DervMan ( snipped-for-privacy@ntlworld.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Like I said - it's not going to make any difference...
But my reply was to Avanti who, IIRC, has blown a shitload of folding on a new Golf. Hence the "fool and his money" comment...
Work hard play hard , no point having the money in the bank for someone else to enjoy when I pass away ;-p
Whether a week or 2 it will still need washing eventually, it's a VW so I doubt it is fickle judging on my previous examples.
Fragile they may appear, but chuck away the unnecessary bits (like glass and interior) and they blow away everything else in class on an autograss circuit!
Well, there is one car I like, but it's a kit car, and would probably cost over =A320,000, or a little more if it's prebuilt. However, normal manufacturers don't make anything like this.
Oh. A Fiat Seicento with a 1.2 16v would suit me, but they never built them with that engine. In my opinion this would be fast, economical, and practical.
lol, fast for me would be 0-60 in around 10s, I would consider less than 7 seconds to be 'very fast', and I wouldn't want it would be a waste on public roads (I don't want to argue about this btw, it's an opinion, I'm not stating it as a fact).
2 seats and luggage would be enough for me.
economical for me would be at least 40mpg, but I genereally prefer a bit higher than that.
I wasn't thinking about 'economical to buy', I was thinking about any car.
(petermcmillan snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
And it is?
Sounds like you need an Elise.
No, he's not being unreasonable here. Fast is relative. Somebody else posted a requirement of sub-7sec 0-60 for fast. But that's tortoise slow compared to a decent bike. It's all just labels.
Or you could think of it this way : Would you want Peter driving anything you consider fast?
cheers, clive
In message , Clive George writes
It is, but what a 1.2 Seicento would do hasn't been fast for a car for a long time. That wouldn't be well into the realms of "slow" by most people's definition.
< 10s to sixty is where "not slow" begins, IMO.Would it make any difference?
Tee hee - why do you accept that it's just labels, then dispute it immediately?
I don't have a personal universal definition of 'fast' or 'not slow' - but then I'm not racing.
(eg I think that a top speed of 88mph is actually incredibly fast, a totally impressive feat).
cheers, clive
Lets not get into an argument about this. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. If you compare a cars performance to the performance of a rocket going into space you could argue that they're all slow.
Clive George ( snipped-for-privacy@xxxx-x.fsnet.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Sure it is.
I s'pose if 55bhp puts the 750kg 1.1 8v Sei Sporting to mid-90s and 13sec to 60, the 85bhp from the Punto 1.2 16v would make it a bit scary. But "fast"? No.
If we compare the Punto performance, 55bhp puts that to mid-90s and 15sec (with 6spd), vs the 85's 110mph and 10sec. Not "fast", but certainly "less likely to hold traffic up".
Yes.
It might teach him how mind-numbingly limited his world view is.
In message , Clive George writes
Didn't dispute that it was a label, I was talking about where most people would set their labels and pointing out that Peter's idea of "fast" would be somewhere within most people's idea of "slow".
For a more objective way of looking at it, would a 1.2 Seicento be faster or slower than the average car on the road today? I strongly suspect that it would be considerably slower.
Top speed is irrelevant to pretty much everything.
So are 0-60 times.
40-80 would be much more to the point.
They're a decent proxy for power to weight ratio if you aren't looking at tenths of a second. Corrupted by variation in traction.
Probably, but not so widely available.
Steve Walker ( snipped-for-privacy@otolith.demon.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Are they, though?
If "version A" of a car (let's take that 55 Punto) is flat at 90mph, it's going to be pretty bloody loud, thrashy and thirsty at normal motorway speeds, especially if "version B" (the 85 Punto) will do 110.
and gearing.
Indeed.
Then I'd say that power to weight ratios are overrated too. All I want to know about a car's acceleration, is what it's like for overtaking, which is as much down to gearing and torque. If a car's geared to give impressive 0-60 times, it'll probably be at the expense of acceleration where it really matters.
Quite, but that's because everyone's so obsessed with top speeds and
0-60 times.In message , Adrian writes
Fair point, to some extent; the 97mph Peugeot 309 I used to own, the Peugeot 306 I had after that and the Civic I have now are all geared to about 20 mph / 1000 rpm in top and all reach vmax in top. Top speeds vary from 97 to 146mph, but they're all turning over at about 3500rpm at
70.Steve Walker ( snipped-for-privacy@otolith.demon.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Can we surmise that the 309 was a diesel, whereas the Civic is a Type R?
It's the underlying factor.
Only if what you mean is "what it's like for overtaking in the wrong gear". Otherwise, assuming that it doesn't have some really perverse gearing going on, it's power and weight.
If it's absolutely optimised for that, yes, perhaps, and you can't draw any conclusions about how quick through the gears two cars would be if only a couple of tenths apart from 0-60. Broad-brush, though, if you compare two otherwise similar cars, the one which does 60 in 6 seconds will be faster on every speed increment than the one which does it in
Some magazines now quote 0-100 and some have quoted intermediate times for ages. AutoCar quote 30-70 through the gears. They also quote 50-70 in top, which I guess is for the benefit of reps who can't let go of their mobile phone to change gear.
In practice, a random sample of cars from the back of AutoCar comes out in roughly the same order if you sort it by 0-60 or 30-70.
In message , Adrian writes
1.3 petrol.
Yup. 306 was a 2.0 litre 8-valve petrol.
I don't think I've found *any* recent(ish) cars unbearably thrashy on the motorway; not in the sense that, say, a Metro or a MKI Fiesta were.
Steve Walker ( snipped-for-privacy@otolith.demon.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Ah. It just ran out of wheeze, not revs...
Wanna borrow Peter's Sei?
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