs on grooves. Not groovy. But good for training, I guess.

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-09-07
Posted in: Motorbikes, Tribology. Leave a Comment

I mentioned that I’ve been riding the Sherpa a lot lately due to a shoulder injury, and it’s been a total blast for the most part. Just not the grooved pavement part.

Last year, I fitted the little green bike with IRC TR8 tyres front and back. They are a good medium duty knob that is regarded well for its on-pavement performance and durability in addition to its very good dirt and gravel chops. I like them a lot on gravel and on grass (yes, I ride on the lawn), and find them to be pretty decent on asphalt.

Unfortunately, a large amount of Michigan seems to be grooved concrete, and knobs and grooves do not seem to get along well.

I initially played off the serious instability of the bike on the tyres being knobs, but the truth is, the TR8s are not a particularly squirmy tyre. If they were, I’d notice the issue on all roads. I finally traced it to the grooves when a colleague noted that my rear tyre was “moving around an awful lot” after following me on I696 one morning. Another day, I had a braking “incident” where I locked the rear while stopping for a red light and the little bike became extremely squirrely. I revisited that lane later and found that it was not only grooved, but the grooves were full of silt and sand. My guess is that there was just enough low traction material to keep the knobs from biting the grooves, and that led to the lockup. I rode it out and did not hit the car in front of me.

I suppose that the lightness of the Sherpa is interfering with me feeling how much the bike actually is moving under me. Apparently, I’m becoming rather used to it and no longer bothered at all by the extra motion. This is a big step forward for me as a rider – I’ve had some fear about handling low traction surfaces and now I find out that I’ve been living with an entire low traction bike for the last two months.

The role of traction* in the stability of a motorcycle is interesting. Too much at the wrong time, and you are flying over your bike in a high-side dismount. Too little and you are hitting the ground in a low-side fall. Somewhere in between (and a pretty big section of in-between, thankfully) is enough traction to stay upright and move forward. Control of the traction force is up to the rider – one can spin up the rear in a nice, smoky burnout, or manage rolling at just the right speed to keep the rear tracking around a hairpin. That burnout is a roost in dirt, where the surface determines more of the traction characteristics than the tyre does. The knobs on knobby tyres allow the tyre to dig into the surface and grip more of it, trying to catch it and lock into it. Roosting occurs when the surface is torn up and thrown into the air. Obviously, this is a bit challenging to do with concrete, so the tyre gets torn up and thrown into the air instead. You can think of the difference between street and dirt riding in terms of which surface is the primary sacrificial one – while dirt tyres do wear (and quickly!), the surface takes more of a beating than the tyre does. This is why motorbikes are often banned from outdoor recreation areas – too much damage to the trails.

Riding in a situation where the traction is not at the operator’s complete beck and call can be unsettling, at least until it is ingrained into the rider’s personal physics. The old term “backing it in” refers to breaking traction at the rear while sliding the bike around a turn. Done properly, this is a very controlled use of traction (or the lack of it) to the rider’s advantage. It requires the rider to have significant comfort in the lower traction environment. One needs to feel confident that they can successfully hook back up and ride it out, without hopping over the line on the track that leads to a high-side. Where better to learn this than on knobby tyres in the sand or loose dirt?

All of this musing here is about me coming to terms with low traction. I’m finally starting to really get a feel for it. The baby GS has great Metzler Tourance tyres on and they are profoundly stable under many conditions. Add in the bike’s rudimentary ABS (it’s fine, quit bitching), and the bike is rather insensitive to traction condition transitions that would send the Sherpa and its knobs into orbit. Me along with it, too. Logging more seat time on the little bike with its little traction is helping me understand what low traction feels like and how to not only manage it, but relax and enjoy it. I’m not sure I’m ready to slide all 425# of the Beemer around, but I find that I’m getting less and less freaked out by the wandering rear end of the Sherpa each time I get on it, and what I used to consider frightening wobbles and stepouts are now just situations that require me to moderate my control inputs. I’m thinking less about everything associated with low traction now and riding it all more. Grooved pavement is no longer a navigation avoidance parameter.

