General Auto Chat

this hasn’t happened yet, but will begin soon. I’m getting to Austin in a few days. And I’ll start test driving shortly thereafter

 

Soup's post reminded me to follow up about the 2020 Q3 we got last year.

I still like it overall, but it's had 2 bizarre, serious defects.

1) The roof leaked. Short movie: https://pmc-dropshare.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Movie-2020-04-15-07-37.mov This happened after a big-ish snow. The snow was melting as we were driving down the road and then all of a sudden there were drops of water falling off the overhead console. WTF! Dealer couldn't reproduce the issue. Maybe the sunroof water discharge system got frozen up and as more snowmelt entered it it had nowhere to go so it overflew the dam and entered the overhead console? Has only happened once.

2) The engine auto-shutoff can't be permenantly switched off. This means if you hate this feature (I do), you have to remember to turn it off every time you start the engine. It's a hardware button, which makes disabling it easier, but sometimes I forget. The defect: the car has a software bug such that sometimes the software puts the engine into limp mode (extremely reduced power mode) when the motor auto-starts after being auto-shut off. Imagine you're making an unprotected left turn in traffic and the engine goes into limp mode. There's a real non-zero chance you'd get t-boned. The dealer knows this is an issue and has no idea when Audi will get around to fixing it. Fixing it involves bringing the car into the dealer (a 3-hour drive each way for me).

Nice car, shitty issues with it. The roof leak issue is one I'm willing to chalk up to extreme weather, but the engine software feature is a real safety issue, and should be recall-worthy.

 

Engine auto-shutoff itself is a bug and not a feature.

All data points to it being worse than not having it for normal traffic stops, and in gridlock you need the engine on for climate control.

Even in the few cars where it does actually save fuel - I've only seen it optimizer enough on the latest hyundais - your cat cools down so you pollute the same or more, and it jolts the car like f**k every time it turns on.

I didn't think we could come up with a worse feature than auto-up-shift in manual mode for automatics, but this industry delivers.

 

Very bias post. I don't see the appeal of sport cars. They are pricey due to they are a sport car, higher insurance rates, and repairs can be worse on your wallet. I'll take a boring car due to cost.

Then again, I only look at cars for Point A > Point B. My first car with a Toyota Celica Convertible from 1992. Plenty of people like it around me, I hated it due to the top keep leaking water, and honestly the space in a sports car is lacking for me.

I'll keep my Honda Fit for awhile, then most likely earn more money and upgrade to a Subaru Outback. Enough room for dead bodies in the back.

 

What about a few other options (used, a couple kinda stretching budget, but would be fun to cross shop):

• Audi RS3 (or VW Golf R)
• Ford Shelby GT350 (2016)
• Toyota Supra MKV (A90)
• BMW M240i

 

Can't speak to any of the OP's choices as I have never owned any of them. There are lots of expensive-when-new sports cars that are affordable to many people once they get to be 10, 15, 20 years old. My own take is that many of them would be great fun to own - but only as hobby cars. Personally would not own any of them as daily drivers unless you have either a reliable backup vehicle or a significant repair fund readily available (or are prepared to use Uber or a bus for a while).

If you live in North America, the Corvette will probably be the cheapest and easiest to maintain, at least of the ICE variety. I would love a 911, always been a dream car for me. I could afford an older one myself, but potential maintenance costs if something major breaks are positively scary.

Diverging from the topic, but I'm considering a new car now myself, and I'm seriously considering the new mid-engine Corvette. With the base ("only" 480 HP) engine and limited options it's quite affordable for what you get. Like a poor man's Ferrari (and with no disrespect intended to GM or Ferrari).

Waiting to see what sort of deals are going to come up in the coming months as everyone tries to get the economy fired up again. This is a really shitty time financially for a lot of people right now and my heart goes out to them. If you were planning to be buying a car anyway though, probably a good time.

 

If you're in Austin I'd swap the 1 / 2 spots between Cayman and 911. Granted I haven't driven all the roads in Austin, but from my trips there I'd definitely enjoy driving a 911 there.

 

I guess it's time for a bit of an update on my progress. I've test driven quite a few cars in the last couple weeks or so.

First i drove a GTI. I went to drive a 911, but it had sold that morning, didn't want to go home without testing something, so we stopped at the VW dealer on the way home. Long story short, the GTI was fine, but it didn't really move me.

The next day I went to the Jaguar dealer to check out the F-Type. Man, what a gorgeous car! It also sounded great and was plenty fast, but for some reason it just didn't move me either. This is also the first sports car I have ever driven and I left a little disenfranchised. I couldn't see anything out of the damn thing, visibility was awful. I left thinking "Is this just what driving a sports car is like?"

I took a few days off test driving just to do some reevaluating.

Then I decided to go test drive a BMW 430i CPO. This really turned the whole thing around for me. I really enjoyed the drive in the bimmer. It took a second for the turbo to spool up, but man, what a fun car once its going. It was also a great deal.

I went back the next day to drive a 440i, cause suddenly I wanted to know how the 6 cylinder felt. It was even better. Much better low end grunt and dramatically less turbo lag. I thought this would be it.

