Australia and Cars (Part 2!)

[[TW]Fox]

Ok.... I had no idea quite so many people were going to nag me for this but here we go. Part 2.

This is where my plan to drop cars off and spend weekends wandering around the big cities sorta went wrong a bit. I tearfully waved goodbye to my Falcon XR6 and walked into Brisbane. The next day it was apparent that, after 5 hours of walking around, that was that. Brisbane was done. Doh. And we had no car. And no onward hire car booked until the Monday. Quick check on the Hertz website and I’d booked a car to take us to Australia Zoo for the day. Hurrah. So we continue..

... 2008 Toyota Camry Sportivo – 2.4 litre VVTi, 160bhp

Hmmmm, a Camry. First impressions, pretty handsome looking car actually. Moving to the interior....

.... oh dear. Suddenly the Ford felt like a BMW 5 Series. Nasty, horrible cheap plastics *everywhere*. Everything I touched felt cheap and brittle. The stereo said ‘WELCOME TO CAMRY’ using one of those LCD screens off a late 80’s digital watch. This didn’t feel good. At all.

Start the engine. 4 cylinders. 2.4 litres. And 160bhp. The engine is quite at idle. There. Thats it. Thats the only good thing i could think of to say about it and I’m really trying, really I am. It’s probably a good engine but not in this car. Foot hard to the floor and we go nowhere fast. It’s time for the acid test of whether a car is acceptable in terms of performance when you need it or not.

Pull up at the intersection. Wait for the lights to green and.... nail the throttle. Off goes the Camry. We get to the speed limit. I glance over at the girlfriend.... who is idly reading her magazine as if nothing had happened. Do that in the Falcon and I get a punch. The Camry then, is not a quick car. It’s not even a sort of quick car. It’s slow.

So the interior is cheap and its slow. Ok, there must be a good point here somewhere, surely? It’s probably really economical, right? Wrong. Average 10 litres per 100km. Which is about 30mpg on mostly highway driving. More importantly, its exactly what I got from the Ford Falcon.

The steering is utterly woeful. There is absolutely ZERO feel whatsoever and the steering is so light you could probably blow on it to get the car to change direction. I have never driven a car thats as over-assisted as the Camry. The handling is far from great as well. Infact, the whole car was rubbish and even though I did just 140km it bored me to tears. So much so I’m bored talking about it.

It did partially redeem itself – driving around Central Brisbane where steering feel doesn’t matter it was alright, very ‘easy to drive’ and the light steering was not bad for nipping about town.

Everything else though? Rubbish. No wonder they don’t sell this in the UK anymore.

I dropped the Camry off the next day on the way to collect my next car for my biggest rental period – 12 days and 2000km to Cairns.

‘How was the Camry for you, sir?’

‘Lovely’

 

[[TW]Fox]

2008 Toyota Aurion ATX. 3.5 litre V6, 270bhp

There are 3 cars in the Australian large saloon class (Which, as previously mentioned, is basically our midsized hatchback class – most people buy a car like this. I like this). The Falcon, the Commodore and the only Japanese manufacturer to have actually made headway, Toyota with the Aurion. There are others but nobody seems to buy them so we’ll ignore them.

The Aurion is an interesting car. It had interested me ever since I first saw one – its big, it has two large exhaust pipes, one either side, and the performance statistics looked very interesting. So much so that I specifically requested an Aurion, to give me something new to try.

The Aurion is the reason why all the Camrys in Australia are now 4 cylinder. It is now the range topping large saloon in the Toyota Australia range, and is only available with the 3.5 litre VVTi V6 engine which develops a very impressive 270bhp. This is the same engine Lotus use, in exactly the same tune, in the Lotus Evora. Only I would imagine the Evora doesn’t weigh the 1800kg the Aurion does.

Unfortunately – and this had not concerned me until after my Camry experience – the Aurion is largely Camry based. The suspension is different, the front and rear are different and the interior is different (Though very similar!) but between the A and C pillars the side profile is the same as the Camry. So much so that at 10pm, in a dark carpark in Cairns, I could be found frantically pulling at the door handle of somebodies rental Camry, wondering why it wouldn’t open.

First impressions. It’s white. Why is it white? Seriously, what is the white car thing about. It looked like an ex minicab. Outside I was greeted by perhaps the odd exterior features of any car I’d driven. It was huge. Very huge. Seemed bigger than the Falcon but I’m too lazy to look that up, and it had two sporty looking exhausts at the back. But it also had steel wheels, with plastic wheel trims. An odd combination.