Yikes. I might actually become a decent motorcyclist one of these days.

*Traction is friction in the presence of rolling, and is related to friction by the differential speeds of the two surfaces as described by the slide/roll ratio. I’m happy to pontificate on that, it’s kind of my thing.

The target rider

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-08-19
Posted in: Motorbikes, Style. Leave a Comment

gearchic is doing an awesome job busting the myths of seat heights of motorcycles. I want to go a step further and talk about how seat heights come to be, and why this sucks for smaller riders.

I own two of the most female-friendly bikes that exist – the enduring BMW F650GS single and the Kawasaki Super Sherpa. Both bikes came about their ladies’ bonafides in a round-about way – they were both designed for smaller men.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Design for a smaller population and the smaller population will buy. It’s not quite so simple, because often, a bike has to be made for many sizes of rides, and as the US market is largely made of up large guys, we get bikes designed with large guys in mind. Tweaking a frame for various body geometries is not an easy task, what is given to the torso must come off the arms, the knees suffer at the expense of the hips, and you can see where that is going.

Think of cars for a minute – the designer of the retro Mustang was fired because a 6′ tall male did not fit in the back seat. The average car seat is adjustable to fit everything from a 4’6″ granny to a 6’6″ football player. That can’t happen on a motorcycle, because the degrees of freedom are far fewer and the hard points more numerous.

Big motorcycles happen because of the way the target rider is chosen. The average American male is around 5’10” and weighs something like 200 pounds. The average female is 5’5″ and closer to 145 pounds. Five inches and fifty pounds is a lot on a motorcycle. And if you’re on the smaller side, it’s a lot more.

Kawasaki developed the Super Sherpa for use as a delivery bike in various “second world” markets – places that are mostly first world, but have enough third world sections so as to make life difficult. It was to fit in under the KLX250 and allow Kawi to go after markets where the riders were smaller, but still needed the flexibility and durability of the KLX250. The electric starter, lower seat height, and softer suspension made the bike much more accessible, and while it was never really marketed in the US, it gained a fan base among guys who wanted to get their wives a dirt bike the ladies would be more comfortable on.

It’s a hit, and Sherpas are durable little buggers that ladies love like Cool James. Too bad they don’t really make it any more, and you are limited to finding someone who is willing to  sell one. Mine came in a box and I had to rebuild it, which was worth every cent and hour invested.

A bonus with the Sherpa that seems to go unsung is the height adjustable rear spring. Akin to adjusting preload, it’s yet another reason the Sherpa shines as a smaller person bike. No need to upgrade to get it sized properly, because making it smaller was on the drawing board from day one.

Way back when, BMW was roundly criticized for the early R65 – deemed a girl bike because the frame was smaller and the bike was targeted to smaller riders. The smaller boxer was no help there. Thankfully, the Bavarians were not completely put off the small rider thing, and tried again with the old BMW single – it was designed with a smaller rider in mind. The target rider was a 170cm male weighing about 70kg. That is by any measure a small guy. It’s also a slightly tall lady. Sprung from the get-go for lighter riders, and sized from the get-go for shorter riders, it gets even lower when you equip it with factory low suspension. I had that, and eventually swapped for normal, because I’m a 167cm lady weighing 61kg. I have the preload set to mostly extended, because as I grow as a rider, it gets easier to ride a taller bike and it also gets more fun to enjoy the suspension travel.

I hope that other manufacturers will start to follow BMW’s and Kawasaki’s leads in the use of smaller target riders. There is no denying BMW’s command of frame design for maximum suspension flexibility – they seem to be able to kick out frames that fit anyone with simple suspension swaps. It’s kind of disappointing that Kawi hasn’t put much into the small rider market on the dirt side of late, however it’s clear they can do it.