A few days later my appointment to test drive a Tesla Model 3 Performance came up. I was at the Tesla dealer at 10am Saturday morning. They gave me 2 hours to go drive the car and didn't even tag along. That morning I had done some googling to find the best twisty roads in Austin. I took the Model 3 Performance out to Lime Creek Road. Which is an amazing twisty bit of road out by Lake Travis and had a blast. What a car, or at least what a powertrain. I ended up getting stuck behind a 911 for about 1/4 of my journey. And on the way back from Lime Creek Road I let the car drive me all the way back in Autopilot.

After getting back the salesman told me to take the standard dual motor model out for a quick spin. he was trying hard to get me to spend less money. It was still fast, but it felt more normal in its quickness, whereas the Performance was special. The Performance will gut punch you with acceleration from a standstill or doing 70 down the highway. Its a "commute fun" machine.

After that is also when I finally got to drive a 911. A 2010 997.2 with PDK. What.a.car. Sure it wasn't as blindingly fast as the Tesla was, but it was incredible in its own way. A lot of this might be chalked up to how much and for how long I have idolized the 911. The transmission was also every bit as good as I've heard it would be (this is in opposition to the ZF 8spd auto in the jag, which was fine, but didn't blow me away). This is also when I discovered it is possible to make a sports car that you can see out of! The dang 911 has better visibility than my Acura TL does!

As amazing as the Tesla was, i think living with it in an apartment would be a bit more troublesome than doing so in a house where I could have my own charger to charge every night. Specially now when I wont be charging it at work during the day for the foreseeable future. I also know that once you go EV it is very hard to go back, so I think now is the time to get a ICE car, can always get an EV down the road (hopefully after a nice, sporty, coupe EV has come out).

One thing with the 911 was the ride, it was pretty rough, and I'm not sure how I would like daily driving it every day after the honeymoon wore off. So I started looking at slightly newer 911's, 991 models, which people say are more "GT" like. I found several up in Dallas that looked really nice, and my plan was to go drive them,

Then I decided to go drive a C7 Corvette. It was a 2019 Grand Sport model. I was expecting it to be rough due to the Grand Sport-ness, but it wasn't really at all, it would be fine on a road trip. Visibility was better than the F-Type, but not as good as the 911. But man, the motor! what a beast. And yet, somehow, it didnt really grab me either. It didn't help that the GM 8 Speed was kind of crap compared to the ZF unit in the Jaguar. ill never understand why they didn't use that transmission...everyone else is. It is also really hard to find manual ones, and there weren't any nearby to test drive. I had to drive an hour just to drive this one. But yeah, this one also just didn't really grab me in any way, sure it was fast and loud and sounded glorious, but driving it didn't move me either.

Around this time I was basically deciding the 911 was most likely it.

But today I decided mostly on a whim to head down to the Toyota dealer to check out the Supra. I had originally ruled it out cause it was auto only, but the ZF transmission in the bimmers had impressed me. I also don't love the styling, but I don't hate it either, and it was already growing on my while I was googling around.

Boy am I happy I did. What a freaking car the Supra is. The motor and transmission are the same from the 440i, but its even better here, this is the best tuned ZF 8 speed I've driven so far and its kind of glorious. There is plenty of power everywhere and there is essentially no turbo lag. There really just isn't any lag anywhere in the driving experience, something I can't say about a lot of the other cars I had driven to this point, and was leaving me sort of confused by sports cars.

I just had so much fun in the Supra on the test drive.

I still love the 911, but there are a lot of reasons not to buy an 8 year old Porsche for 65k dollars. Maintenance would not be cheap, let alone if something broke. Whereas the Toyota would be brand new with a warranty, and be a Toyota to boot, as well as having a maintenance plan. It hasn't been my dream car for 20 years like the 911, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense to purchase right now and I had just as much fun driving it. It also was super comfortable just cruising! something the 911 couldn't accomplish, at least not the 997 example I drove.


So then I came home and did some more research. Turns out Toyota made quite a few changes for 2021 and that comes out in June. I think tomorrow I will be looking for a dealer to put down a reservation on a blue 2021 Supra at.

TL;DR; soup drove a bunch of cars, decided he didnt like sports car, found a sporty coup he liked, decided he liked sports cars again, drove a stupid fast EV, and finally found out he loves the Supra and will probably buy one.

 

So I wrote a little about the improvements to the 2021 MY Supra. It's getting a bump from 335 to 385hp and from 365 to 385 lb-ft. This is apparently not just from a tune, they also redid the piston design along with intake and exhaust. It also has improved suspension tuning and chassis support.

My concern here isn't really that I want more power, the thing is already amazing. Dyno runs of the current model show that it is severely underrated, and actually puts down like 430 lbft and 340 hp at the wheels! I'm worried that 5 years from now when people are looking at Supras, they will actively avoid buying 2020s because it ends up being known as the year they "gimped" the motor? Does anyone thing there is any merit to this?

I ask because I guess for future model years Toyota is planning on producing less cars, so it will be harder to find them not marked up, whereas I can get a pretty sick deal on a 2020 right now. 2021s are also supposed to be in dealers by June or July, but who knows with all the Covid-19 stuff, it could be months before I could get one with an unknown increase in MSRP and unknown dealer markup.

