Call me a luddite, but I would struggle to spend more than £8k on the best condition Mk1, and have all the fun of a Mk4 MX5, and not propping up the Japanese economy along the way. As for ethics, the Japanese only paid my Grandad £100 compensation for years of torture.
Mazda promoted the Mk4 MX5 by using Mk1 oconography, and no one stopped to think why buy a Mk4.
90hp MGB versus 300hp MGC.
Fun is measured in different ways, and people have different ideas how fun is defined in the future. William Woolard, on reviewing the 1989 Miata, thought it was a brilliant car, but wouldn’t appeal to the “purists” (MGB, Midget, Spitfire etc owners) as it was “too refined”.
The beneficial effects of a 60 year old car on the environment are debateable.
“Radar” that low down will be almost useless; every bit and bump in the road will be flooding the “AI” with meaningless data. The “AI” will need to be really, really smart to be effective and safe and quick to respond, while yet allowing a smooth and comfortable drive.
Up high above the windscreen cuts out a lot of clutter and allows the “radar” a much better depth and field of view. Good examples are used by the autonomous cars.
I expect stylists could do a better job if they really wanted to, unless it is merely intended as a prominent tick-box obviously seen to be well and truly ticked.
I do understand your point of view and certainly don’t condone many of the acts of the Chinese government. However there are dilemmas here too.
Who are we hurting if we don’t buy from China? I buy parts for items I produce that are made in China. In most cases I get the best price if I deal directly with the manufacturer in China. The people I have dealt with online are always polite, friendly and helpful.
Yes there is a difference in dealing with a privately owned Chinese company and a state owned company. But if we choose not to by an MG because the company is state owned who does this action hurt? I would imagine it will have more effect on the workers at the factory than the government.
I’m sure you’re right. They are extremely clever people at Porsche.
For mere adaptive cruise control it’s looking for a big lump one or two metres wide and at least a metre tall. That’s effectively a cleverer longer range parking sensor, parking at motorway speeds.
But on a narrow road, or going round a tight bend or over a hump-back bridge? Shiver…
And what happens when they extend its application to cars driving themselves and looking for thinner, smaller objects such as dogs, bollards, bicycles and pedestrians?
My post was almost a Pavlovian reflex reaction from having done four years stressful work designing and building sensor systems specifically to capture positional information of broadcast cameras in a studio. This had to be accurate to less than a video pixel to “key” stuff seamlessly into real time video, so we could place people, scenes, sets etc into an imaginary “virtual world” or vice versa. The system ended up so good it did not need green/blue screen backgrounds lit by kilowatts of studio lighting.
But that was twenty years ago and the world has moved on.
I wouldnt engage cruise control in such circumstances. Obviously, it is useful on the motorway, and I also found adaptive cruise helpful when re-entering the city and needing to keep down to 30mph in the presence of radar! The adaptive part brought me to a safe halt at the frequent traffic lights. Of course, it only works with automatic transmission.
Sad maybe for some motoring enthusiasts. Maybe sad for the people who brought these things, who seem to be mainly either tasteless Russian oligarch offspring, gauche Arab princelings, lottery winners, social media influencers, crypto billionaires and former kick boxers looking forward to a future inside a Romanian prison cell. Are any of these actually brought by “enthusiasts”, unless 4th or 5th hand. I doubt it. In which case, no biggie whatever the Volkswagen subsidiary decides to do.
An article for those not conversant in the language of a former foe might help:
Of course there is devil in the detail. Lamborghini production is fully sold out for years in advance. They are still going to be building these ugly 3.5-5 tonne petrol cars for many years. Only it doesn’t matter how much you win on the lottery, you can’t have one, because instead they will likely go to someone subject to sanctions of some kind.
And you can continue to place orders for a hybrid Lambo if the lottery money is burning a hole. You can go and place an order for a V12 Revuelto if you want.
And hybrids are by definition not enthusiast cars?? Worth following this series, as a Hurricane/flood damaged P1 is rebuilt
Honestly I have never ever met any petrol head who would mouth Lambos are ugly.