Let’s bring the smaller target rider to the forefront, and start at the drawing board, instead of trying to patch it up after the fact.

Passat GTO

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-08-15
Posted in: Automotive, Style. Leave a Comment

Found this oldie in a dark corner of the interwebs…

GTO

Go back to 1964. While GM is not thinking about much besides moving some people around at moderate speed, a few engineers at Pontiac have other ideas. Borrowing from Ferrari (more on that later), they designed an option package for the mild-mannered Tempest. Ignoring GM’s self-imposed displacement limit of 330 cubes, they pulled a 389 cubic inch V8, new steering, and a funky dual exhaust together for an option package they would call “GTO”. As the line grew and matured, a manual transmission, improved rear end, and stronger styling would be added. This first of the sleepers, the GTO would take America by storm, outselling even the wildest expectations of the engineers.

Gran turismo omologato

Go back to 1962. You will find a Ferrari that wasn’t just a track car. One of the first few supercars, nitro you could take out on a date and bring home without worrying about the aftermath. A car you could drive to work on weekdays and wring out on the track on weekends. True homologation (omologato) was a bit questionable, with only 42 of the required 100 cars (for GT qualification) actually being built. Somehow this was overlooked in the racing circles, and Ferrari went on to torture opponents at race time. The Scaglietti coupe remains one of the most beautiful automotive designs to ever find its way into traffic.

Grand touring, homologated

Homologation is the process of making a car street legal. The Ferrari was homologated to participate in the particular racing class it was destined for. While some may question the roadworthiness of any Italian cars, it is always a concern of the manufacturers to have the cars meet any safety or other regulatory guidelines for driving on public highways by lay drivers. Homologation can mean adjusting the power to weight ratio, adding emissions controls, even modifying the traction control components. Homologation also means proving that the car is a true production model, not a one-off. Hence the 100 car requirement in the case of the Ferrari GTO.

The Pontiac GTO bore little resemblance to the Ferrari GTO. Not a race car, not even race-bred, it was a glorified passenger coupe that could go very fast and do it without attracting attention. With a final production run of over 32 000 in its first year, the homologation requirements for GT class racing were surely met! The Pontiac GTO was also assembled in the opposite direction of the Ferrari – chassis first, drivetrain second. It is generally clear to car enthusiasts that Ferrari operates in the other direction.

I have recently become very interested in homologation, largely because I have only recently learned what it meant. I have also been thinking about the unfortunate and impending demise of the W8 engine in the Passat, so I got around to tracing its lineage.

The W-series program seems to have started with the Nardo, a W12-based GT car which will never see real production. The goal of the Nardo program (named after the track on which many world records for speed were set by the car) was to produce a compact engine that would produce a maximum horsepower to weight ratio. With such a compact and powerful drivetrain available, homologation was the next step for the engineers at Volkswagen.

Street legal road racer

With the largest production vehicle at the time being the Passat (the Phaeton was still on the drawing board), power-to-weight ratio and engine bay limitations were examined and four cylinders were lopped off the W12 leaving the W8. The Passat chassis had been proven out in track circles through the V8STAR series, although not fitted with the W8 motor. A six speed manual transmission was added (likely from the Nardo program considering the weak stock clutches in other Passats) with four wheel traction to handle the power. Big brakes suitable for stopping such power completed the new drivetrain package. With the conveniently 4Motion Passat chassis readily available, the new drivetrain was inserted and a performance beast was born in the form of the W8 Sport option package on the venerable Passat.

Like the Ferrari, the Passat W8 Sport started with a motor. Like the Pontiac, the choice of chassis was an unassuming, nearly invisible family sedan. Given the introduction of the Rabbit GTi some 25 years ago, one would think that VW would remember their past success in making street legal road racers. The irony is not lost on this writer.

