I won’t bother with lists of not doing much since my last proper posting but I will bring you up to date on a few things.
Firstly,
i took my car to the SAAB dealer this morning.. they test drove the car (which,
unsurprisingly started working FAR better the morning I took it to the doctor)
and then took it around the back. The result, a change of spark plugs later,
costing 15 quid ‘cos they didn’t bother charging for installation, and the
car has it’s woosh back.
Apparently, SAABs, unlike any other car,
don’t have a pre-set firing order of their cylinders. When you start the
engine, the engine management system fires all the spark plugs, monitors
the voltage drop over them and then figures out which cylinder fired and
hence what should happen next. Apparently this is a neat trick, but requires
that the spark plugs be working properly. This is why I was getting a slight
misfire upon engine starting and possibly why I was getting such awful performance,
as the engine management system was making sure the engine didn’t get damaged
if there were a fault with a leaky valve or some other fault.
Secondly, I got my hair cut..
Finally,
I was about to travel back to Oxford to go to Sinoco computers to pick up
an LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive so that I can give my old CD-ROM to my dad as part
of an upgrade to his system. (I’m donating to him the case, motherboard,
PIII 500Mhz CPU, memory and CD-ROM but he doesn’t know this yet.) However,
passing Dixons in Witney on the way back to the car after my hair cut I noticed
that they had on sale the very same drive I was going to buy from Sinoco’s
but £15 cheaper and this was the full retail boxed version rather than the
OEM version.. So I dodged in there and bought it instead,
On the whole, a decent day’s events so far.
This
evening I’m off to a BBQ at a friend’s place in Oxford, so I will probably
wash the car this afternoon after doing the weekly shop.
PS.
I had a nice long chat with the head of the maintenance at Oxford SAAB about various things, including the fact that all the technology put into the new Vauxhall/Opel Vectra (You know, New Vectra, New Rules advert) is actually taken directly from the SAAB stuff developed for the old 9-3 and 9-5. The new petrol engines in the GM range are all SAAB derivatives also. Was it GM who bought the SAAB car division or the other way around?
figures re the saab/vectra stuff, somethign I have noticed is this. they have a this whole ‘tottally new car/new thinking’ ad campaign yet thsy have posters up showing the chassis and say ‘74% extra torsional rigidity’ so 74% more torsional rigidity than what exactly? If it is a totally new car than comparisons like that are pointless, if it isn’t then it’s not new thinking…. personally I have noting against GM but i do think vauxhall could make much better cars than they do. They are boring and show no effort to be better than ‘average’
Vauxhall/GM used to be quite inovative in the late 1960’s with their safety technology, and again with pushing front wheel drive diesels into the general population in the early 1980’s. However, it’s very sporadic and has all but disappeared as they’ve amalgamated all their design centres into a single one. (Each of the divisions, ie. Vauxhall, Opel etc., used to have their own design teams etc. They were small and reasonably innovative.)
I have a feeling that GM bought the car division of SAAB to use it as a sort of Skunk works. ie. A division which tries out novel ideas in production before it trickles down to the rest of the product lines.
Ford have been better at innovation recently. The new Ford Passat, sorry VW Mondeo, oops, Ford Mondeo is a case in point.. the innovation was to poach the complete design staff from Volkswagon.