UKPylot’s MINI Blog

I was watching CNN this morning while getting ready for work and they announced a new JD Power initial quality survey that showed (in their view) that the US car industry was improving. They were quoting figures for the number of repairs required in the first 90 days per 100 cars. Only ones I remember (roughly) are:

• Lexus – 84 repairs per 100 cars
• Porsche – 90
• Cadillac – 91
• MINI – 165 per 100 cars
• Industry average – 108

In trying to find the article I found this one that says that MINI came dead last: ouch! The full details are on the JD Power website. But here is a summary:

Been a while….

• MINI recently passed 85,000 miles, looks like I will make it to my first ever 100k automobile
• Stripes are starting to look really tatty, faded, rusty even. Tempted to take them off and see how it looks with the two tone paintwork or maybe even buying some new ones
• Talking of stripes, I finally came up with a side stripe theme I like but don’t know who I could get to make them or, more importantly, if I want to spend the money
• Got a voicemail today from the shop that did my last Inspection in December, asked me to please call them. I presume this is a business-generation call but I’m still smarting form the $500 rear brakes replacement so probably will not call them back.
• Hmmm… I’ve surely jinxed the car with the first bullet point
• Doing my part to save California – my car tax is up to $289 in August!

I’m getting a lot of cold calls on my cell phone to do with expired car warranties right now. This is annoying because, well, at 80k miles I doubt I could afford a warranty even if someone wanted to sell me one and also because my cell phone number is only known by a handful of people, so who is selling my cell number (yes I am looking at you scumbag credit card companies).

Most recent call was interesting – apparently, my car had expired! Well, I can’t see me wanting a warranty in that case.

Filled up my tank Monday morning before going to San Diego – 389 miles on the full tank of gas which turned out to be 28.6 mpg according to my calculator. I’ve never made 400 miles on a single tank but if there had been a gas station within in the next 15 miles I would have carried on and made it. One day, perhaps.

Oh, the difference in driving “style” between this tank and previous one was actually some favourable tailwinds.

I’ll come up with a little write-up later but for now, here’s a video from our trip and some pictures. The video contains footage from the parking ramp at the event, and also from our run to Temple Bar on Friday morning. Feel free to click on the video and on to the high definition version.

And some pictures on my new flickr AMVIV VI set.

Yes, it’s that time of year (well, for me that time of every second year) – AMVIV is here this weekend and we’re looking forward to winding our way northwards to Vegas. Last time our journey was quite entertaining – heavy rain meant that some of the washes had flooded route 95 so we had to ford some big puddles, including being totally drenched by an oncoming lorry that splashed a wave of water than went right over the car. Good job we had the top up!

Our current plans are:

• leave Thursday morning and make it to Vegas in time to sign-in
• Friday we will join the run to Temple Bar, grab some lunch and then probably go up Mount Charleston “on the way back” since we’re really disappointed we won’t get to do it on Thursday
• Friday night we’ll be top down cruising the Strip
• Saturday morning we’ll follow everyone to Nelson’s Landing and hopefully we’ll be back in time for the Poker Run as we really enjoyed that last time. It’s a bummer that these two events overlap.
• Saturday night we’re off to The Mirage to see Terry Fator and his puppets!
• Sunday morning, pack our bags and head on home

See you all there!

Most of you probably saw the announcement this week that Sirius XM plans to release an iPhone application by June.

I must say I quite like the idea depending on how much extra it will cost on top of my current subscriptions. I’m assuming you will need 3G or Wi-Fi to be able to listen to it. It would be nice if there was a way to have these things (such as Pandora) do some kind of downgrading of the quality when on the Edge network. If I could get uninterrupted listening I don’t think I would mind a reduction in the song quality.

Anyway it will be interesting to see what Sirius XM comes up with, hopefully it will be good enough to keep them aloft for a while longer at least.