I suppose I’m mostly disappointed about the impending demise of the W8 Sport Passat because it was a GTO in both senses – a homologated grand touring machine packed into an otherwise unassuming package. A sleeper of the grandest proportions. I’m particularly upset about losing the wagons. The Americans have never had the guts to produce such an extreme vehicle. The Dodge Magnum is their best effort so far, but there is no stick (or even SMG) option. I find that to be a serious flaw.

I’m also sad that I didn’t realize how much could have been made of the car, particularly in advertising it. The ads for the W8 Passats flat-out sucked, but a phone call to the right people with mention of ‘GTO’ could have been made. I kick myself for not seeing it sooner, not figuring out how to make the program a success in the US. Nostalgia is a powerful tool, and VW has used it wisely in the New Beetle program. Why not haul it out again for this most glorious of cars? I don’t know.

So, goodbye, Passat GTO. You never really were, but I will miss you anyway.

roll video of Nardo taking laps at Nardo.
VO: At Volkswagen, sometimes our engineers get a little creative. This time, they took two thirds of our grand touring car’s drivetrain and one third of our award winning Passat to create the Passat W8 Sport.
CG: Nardo drives through a Passat and turns into a W8 Sport variant.
VO: With eight cylinders, six gears, and our superior 4Motion all-wheel drive system, we like to think of it as the German GTO.
video: PW8S drifts to position on screen.
VO: The Passat W8 Sport. A milk run doesn’t always mean groceries.
offstage VO: Did you tell them it seats five?

Dear Media,

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-07-25
Posted in: Style. Leave a Comment

Way back in the 90s, I put a Sam Katz for Mayor sign in my Philadelphia window. To my recollection, it is the only political sign I have ever put out, if you don’t count my old “don’t blame me, I voted for Perot” bumper sticker.

Sam Katz was a republican candidate running for mayor in a Democrat town. Ed Rendell had run his two terms and up next on the Democratic ticket was John Street, a bully of a City Councilman who’d decided to throw his name in the ring.  The city was still (yes) reeling from W. Wilson Goode’s two terms in office and finally getting over Frank Rizzo. Katz came out of nowhere and ran a solid campaign, convincing the city’s intelligentsia, and moreover, the editorial board of the left-leaning Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Inky endorsing a Republican candidate for mayor was the east coast equivalent of a magnitude 8 earthquake, and it left the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board in a bit of a pinch. The Inquirer had leaned left for so long that this shift caught everyone by surprise. The News pulled their endorsement editorial and sat on it for a week, during which the editorial board decided to endorse Street. Street went on to win the election, and by all measures was a good mayor for the city during his terms.

Some time after the election, the editor of the Daily News was interviewed about the endorsement of Street, and opened pointed out that endorsing Katz as they had wanted to do would not sell papers. Endorsing Street was news on many levels. First, it made a race out of the contest. Second, Street was a character – he sported a big afro with a white Bride-of-Frankenstein streak and kept a fleet of conversion vans and ATVs on his Overbrook property – and was known to lose his cool in Council meetings. Third, brother Milton Street was a multiply-convicted felon, so there was opportunity for scandal. And fourth, the flip-flop of positions by the two papers was news in and of itself. By holding their endorsement editorial, they kept the discussion of the papers’ roles in city politics at the forefront of discussion, selling a ton of papers on that news alone.  Street’s personality was good for at least one feature a week. Milton stayed out of trouble for the most part. The race was on. Three out of four bets paid off. Papers sold, both from the News and from the Inquirer, too. Subscriptions at both papers went up.

It’s arguable whether the Daily News’ endorsement and coverage actually influenced the election – Street was a popular black councilman with well-honed skills in back-room city management, and Katz was a total outsider of the Ross Perot mould who tanked with the working class. All the wishful thinking in Chestnut Hill wasn’t going to get Katz elected, and Street swept the neighborhoods. To be clear: this is about the media using the candidate, not the influence the media had over the public. Papers sold. The two papers successfully (if unplanned) co-opted the election for themselves.