(I suppose you are an electro head? )
Of course they look ridiculous. Lambos are supposed to be flamboyant, nuts, completely and utterly impractical supercar, and every time you get into one you awaken your inner 5 year old boy (or girl)…
Its similar to working through the gears in your mx5 on B roads and listening to the engine… you just simply don’t get the point I’m making and why there isn’t and wont be an electric powered substitute for these great cars…
I suspect there are many who are sorry Bentley Blowers are no long made, and though there would never be a substitute for them.
Yes, Lamborghinis are ugly to my eyes, since the Contache. Other supercars manage the same goals without offending the eye. Each to their own.
I recall a MX5 meet that I arranged, where one of the OC members turned up in his straight through pipe Diablo. Obviously sounded amazing, but inside, it looked like a bad kit car. Very very crude. His wife came in a Prowler.
Some professional motoring journalists agree with me.
Its the posing pouch brand of cars.
As for the future of electric cars; its speculative. We will get a chance to to see a MG Cyberster move under its own power at the Goodwood FOS. At the same time, MG will be bringing out what they call a 6R4 Gp B tribute, the Exp 4 (following traditional MG nomenclature for one offs), based on the recently announced MG4 X-Power.
This twin-motor X-Power seems to be something astonishing thats slipped under the wire. Pricing confirmed at £36k. For that you get a MG4 in a light metallic green that is very similar to the colour MG used for their experimental cars. Plus it has upgraded big brakes (calipers in a fetching orange). Bigger wheels, no wheel covers. Thicker ARBs front and rear, and stiffened suspension. And 435hp. 435hp for the price of a base Hyundai. We already know the standard MG4 does handle very well, indicating some of the old MG-Rover magic survives (they were known for good packaging, good chassis and very nice seats). And the Xpower has very nice looking Alcantaea steats in a rally, albeit well padded, style.
The Exp4, from the teasers (note the reflection), is obviously completely bonkers
But maybe a critique is that electric cars will never be fun on, say, a track.
Here’s the crucial observation
Remember that you can select from a bewildering number of driving-mode combinations in the i30 N? Now imagine that but also with everything a four-wheel drive EV can do, including torque-vectoring and adjusting front-to-rear power distribution; plus some synthetic noises (including an ICE one) and a fake tacho and gearshift via the steering-mounted paddles. There’s even a drift mode, made unavailable to me by the engineer sitting beside me as I drove, because they knew that I would turn it on and then get so distracted that I might struggle to turn it off again. They would like to show that there’s rather more to the dynamic depths of the Ioniq 5 N than silliness.
ICE cars are constrained. For generations, car manufacturers have struggled about where to get that gearbox and motor located, in order to promote optimal handling in combination with the suspension and other factors. Only a few have nailed it, and they stand out from the rest. Mazda nailed it, in discovering their own Golden Ratio.
Manufacturers were restricted where they could place the drivetrain because of production realities. Part sharing constrained things. The MX5 has a lot of partsharing, and without that, it would never have been made.
The Japanese seem to have pushed that ICE model as far as it could, evidenced by the Evo series of Lancers, which employed all sorts of electronic trickery to transform the handling of an economy car.
EVs, certainly the second and third generations hitting the road, seem, to an extent, to be freed of that constraint. The same platform can be configured to be FWD, RWD, AWD. The COG and weight distribution can be more easily constrained because in the end, its only the length of a wire that dictates where a component is placed. Solid state batteries will further improve things, such is human ingenuity.
So the MG4, one of the cheapest cars in its class, has RWD, because its dead easy now to mount the motor on the axle. The battery is integral to the chassis, helping even weight distribution. That mass is now low, so a low centre of gravity. A cheap car has near perfect 50-50 weight distribution.
