misc driving stuff

 

I want the Dodge Caliber SE Plus that I bought last February to be the last gasoline powered vehicle I ever buy.  It’s an SE, with a five speed stick shift in it, so it has the lowest level engine available in Calibers, a 1.8 Liter dual overhead cam engine that makes 148 horsepower and 125 lbs of torque.  I don’t notice the "low" horsepower much, because my last vehicle was a 1990 Plymouth Voyager minivan with a 2.5 L four banger that made, tops, 105 HP and about the same torque – more than somewhat underpowered with a full load of people aboard it.  I got the Voyager out of a tow yard for $337.50 to do the daily newspaper deliveries in – it easily held and moved a thousand papers around town, at low speeds (45 mph tops, and mostly 35 and under).  It got decent mileage for a minivan: 18 mpg in town and almost 30 on the highway, but I was afraid to drive it very far out of town due to the fact that it was in the end stages of it’s life, and god only knew what was gonna break next.  The Caliber is just a year old (built in January 2008) and gets much superior mileage to the van; 25 mpg going back and forth to work, and as much as 37 on the highways.  It consistantly gets 33 mpg or better – going to and from California last month, where the speedlimit is higher than in Oregon, even at 75 miles an hour, it returned 34 mpg.  As it breaks in, the mileage will improve.

I’ve put, in the last year, 12, 787 miles on the Caliber.  I like to drive, and Cali-Blue, my car, cruises very nicely, riding on 17" wheels sporting 60 series tires – tall and wide and very stable at any speed.  In 1994, I totaled all my driving miles up to then and came up with (rounded off) 550,000 miles of driving.  I stopped counting after that – half a million miles impressed the hell out of me, especially since most of those miles were on my dime.  I have been a big trucks driver – driving semis here and there in the 11 western states, but most of that mileage was made in my cars, or rental cars, and wasn’t for a job; it was because I LOVE driving.

The school bus I drive this year is less than two years old – it was just over a year old at the start of the 08-09 school year, and I’ve racked up 6,000 miles on it already this school year. All those miles are just in town, in Milwaukie, but I fatasize about getting that bus out on the highway and using the cruise control is is equipted with, just for the hell of it.  That bus has a Cumming six cylinder turbo motor in it, and it GOES nicely, especially compared to the 24 year old bus I drove for the two school years previous to it – a V-8 non-turbo engined piece of… well, I didn’t like old #25 nearly as much as I like #63 that I drive this year.

One of the most powerful cars I ever drove was the name of Clint Eastwood’s new (and reputedly last) movie, "Gran Torino".  That car belonged to one of my high school class mates, who came to visit me in California a year or so after we graduated in 1980.  It had a BIG engine in it, a 429 ci V-8.  We drove it to Arizona, where the Ranch campus of our private school was (is).  I was driving along I-10 in the SE California desert, going 80 or so, and put my foot down to see what would happen.

Going 80 miles an hour, the car downshifted into second and shoved us both back in the seats as it leapt forward, not shifting back into high gear until we hit 100 and I backed off.  We were nearly doubling the speed limit, 55 mph at the time, and ol’ Sarge, my friend, said hey Kat, we don’t want a ticket, do we.  The last car my parents had bought, and the first car I drove, was a 1973 Torino wagon, and it’s 351C engine wasn’t in the same league as that 429 in Sarge’s car, no way.

The 351C in my Engineering buddy’s car, while I was on the ship (in the Navy) was a totally different story.  He’d been a shore based sailor before he got on our ship, and had had access to the Navy’s tools and auto hobby shop in Norfolk, and had built that 351C to the max – it was THE MOST POWERFUL car I’ve ever driven.  I borrowed it once in Maine, where our ship was in drydock for it’s "Post Shakedown Availability", and when my car was in the shop getting a new engine in it. Ol’ Wayne’s car was a 1973 Mustang Mach One, and although, in stock form, that car was less than it mighta been, after Wayne got done building his, it ROCKED.  Me and the wife were driving up US 1 from the shipyard to Wiscasette, where our apartment was, and as was the usual thing for me, when we got out of town and the speedlimit went up, I accelerated.  Some guy was tooling along ahead of us, going maybe 50 mph, so I floored it and went to pass him, and ol’ Wayne’s car LEAPT forward from 50 and hit 80 like that, and showed no signs of runing out of steam – she wanted to go and keep going, and illegal speeds were reached before I knew it.  My wife turned to me and said "I don’t think you should have a car like this", as we passed 85, 35 miles an hour faster than we had been going the second before.  My face was already hurting from the wide grin I wore, but I took the wife seriously and backed off it and slowed down to legal speeds.  she said she’s never ride in that car again with me – and meant it.

