The car is a piece of shit. It’s falling apart on the inside and in general is probably getting close to death. Cost 5k like 5 years ago, so I’m not too worried.
I’m waiting to pay off my student loans before I commit to a new car payment. But there’s a 70’s RX-7 for sale near me that’s ~6k and I want a project.
In my opinion this is nearly as perfect of a vehicle as it is possible to get.
The 1.5 liter engine is small and efficient which means your gas bill is nice and tiny compared to the average vehicle I see on the road. It also has this weird quirk of FEELING really fast and exciting while driving while actually being rather pedestrian. A year after this vehicle was released motortrend came out with an article about the slowest cars they have ever tested: The Toyota Yaris was the 5th slowest. Probably due to the manual gear box, the sharp and agile steering, and the noise it makes, it simply feels a LOT faster than it really is. THIS IS A POSITIVE. It means you can have a good time and enjoy driving it but unless you are trying REALLY hard you won’t be speeding all that often and even with your foot to the floor you won’t be ripping away from traffic and drawing attention to yourself. That doesn’t mean you can’t red-line the engine, drop the clutch , and rip a nicely satisfying burnout, because you can… And I have.
Oh BTW… if you want to have some fun you can buy a ready to install everything included SUPERCHARGER kit for the Yaris. It’s on my bucketlist.
The cargo space is MASSIVE! because the rear seats fold flat and it’s a hatchback with a wide trunk opening and a flat-ish roof (instead of aggressively raked back) the amount of stuff you can fit in it is kind of insane. Several hundred pounds of firewood? Check. Two fully assembled kitchen cabinets to be turned into a kitchen island? Check. 55" TV in box? Check. 6.5’ Christmas tree? Check. Just look at that cavernous space! https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/eb4e1182-4386-4294-b731-1def6307dd1d.jpeg
Shoot, my wife and I regularly go car camping out of the Yaris. If you push the front seats as far forward as they go you can fit an inflatable mattress in the back with only a slight bend in it. It’s remarkably comfortable and unless you need to sleep perfectly straight as a log it serves very well as a mini RV. Back when I commuted 26 miles to my full time job and then another further 55 miles to my full time schooling I would often sleep in the back of the Yaris between the two and have very restful and replenishing sleep.
At first having the gauges in the center of the dash was a bit weird but it comes with two bonuses. The first one took me a while to notice: You feel more connected to the road and your journey. Putting the dashboard gauges directly in front of the driver actually puts a barrier between the driver and the road ahead of them. It’s a wall of information density that permanently exists between you and the world ahead and you have to go through it before you can experience what’s before you. It might be a borderline subconscious thing but not having something that constantly wants your attention in front of you really lets your mind focus on the road ahead of you and the journey you are on. If you NEED the information, it’s still there, just politely sitting off to the side waiting to tell you whatever you need to know.
The second bonus to the center gauges? MOTHER FUCKING GLOVEBOXES BABY! THIS CAR HAS THREE! There is the standard glove box around the knees of the passenger but there is also one above that and a THIRD one above the steering column on the driver’s side. I never would have guessed how excited a grown man could be (me) about the discovery of multiple GLOVEBOXES in a car. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/50261100-fb13-4925-b402-cd179c56b0db.jpeg
Almost nearly as much as I enjoy the gloveboxes I really am impressed by the setup of the cup holders. You have your standard 2 cup holders down by the hand brake in the center console but the really awesome ones are seamlessly folded into the dashboard near the doors. These aren’t your tiny popout cupholders you find in most cars that break the second time you put a big gulp in one. No… these are chunky, heavy duty cup holders that make an audible ca-thunk when deployed. The amount of times I’ve deployed the cup holder at a driver through and had the teller make a visible reaction or even stop to say something is significant. My words probably do not do them justice so look at these pictures of their location and diagram from the manual and tell me that they don’t inspire confidence.
There are only TWO things I would like changes about this car. Give me a Bluetooth enabled head unit with better speakers and a good place to put a chi charger for my phone. That is all.
I could go on for hours about this car but my last point about how epic this vehicle is and how we don’t deserve it is this: It’s a Toyota. A proper old fashioned bulletproof, reliable, affordable Toyota. Parts are dirt cheap and easy to replace.I’ve got 266,000 miles on mine and let me tell you, they have not been kind miles. We regularly take this on off road trails bouncing off of rocks and occasionally trees. I’ve torn the O2 sensor clean off of the car a couple of times and got it stuck up to the bottom of the door in deep snow while driving a dirt road pass in the Rockies. I have treated it like dirt and only done basic maintenance far less than it deserves. I’ve only had to replace the clutch once and this next summer will be the first time ever that I need to do anything even approaching major service. It’s got a water pump leak and a front timing cover leak. Neither of these stop the car from functioning at all but as long as I keep an eye on the fluid levels we are good to go.
All this and it takes it like an absolute champ. It trucks along being the best little car it can be. The snow, dirt, and mud, and neverending miles of cross country journeys this car has never failed me. I will not part with my beautiful little car for anything less then total destruction. The day that happens I will remove the logo from it’s sad lifeless carcass, frame it and hang it on my wall for all to know what an amazing being was part of our lives for so long and yet not nearly long enough.
I’m going to try and say this without sounding excessively depressing but… There are few things in my life that bring me joy or excitement so when I find something that does I latch on to it and don’t let it go. Even if it’s a small relatively inconsequential thing let it bring joy into your life no matter how little the amount.
I’ve got a 1/2 cube made of tungsten that is just satisfying to hold onto and it’s one of my favorite things.
Excellent read. I now want to go camping in a tiny but huge hatchback. Your car sounds amazing, I hope you have many thousands of kilometres before retiring it.
Makes me think of someone who’s so empathetic that their heart is just always overflowing with thoughts of other people’s misery. It hasn’t gotten better.
Don’t follow news feeds on any social platforms including lemmy. Find a reliable source. These billion dollar platforms like Facebook can’t moderate every fake news, lemmy has no chance.
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t have a need to. Enticing news, fake or otherwise, keeps people engaged, commenting, posting, starting flame wars, and they do all of it on the platform. Somebody at some point noticed that users don’t mind fake news (as in they don’t leave the platform as long as there is fake news posted there), and the potential ‘hit’ to reputation is well balanced by the boost in engagement they see.
Lemmy, on the other hand, might not have the same incentive (yet?) to keep spreading bullshit for the sake of getting firemen and arsonists locked in a neverending game.
Maybe we can have a fact-check community. People could post there if they find fake news or they could request fact-checks of information by others. It should be a community with strict rules on referring to sources, creating valid arguments, etc. and content should only be banned if it does not adhere to these rules.
A bit similar to what happens in scientific research. I will reject a paper if there are issues with its methods. I will not reject it based on its conclusions if the methods are fine. I think this works in academia, why wouldn’t it work with the right moderators here? There are still a lot of people who value truth above all else and in this way, they would have a space here.
Sorry, I just always hated how short that song is compared to how great it actually sounds. It’s nonstop vocals for the most part, too. Might be something different for you to try.
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