Emissions controls were first introduced in the late 1960s, in the US. The first cars affected were miserable, with power outputs halved. Imported cars had to have different and worse fuel systems fitted (eg Strombergs fitted to MGs). It has been called the malaise era, and was a change entirely driven by regulation, with the aim of improving air quality and preventing brain damage to children. Europe and the UK resisted catalytic converters for a long time. The manufacturers, such as Ford and Austin-Rover, argued that they had much better solutions to address the smog issue (lean burn engine technology, ie. the Rover K-Series). But they lost the argument. I see the same with efuels. The K-Series was a highly advanced and very efficient engine, enabling new ways of manufacture that ultimately proved to be a dead end (no one else built a block the way Rover did), and ultimately, all that work on that engine killed Rover. I see the same happening to Mazda, with its dead end Sky Activ approach. Ingenium is probably the reason JLR will disappear (Jaguar lost a huge amount developing their own diesel engine line, which is now seen as a complete waste of money).
Cats became standard fit in 1991. 32 years later, emissioned controlled cars in 2023 are among the most powerful road cars ever known (eg the Dodge Hellcat. Heck, nearly 20 years ago, even MG offered a 900hp MG-ZT estate (supercharged V8 with factory nitrous), that met all emissions requirements of the period.).
So there was probably a 10-20 year period where pundits would claim cars were worse than previously, and motoring was effectively over in the smog control era. And some would believe them. There is still this persistant belief that a decatted MX5 is better than factory. Its not of course.
There is, with some foundation, a critique of EVs because of the gearbox (or lack of), robbing “fun” for the driver. But examine current gearboxes. In many cars, the shifter is connected to the gearbox through a series of cables. The design of which affects the quality of the change. The engineer can give the driver the sensation that they are directly connected to the gearbox. Dual mass flywheels can make average drivers feel like racing gods, with smooth changes. Ultimately mechanical trickery Flappy paddle change is merely a series of switches and motors, with some solutions being better than others, being meaning how well the system fools the driver into thinking its them who who is doing the work, rather than a computer receiving and executing instructions. More trickery.
Roll on to Toyota’s fake gearbox shifter; allowing a manual-shift like experience for a EV. Its become a realitry, and apparently even in a prototype, is very convincing. And that’s all it needs to do. Many ICE drivers are wilfully ignorant about how little in control of their cars they are.
When you start talking about emissions… it just triggers something in me…
People seem to forget what electric car food looks like… in most countries it looks like this…
In the UK current energy production snapshot looks like this:
19.6% fossil fuels
37.5% renewables
19.2% other sources (which 16% is nuclear)
22.1% bought from overseas
1.7% storage (I actually didn’t see that coming but hey we learn something new every day)
This is something I put together based on the data available - there is a link of how I did the calcs and sources in the end.
The workings of these calculations are shown and the result shows that:
Cars account to 12.4% of total greenhouse gas emissions
Trucks account to 5.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions
Aviation account to 3.8% of total greenhouse gas emissions
The values are not small by any means but my question is… WHY do the government organizations not present the information without making the data difficult to interpret?
Also note - Energy production is 25.2% of total greenhouse gas emissions
In addition a few things that I would like to add:
If you want to solve a problem that has multiple contributors you have to tackle and reduce all contributors. However the most efficient way of tackling the issue is to focus towards the biggest sources and put more of your efforts in reducing those first.
I have not yet seen a report that shows the effect to Greenhouse gas emissions by increasing energy production due to increase in demand because of electric cars. And believe me, this will happen because a very large proportion of energy generation for all countries is not renewable.
Edit:
Looks like people don’t really want to continue a debate when they realise they are wrong.
Btw just to answer your question, if you bothered looking at my emission sources they are government publications.
You’ve successfully hijacked a thread about a sportscar with your own agenda…
All your blah blah copy pasting might be true in 2023 (though you are quoting what seems to be your own FB discussion based on hackneyed sources on the topic). Not true in 2033, 2044, 2053 ad infinitum. Start your own thread on the matter. As it is, you have succeeded in shutting down discussion on the Cyberster, as you cannot keep to the thread title.
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