The fastest I’ve ever driven was 120, on the car’s speedometer.  I used to regularly drive my cars at 100 mph plus, just to see if they could do it.  I rented a Ford Thunderbird in 95, on a visit back to the states from Japan, and was passing through Death Valley, on my way back up here, after a visit to Jhni’s in Big Bear, and came upon a three mile line of RV’s, cruising s l o w l y through Death Valley.  That T-Bird had a 4.8L V-8 in it, and was new too, so, looking ahead (I could see for miles), I put my foot in it and passed every one of those RV’s at one swoop. All three miles of them.  Since it was a rental, that car topped out at 104 miles an hour… but I held that speed as long as it took to pass all those slow RV’s, and ya know, it didn’t take very long at all.

Like I said, I want the Caliber I bought last year to be my last gas powered car, and so I’ve been gentle with it – hell, it’s not even really broke in yet anyway.  Twice on the way

back from California a couple weeks ago, I had her up to 80 or so, but I’ve never driven my Cali-Blue faster than that… so far.  The higher levels of Caliber have bigger, more powerful engines in them; the SXT (and the SE too) has an optional 2 Liter engine in it, rated at 157 horses.  The R/T model has a 2.4 L engine in it, rated at 172 horses, and the top of the line SRT4 model has a turbocharged 2.4 L four banger in it that makes an incredible 285 horsepower.  I’d love to drive one of those, just because, but the 1.8 L in my Cali-Blue works fine for me.  Gets better gas mileage too.

That small engine in my car makes as much horsepower as my first car did, a 1970 Mustang with a 302 V-8 in it.  When I got it, it was ten years old and I was 18, and driving it over 110 miles an hour basically killed it – the timing gears were  plastic coated sets of steel gears, and that car had been rode hard and put away wet too many times, and I stripped the plastic off the timing gears and that was that for that engine.

ooops.

I got the engine out of my friend’s wrecked Mercury and pulled my Mustang’s engine and put in his, and drove it till I blew up the transmission, spinning donuts in Arizona at the Ranch Campus, after a beer run we’d made to Sedona.  Ol’ Sarge and I drove out there to get my car back, because I had driven out there with another friend the month before and had spun those donuts and had left the car in a shop to get a rebuilt tranny put in it.  That transmission failed again less than a year later, in Tulare, California, and I left it in a mall parking lot while I figured out what to do with it, and it got towed a few days later, and that was the end of my first car.

The Caliber is the eighth car I’ve owned, but I have driven hundreds of them.  All my friend’s cars, I drove them.  I’ve rented a few dozen cars.  I used to drive ’em away for a $, and every chance I got, I DROVE something.  I love to drive and so, when in 1989 my college career stalled out and the wife said "What do you REALLY want to do?", I said "I wanna drive" and she helped me get my first Commercial Driver’s License.

I’ve been a janitor, a security guard, a Navy engineer, an English teacher, and this that and the other, but what I love is driving.  They told me as I was growing up that I was smart enough to do ANYTHING I wanted to, and while my parents, telling me that, had visions of me as a Physicist, or nuclear engineer, I took it to mean that I could do anything I wanted to do.  I crashed my car in 1998, and didn’t have a car again until 2005, but by that time, the man who owns the store on the corner had already said "do you want to drive for my son, delivering the Oregonian?"

I said "YEAH!!!" and have been driving that route for five years now.  That stepvan I drive has a pretty strong 350 V-8 in it, but the gas mileage is rather dismal, so the boss helped me get that minivan out of the tow yard to do the Dailies with, and I’ve had my own car ever since.  Last year, that minivan blew it’s headgasket, and when the Dodge dealer that I visited in February offered to sell me a new car, and to give me $4500 for the van, sight unseen, I said "YEAH!"  and bought the Caliber, brand fucking new.  No regrets.  Although, in a typical car sales fashion, that $4500 got knocked down and I paid more for the Caliber than I would now (looking in the Saturday paper, I see Caliber SE Pluses are going for thousands less than I’m paying for mine)  I was soo happy that they’d take that used  up van off my hands and hand me the keys to a new car that I didn’t really negotiate with ’em for the Caliber – I took what they offered and haven’t looked back. What I’m paying for the car is a thousand under MSRP anyway, and we were all happy with the deal.

Wanna go someplace?  I’ll drive.  Take shotgun and enjoy the ride.  C’mon!

*****