This co-opting is happening again in our entire US media. The demand for clicks is so high that our newsmedia is going for anything that will sell their content, regardless of what it looks like. This is scary, because Donald Trump is no John Street. He’s no Sam Katz, either, not by a long shot.

So, dear media, please stop worrying about selling clicks. They are coming to you regardless. But I need reporting, not clickbait. I need the deep analysis more than ever. I need you to treat politics like the future of our country, not the Kardashians. I need your editors to double down on the meaning of “fit to print”. Please. Now.

Sincerely,
America

Dip

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-07-04
Posted in: Automotive. Leave a Comment

His first thought had been “well, that was easy.” It was a long time ago, but some days it still seemed fresh. A bit escapist, sure, but fresh, and clean, thanks to the car wash. He still occasionally used the single old self-service bay, and always put a $100 in the tip jar, even if he didn’t get a towel dry. It was the only place from that day in real life that he ever revisited.

He had parked his car in the driveway like every other day, walked up the path, and into the house. Same car, same driveway, same house. Same beige barge of boredom, same cold grey concrete, same cookie-cutter dwelling. He was different, sure, but he knew that no one could see it and it wouldn’t matter to anyone who saw him, anyway. This time it was a little more, and the risk had been a little greater, but ok, a little physical risk once in a while was not a bad thing. Fear in small quantities is a benefit. Kept him on his toes. The usual way of doing it was boring and nearly without risk, because he was so good at what he did. People rarely noticed his actions or even questioned them when they did.

He had washed the car right before he got home and parked. The high pressure bay was open like he had planned. No stress there. It took a little longer than he expected to complete the job, mostly because of all of the cracks and crevices and their ability to hold the brownish-red stuff covering the car. He was surprised at the tenacity of the material he was trying to remove, especially because it was supposed to come off more easily if you got to it quickly. That’s why he had chosen this means to his end. The radio was on, he liked the news station and he was hearing what he expected to hear. The information was wrong, but hey, no one else needed to know that. Ten minutes before he dropped his quarters in, he had been in a dangerous place doing a dangerous thing. A financially rewarding dangerous thing. At least everyone saw him do it. He was pleased to know that he had been seen.

He was getting away from the scene, just a few hours of his life and just a little money to stow in the offshore bank he’d set up and been quietly feeding for a few years now. The sirens were wailing nearby, time to get going with the next step. It was time to get away with it.

The encounter had gone off without a hitch. He got what he was after and drew the attention he wanted. It was surprisingly public for a person who stayed in the shadows most of the time. He assessed the target as he approached the meeting point. He re-established trust and made sure to make a show of how he arrived. He liked his not-very-special car, even in this guise. It was in many ways a very good car for him, even if he barely recognized it as his. From then on, the scene wasn’t pretty by any means. It was an ugly, brutish takedown, and he was counting on as many witnesses as he could get. He needed them to see his car.

The car wash was important. He knew that this was actually the highest risk element. It had to be operating and he had to be able to get into the high pressure bay. Worst case would be a delay there, so he had stopped by on the way and jammed a slug into the coin-op unit. He figured that he could put a $100 in the tip jar another day if everything played out ok.

He had gotten into the car more smoothly than he expected to. He had been a little worried that he would spend too much time there because it was different now. No hesitation. No hitches in the plan. Out of the garage, onto the street. Checking off the mental checklist in his head. Necessary tools were packed. Slugs in pocket. Plan in place.

The prep work for the encounter was surprisingly little work. He had been even shocked about how easy it was, he’d expected to spend hours on it, and in reality it wasn’t much more than one. A bit of newspaper here, some tape there. Some draping off of the surroundings and trash hauling. Uber for a couple of days while the car was “at the shop”. No stress, if you didn’t count the extra bag of trash that week.

