Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
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. 
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Dennis |
We have a crapload of Minors out here. I wasn't talking about the Countryman. At all. We have Minors and all those wee electric cars. I mean, those teeny suckers. Because we are Boonie Dwellers, lots of those who "moved out of it all" see the distances, and think "oh, I need a car that gets awesome gas mileage," and for those that work down in the city, they're not wrong. So, they get Minors and those suppository cars (the oddball electrical ones), and move up here. But, shhhhhhhhhhhhugar, boys, we got us some
real live rednecks, horses, horse trailers, and all that dadgum stuff up here, and I know for a fact--because I drive our Ram, which is not on big tires, jacked-up, or any of that stuff--that when those wee cars get behind you,
you CANNOT SEE THEM. I could back over one of those suckers without knowing, until it was too late.
And because we have long stretches of road, with high speeds and all that, I just worry about the reality of flipping a Minor at 80mph (I flipped that car, in the accident to which I'd referred), or worse, slamming into the back end of an elevated p/u truck. I mean...physics are physics=MA, y'know?
Hitch