 

Are you buying for yourself, or are you buying for a presumed possible future buyer? Are you going to track it regularly or drive it on the street?

Because the supra is already way more capable than is remotely possible to use outside of a racing track without a) losing your license or b) dying or c) killing someone.

This is also the case for all "sports" cars except miatas, bzrs, and hot supercompacts like the 500. They're so good their limit is at 2-3x the speed limit of a back road.

So you're not going to notice a minor bump in power, because you can only really use like 30% of it as it is.

Now if you're buying not for yourself but for a possible unknown future person, who knows?

Could be the old engine is better for tuning and it shoots up in value - papadakis racing got 1000 hp out of the 2020 with the stock shaft/block/valves and will be racing it in Formula Drift.

Could be people only want the new! You'll need a crystal ball to know.

And if you're going to track it, the new model *might* be better. Almost certainly if you drag race, less certainly for circuit because more power power not necessarily equals better lap times.

 

Bring that up with the dealer. Until you've signed papers, actual cost to you is still negotiable. Anybody in-the-know on the B58 series engines knows they're capable of 1000hp and about 650 lb/ft on the stock block (somewhat reliably). If it were me (and know that I'm seriously considering a used A90 to replace my GTI in a couple years...) I'd be all over a 2020. Tune and exhaust on an A90 gets you 475-ish hp and 450-ish torque at the wheel. That is plenty to make a 3300lb sports car a true sports car. And, tune + exhaust is going to be right around $1-2k depending on who you go with. Throw your money at some Michelin PS4S and be done with it. For all the shit that gets thrown at the BMWyota it's very well engineered and much more right than wrong on paper and in practice. You drove it, so you know it will give you high smiles-per-dollar. Add a hundy+ horses and some sticky rubber and get to driving the piss out of it.

 

Hahaha I did, that’s how I got such a good deal out of them.

I probably wouldn’t get a tune done, for two reasons. As taverius said above, it’s already more than enough car and I already love the way it drives. And also, I don’t want to void the warranty ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

they also made my decision between the blue or the yellow a lot easier by selling the blue one this morning.

 

Original post was a great read, and kudos for actually taking the time to drive all of them.

Out of curiosities sake, what's the difference in price they're giving you between 20 and 21 model years?

 

thanks, I had a great time going out and driving a bunch of cars. Finding out what I actually enjoyed and didn’t was enlightening as well. It very quickly made my current 2000 Acura TL feel slow though, I wonder how I ever managed to merge or turn out onto any streets. It really helps that while I was supposed to start working Last Monday, due to some setbacks cause of corona, I’ve had plenty of time to go do the test driving.

The msrp of the unit I’m looking at is 57k, it’s the 3.0 Premium, with drivers assistance package and the yellow paint. I got them down to 52k. Which is under what they said “invoice” was(53k).

They wouldn’t give me a number for the 21, Toyota hasn’t released an msrp, so no one knows how much they’re gonna raise the price. They also said they couldn’t quote me a specific number for markup. But I imagine in the first several months paying 3-5k in markup would be normal?

 

I guess it depends on the market for getting taxed. I know here in SoCal my buddy was looking at the Civic R when it first came out and the Golf R. The Civic was $7k+and the Golf was roughly $5k+ over MSRP, he wouldn't say.

I've always been a fan of the Lexus IS-F, even though it wasn't the fastest or top dawg in it's class.

 

If I had the cash for a 2nd car and wanted one that's too good for the street I'd get a Giulia QV.

Not the new GTA, that one is just stupid - like the ultra rare near-race-spec M3s you'd hate your life after the 3rd time driving it.

Best steering in class, best engine in class, best suspensions, best looks, best sound.

I don't think I'll be replacing my 124 Abarth any time soon though - it's really refreshing being able to take a mountain road, put the pedal to the metal all the time, feel fast, and yet somehow do it all inside the speed limit.

 

Well, the decision was made this morning and I got to come home with a new toy. I got them to agree to extending the bumper to bumper warranty and maintenance plan out to 5 years / 60k miles to match the powertrain warranty, all for 5k under list, not too shabby.

I decided to go take some glamour shots in a random empty parking lot, cause why not.

 

I’d fuckin drive that

congrats dude!

 

NICE pickup.

I know you're looking to keep warranty stuff intact, but if after the honeymoon, if you're still wanting some extra oomph, consider Burger Motorsports for a JB4 piggy-back tune. It's not an ECU flash, and it's completely removable without any evidence (except for i think a tap into the upper O2 sensor). That, and I'd highly recommend dropping the dough for a nicer ceramic paint coating and/or paint protection film after the paint has fully cured. Ceramic coating makes keeping the wheels clean as painless as possible - coat the faces and the barrels and the calipers.

 

Nice, though personally I think less saturated colours work better on that shape.

I'd love to see what a glossy, flake version of a battleship blue/gray would look like on a supra.

Also be really really f'ing scared of potholes because with sidewalls that thin you won't just puncture but also wreck the rims, and you'll be out a couple grand. Not fun!