The encounter had been in the plan for a while, but the getaway had been a sticking point until a few months earlier. The kid who delivered the mail at the office had given him the idea when he had arrived at work in a different colored car every week for a while. The kid fun to talk to, a gear head on a low budget who was always fiddling around with something. He’d asked the kid about the color changes and thankfully gotten the idea before he pried too much and made his interest too clear. The kid had said that he just sprayed it on and then washed it off at the car wash when he got bored, you know, the one over on Batton Street with the self-service high pressure bay. The kid laughed as he recalled the secretary who thought he kept buying a new car each week. The idea was coming together.

He smiled as he thought back to it. Every once in a while, he entertained the idea again. Not the encounter, that was enough of that and he was back to his normal way of padding the account. It was safer, and way easier. However, the whole getting away thing… That might be worth revisiting one day.

Diesel Decorations

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-06-01
Posted in: Automotive, Motorbikes. Leave a Comment

I love Diesel engines for the stump-pulling torque, but about once a year, I have to face the reality that even clean Diesel still makes particulates.

That day is “washing the conspicuity vests” day.

These are two older vests that I had in the closet from my time in Germany. Front to back, inside to ouside, it’s not really pretty. 

Little Old Lady Driven

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-05-29
Posted in: Automotive, Style. Leave a Comment

You see it in car ads all over the net:

“Driven to church every Sunday by a little old lady”

“Grandma-driven”

“My elderly aunt had it for the last ten years and only put about 20K miles on it”

I recently took possession of a car driven by a little old lady – my mother-in-law. I have a new view on what “little old lady driven” means.

First, lets discuss the interior. A Little Old Lady is probably pretty fastidious, that’s how she got to be so old in the first place, so the interior is probably kind of clean. It might even smell like perfume. But she’s not as strong as she used to be, and getting in and out can be a chore. Look for wear and tear on any surface that could potentially be used a hand-hold. Cubbies suffer too, because as dexterity fails, it gets more difficult to operate the opening and closing mechanisms. Good bye, $250 center stack trim….. Hello permanent creases in the upholstery from the box of stuff that never made it to Goodwill….


Now, on to the drivetrain. The mysterious “O/D Off” button was never touched, and neither was the RPM range over about 3K. You’re going to be blowing carbon out that motor for a month. Check the suspension, too, because as vision fails, so does the ability to recognize potholes. CV joints and wheel bearings can take a particular beating. I’m still sorting out what the squeak in the driver’s front wheel is.


That limited vision? The slowed reflexes? The deteriorating range of motion? Oh, man. They all add up to one thing – “I didn’t/couldn’t see it!”, and that means paint. All over the body. Usually belonging to other vehicles and stationary objects. The tears of a hundred parking bollards in this case. Plan on at least a solid eight hours of wheel work just to get the worst of it off the sheet metal. The plastic bumpers might be a lost cause, and we’re not even at the scratches yet.


If the paint is suffering, you can be sure the metal is, too. Look for misaligned panels (what? Oh, no, she/I never hit anything!), deep scratches, and other small dings that throw some serious shade on Grandma’s health condition.


Needless to say, this could have been a total cream puff, but in reality, it’s a damn mess. Because little old lady. Next time you read that in an ad, think twice. You don’t want to deal with parking bollard tears. They kind of melt into the paint and stay there.

Rental Review: 2017 Hyundai Elantra

Posted by atomicalex on 2016-05-25
Posted in: Automotive, Style. Leave a Comment

Urgh, another rental. Wait, I have a blog, so I can tell you all about it!

I got to Enterprise yesterday and was asked if I wanted to upgrade to something roomier than the midsize I booked. Uh, no. Thank you, but no. I asked for something smaller, and the manager just sighed, wandered off, and eventually handed over the keys to a brand new (seriously – 102.3 miles on the odometer) 2017 Hyundai Elantra. I took it home, loaded up my stuff, and headed out to visit a plant in the middle of OH. Possibly the most boring road trip ever.

The stripper rental car was doomed when Volkswagen decreed in the early 90s that all cars shipped over to our shores should have at a minimum air conditioning. By the early 2000s, Honda had caught on, and by the mid-2000s, it was almost impossible to find a true stripper any more. There isn’t even a delete option for most automotive features now, so good luck with sweating. All this change has meant that your average rental car is now actually a decent place to be, like this Elantra.


