Catching up, Part I - The Car

First off, Happy Thanksgiving! Seeing that I have a few days off I figured I might take some time to catch up with recent events.. probably sorted around various topics. This one, obviously, involves the car.

First off, currently, it’s in the shop. Sucks, yeah.. I know. With modern cars come modern problems. This great auto has a really neat suspension system that controls the shocks and the ride based on the user settings (Comfort, Sport or Advanced). Well, one of the accelerametors that sends signals to the computer seems to be sending an out of bounds signal every now and then. The big problem is that once the car gets turned off, that error clears. So it’s hard to diagnose it if your on your way to work, or your leaving after hours and the shop is closed. It finally happened during one of my lunch trips so I was able to take it to the dealer and have him look at it. Hopefully they will be done with it tomorrow and hopefully the error doesn’t come back. This is one of the things I miss about the states, better service in regards to the customer. A dealer that will give you a loaner, understand what you are talking about and provide feedback and suggestions. The dealers here are very quiet and not very talkative, and they wanted 60eur a day (w/o VAT) for a S40. Get out of town with that.

Besides that though, the car has been running great. I’ve put over 10,000 miles on it already and am averaging about 17-18 MPG overall. That’s not all that bad for a majority of city driving or speeds on the highway averaging 95 mph . I’ve put some parts on it (tinted tail lights, MS Designs trunk spoiler and VST roof spoiler and had the windows tinted with 50% all the way around) and I recently ordered up some new rims from IPD (VST Monoblocks) that should be here in January. I plan on making the new rims summer shoes with tires for summer driving/track outings. Yes, I do plan on making more trips to The Ring. Once summer comes I’ll be having the OEM Pirilli’s removed, the rim-rash fixed (stupid small dutch roads/parking spots!) and get winter M/S tires installed on the Pegs for next winter.

Performance wise, I think in the spring I’ll get a new down pipe and exhaust installed, maybe also do the new sway bars, endlinks and springs. Followed up with a softloader from IPD. I am glad I haven’t done those yet, since having the car in the shop for 4C problems wouldn’t look good if I had replaced all those pieces with new none-OEM stuff. That tends to be things that the dealers don’t like to see and negates any warentees.

I’ve got some good pictures from my track time and a visit to a World Rally Challange up in northern Holland. I’ll be getting those up soon.