shrunk

http://youtu.be/Iphr5aiDvIU

Forgive the car used here, had a GT Starlet for a while in my early 20's, but here's a couple chops of it: and this was a little animated gif I done of it:

Will the cars still be branded the same? It would make sense for them not to be, since they're not officially built by 'FPV' but it's a fairly powerful brand. People know what it represents, which adds value to the product on the showroom floor.

I'm borrowing a mates '09 335i Motorsport for the next couple weeks, while in-laws are visiting & using my g6et. My seat-of-the-pants-ometer puts the g6et ahead in straightline performance, especially the 80-120kph sprint, but handling is a different thing altogether, the 335i is leagues ahead. Makes me want to reprioritise my spending away from more power toward more stability (is this just a g6e thing?). My last car was a Legacy (Liberty in Aussie) B4 Blitzen, with it's factory Bilstein suspension it handled a sh!tload better than the g6e and the 335i is a sh!tload better than the blitzen. One real impressive thing about the 335i is the huge contrast between its equivalent of 'drive' and 'performance mode' in throttle sensitivity / responsiveness, it's night and day. Even with an auto-box, the 335 feels like it would be right at home on the track. The interior's are very comparable, but the ICC / user controls in the g6et are much more user friendly (plus the 335i has no reversing camera etc). I prefer the tighter fitting seats in the BMW and smaller diameter steering wheel. The keyless entry, start button and keyless lock in the BMW are pretty cool too and not just for the gimic factor, it all works quite seamlessly.

The question is does anyone have decent evidence to support carwashes damaging a vehicles paint work any more than a hand wash. A car wash is enclosed using a significant amount of water and foam (in most cases) and most modern carwashes have done away with the old bristley brushes. At home you are doing it in the open, exposed to all the dirt and grit etc that is carried in even low wind conditions, after wetting your car these will settle and you'll scrub them accross your paintwork in irregular patterns (most/all hand washed cars show this in abundance in the swirls you see in certain lighting conditions). So unless you're handwashing your car in an enclosed envinronment, with a few bucket loads of water and a lot of foam - you're probably not much safer than a carwash. This video from 5th Gear shows the carwash (old brush type) might not be perfect, but gave less damage than the other means evaluated in the test. This is not to say I'm going to make the carwash a regular thing - I prefer to handwash, but when it's a -1 degree celcius Christchurch day, you can understand a lack of motivation to play outside with a hose.

Thanks for all of that. @ It's a 2008 model - I'll check with Ford re. the update... the bluetooth part works fine (handsfree etc) but the music playback via dock / connector in the console is the pain. Bit disappointing about the mirrors, even my 10 year old subaru had automatic folding... it was a last minute scramble for a button last night as the carwash fired up and felt too stiff to be manual when I wound down the window with foam and water spraying everywhere!

Just returned from a 1000km trip from Christchurch to Queenstown and back - averaged 8.5l/100km - very happy with that... several decent stabs of the go button along the way - at one stage early on I was sitting at 7.8/100 - until I got sick of a tailgating subaru.

Only owned her a couple weeks, and have a couple questions I havent been able to answer using search so far.... 1. How the hell do you retract / fold in the side mirrors?? Hoping the answer to this isnt 'manually'! 2. iPhone integration / music playback was working ok, display said 'not supported' but still able to skip tracks with steering wheel controls etc, but now it's simply identifying the phone as 'auxillary' and steering controls no longer work.. any ideas? I haven't updated the OS on the iPhone at all during this time. 3. Boot popper on key remote - should this actually 'pop' the boot open, or simply unlock it? Other than the above, pretty stoked with the car so far - priced up a local xcal3 tune and injectors so that will be on the cards as soon as I can convince the wife that it's all in the interest of economy gains...

I just done my first fill in my new g6et - used 55L of 96 and got 450km out of it (so still plenty left in the tank). Car was reading 11.7L/100km at that stage. I'm pretty happy with that. That was pretty much right on 50/50 city/motorway in Christchurch, NZ (added that comment to add the climate factor - cooler air down here etc). Admittedly I was babying the throttle most the time - just to try prove a point to the misses that it wasnt going to be too bad on fuel. I'm coming from a 2L twin-turbo legacy (aka Liberty in Oz) which was doing 12.5L/100km. I've now filled it with 98 and its sitting on 11.5L/100 - but don't intend to drive it quite so nicely on this tank.