The Elantra I got was a bit of a surprise to me. The 2016 was ok, but not something I would consider renting again. The 2017 has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it a particularly good choice at the counter, the first being the incredibly adjustable front seat. Yes, I am swooning about a seat that is otherwise kind of stiff, not particularly supportive, and not really pretty either. The shear range of positioning is what makes this seat so great: in fact, the entire ergos for the car are far better than I expected, and frankly, might set a standard. The vertical adjust on the driver’s seat is nearly six inches. This means that I, as a person who does not enjoy the Actros or Mack seating position, can get the seat (and my H point) down to somewhere sensible. Forward and backward are manually adjustable and also generous. The seat is missing lumbar adjust, something that would prevent me from purchasing the car. Regular notched seatback angle is also impressive in range.

Complementing the extreme seat manipulation is a very adjustable steering wheel. It pulls out about five inches and has significant up and down motion. While it might not look like an F1 car on the outside, those of us who prefer the F1 seating position can almost get there. And still see out of the greenhouse. One noteworthy feature – the seat is nearly perfectly in line with the steering column. Otherwise perfect ergonomics have been ruined by misalignment of these two critical parts, so it’s nice that Hyundai has taken care here.

The rear window has a nasty fogging effect from its internal lamination that obscured vision in the lower driver’s quadrant. At first, I thought I had the generous AC cranked too far up, but the rear defroster did not help. Some investigation and reduction in solar angle of incidence revealed the tell-tale dot pattern of optical adhesive. Otherwise, visibility was very good, even with the seat all the way down.

The stereo works pretty well, and was minimally difficult to figure out. The base stereo and button-intense control surface seems almost quaint in today’s world of full-color TFT touchpads. XM works as expected, with three bands available for presets. The preset function is super-easy to use. I would recommend this stereo for technophobes, it’s straight out of 1995, but with more words on the screen.

Climate control controls were scattered and took me a few minutes to sort out. Seriously, though, GM-level AC in this thing.

Riding down I75 in Detroit, the car started beeping at my, with no indication in the instrument binnacle of the source. I quickly learned how to operate the steering wheel controls, the various functions on the dash, and a few other odds and ends before realizing that my purse, coat, and adapter bag were enough weight to trigger the passenger airbag/seatbelt interlock and warning. Ooops. I swished my purse and coat to the floor and the beeping stopped. The angle of the late afternoon sun had made the warning light on the center stack very difficult to see.

The car struggled with grooved pavement and winds, with very unsteady tracking. The first one hundred miles or so of the two-hundred mile trip were difficult. Once I was through the grooves in Michigan and the construction zones in OH, the car started to settle down a bit. The sensitivity may be related to the tall-sidewall tyres the car is shod with, or to air in the steering rack. I don’t know, but it was super annoying and made an otherwise pleasant ride into a more stress than it should have been.

The engine is plenty powerful for rental abuse, and the transmission is remarkably not annoying. In sport mode. In regular and eco modes, it is a dog. Way too much lag off the line. Gear-hunting was rare, downshifts were smooth, and no clunks or lurches. No shifter weirdness because the shifter is like the radio – an artifact, but a very welcome and pleasant artifact. If it ain’t broke… you know, don’t “fix” it.

The interior is not upscale, but it’s also not downscale. It’s extremely neutral. Hyundai uses a better quality hard plastic and textures it to avoid surface glare. The upholstery is smooth, but looks to be a fine knit that may pill or pull. Time will tell. No one is going to mistake this thing for a Genesis, that is for sure, but it’s noticeably better than a Corolla. The trunk includes a rear seatback release button and is roomy.


It’s a car with decent looks and controls. It’s boring, but predictable. Overall, you won’t go appreciably wrong by selecting the 2017 Elantra at the rental counter.

(pics coming soon)