Thursday, July 10, 2008

Interesting Cars

As you all should know I have a love/hate relationship with cars. I love observing the designs of cars, but I see it as a necessary evil to drive them right now. A few I have been taking notice of...

Volvo C30
-Cute luxury hatch from Europe that has a plethora of safety features, average gas mileage (29 mpg), and excellent utility. Kudos to Volvo for returning to its true roots. It is what the Ford Focus ST looks like in Europe. Unfortunately, we don't get to see such a car, but we still get this cute thing.

Volvo XC60
-This vehicle will enter the small luxury SUV market with the Subaru Forester, Acura RDX, BMW X3, etc. It looks based on the Mazda CX-7, but packed with safety features. I will be curious to see the engine and consequent gas mileage because the inside is true Scandinavian unlike the XC90, which was tank force built I assume by Ford. The engine is rumored to support biofuels (the good and bad of that).

I think the two vehicles above show a shift within Ford toward smaller vehicles, which is good, but they still have work to do. Who knows, there might come the day when I purchase American for a vehicle.

Tesla Roadster
-All electric roadster goes from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds when fully charged. However, the acceleration quickly changes to 6 seconds as the car loses power. It is too expensive ($110,000) and impractical, but it caught GM's eye and I think is a step toward a better car for tomorrow.

Just my thoughts on some vehicles I've seen lately. What have you seen or heard about?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was disappointed when I found out that the Smart car only gets 33/40 MPG. That seems quite terrible considering the size of it. I've calculated that my moped gets 75 MPG, and it can get me to West Towne just as fast as a car.

While I can't drive a scooter in the winter, I doubt a Smart Car would do much better. To me, the only reason you would buy it is to show off to your neighbors that you care about the environment. Oh, that and the $12,500 MSRP.