Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
You're a braver man than I, Gunga Din. I mean, seriously, I think that they are cute as the devil, and for some environments (like London, particularly, or any very cramped city), absolutely perfect for tricky parking, and all that, but having been in an accident once, with a very small car, in which I was obscenely lucky not to have died a pretty horrible death, nyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, I want a bit more protection between me and the Grim Reaper. Out here, we tend to have long stretches of road coupled with a fair amount of high-speed driving, and I'd be too chicken to zoom around in a Mini, or one of those itty-bitty suppository cars you see running bout. (You know the ones; we could pick one up and put it in the bed of Mr. H's Dodge Ram p/u truck...)
|
As Wodin mentioned, the Mini Cooper S Countryman isn't really a small car. The standard Mini Cooper is, more or less.
I was gobsmacked not long back seeing a
Morris Minor parked near me. (Pic attached.) It looked like the larval form of a classic black London taxi. It was a quite compact four door sedan, and somewhat shorter than most standard US passenger cars.
NYC is currently seeing an increasing number of
small cars - the Smart car. Two seats and enough luggage space behind the seats for a briefcase or so. If all you want to do is drive in the city, they're good choices. Exceptional fuel economy, and able to fit in tiny parking spots. They aren't all that fast, but you don't care. NYC used to have an in city speed limit of 35mph. That got dropped to 25mph after a nasty accident, and I just snorted. Given traffic in Manhattan, good luck getting
up to 25mph, let alone 35mph, unless you are driving at 3am. I was really tickled to see a Smart car with commercial plates, a contractor's logo on the side, and a roof rack with a tiny ladder strapped to it. If all you needed to do the contracting was tools, the Smart car was a decent choice because there was enough space to hold those.
An old friend would agree with your notion about driving big cars for safety. He drove big V8 boats, and claims doing that saved his life because he emerged unscathed from an accident that would have totaled a smaller car
and him. He was making noises a while back about getting a HumVee. I said "Bear in mind you will get gas mileage in the single digit range" He believed gas prices would plummet. They did from when he got the idea, but not
that much. He has a standard sedan (Honda, IIRC) that he hates, and his pride an joy is a lovingly restored canary yellow 1957 TBird convertible. Opportunities to drive that are a bit limited, however, but it turns heads when he does.

______
Dennis