Inside, its very similar to the Camry yet subtly different in ways which actually made quite a big difference. The interior was not, in my opinion, a masterpiece and it was not built with any degree of quality whatsoever but it didn’t annoy me like the Camry did. It didn’t feel ridiculously cheap, just.. not quite as well screwed together as the Ford (Did I just say that?) in terms of the plastics quality and suchlike. The centre console had the same godawful radio out of the Camry, but the lack of a conventional handbrake made for a spacious centre console with lots of room for drinks and satnav chargers and copies of the Lonely Planet guide to Australia. Loved the weird lighting effect on the dials when you turned the engine on. Hated the horrible hard plastic steering wheel. It’s probably a spec thing but this was an incredibly poorly specified car. I had manual AC (More on that later), the aforementioned plastic steering wheel and it didn’t even have a trip computer.

So, engine on, off I go. Steering is already better than the Camry. It doesn’t have the feel and weight of the Falcon, but neither is it ridiculously light. First set of lights and it’s TLGP time. Off we go. Blimey, this shifts for a land yacht. Quicker infact than the Falcon. And again...

.... the dashboard shakes. Then the traction control kills all the power. Hang on a sec....
The Toyota Aurion is front wheel drive. Thats right kids – it’s front wheel drive. And it has 270bhp. And if that’s not enough for you, you can buy a TRD version which is supercharged and develops 330bhp. This makes it the worlds most powerful production FWD car. Is that like being the worlds best Conference league football team?

Handling is what I’d describe as acceptable. It’s not sporty, but neither is there acres of bodyroll either. It wasn’t THAT bad through the many twisting mountain roads I threw at it but the one thing that annoys me was.... the fact it was FWD. Mostly, RWD is better than FWD because when you drive an RWD car, you are able to snipe at people on the internet with FWD cars. But this car demonstrated quite how unsuitable FWD really is for a car of this type.

Before I carry on, we’ll pause a bit and talk about the performance.
Once you get the annoying gearbox out the way (Why is every autobox I ever drive dim-witted?) this is a fast car. 0-60 is 6.5 seconds, which is not bad, about the same as my 530i, but then you remember its 6.5 despite the fact its FWD *and* has a dim-witted autobox. The acceleration in gear is absolutely awesome. Put your foot down with the car in the right gear and it’s off. Certainly quicker than the Falcon. Infact its ridiculously powerful for what it is – remember guys, this is a car with steel wheels, plastic wheel trims, no trip computer and a plastic steering wheel. And a 270bhp V6. You are never found wanting for power in this – any more power would be completely ridiculous in this sort of car.

And its this power which brings us back to the unfortunate point that its wrong wheel drive. Overtaking at maximum attack brings new challenges. Select the right gear, manually, because if you wait for the gearbox to chose you’ll be there all day, wait for a gap, bury foot in carpet and... wrestle the steering wheel as you fight the torque steer round the truck. Want to make a quick getaway off the lights? Careful, too much throttle and it’ll spin the wheels and do that awfully annoying dashboard shake thing FWD cars do when wheelspinning. Until the traction control cuts in. And you can’t turn the traction control off.

So whats it like at a cruise? Not bad, but a surprisingly large amount of road noise. Unusually for a car of this size its not very refined and I often found myself turning the music up or raising my voice to talk.

Except this particular example has a slight fault. It pulls to the left. This is irritating for 50km, annoying for another 50km and plain drives you made for the rest. I pulled in at every single hire depot between Brisbane and Townsville (Thats 4 different depots) and until Townsville Airport, nobody was able, or could be bothered, to help. No cars, they said. Not our problem, they said. One depot did send me to Bob Janes T Mart, which is basically Aussie Kwikfit, who spent an entire morning fiddling with the alignment and fitting two new ‘Bob Janes All Rounders’ (No joke, google it) to the front of the car.
All this really did was meant that as well as pulling to the right, any attempt at a u-turn or a reasonably sharpish getaway was met with loads and loads of tyre squeal. I found this awesome. The girlfriend... did not. Finally got the car swapped at Townsville Airport. A letter on its way to the hire company I fear.

So the Aurion. Great in places, less so in others. Faster than a Falcon but nowhere near as complete a package. To be fair like the Omega this was a particularly badly specified example – the sport model may well have been a different story (But would still have been FWD). Oddly though I kinda liked it. It wafted around well, it had a great engine which sounded absolutely fantastic when you gave it a good thrashing, and the tyre smoke antics were quite amusing.

Annoyingly the Aurion also rattled like a small branch of Mothercare (Obviously anything French would be more like one of those superstores). The folding seats rattled like mad and there was something loose deep within the dashboard as well.

I did not, however, at any point consider whether one could be imported to the UK like I did the Falcon.

The Aurion, well both of them, took me all the way from Brisbane to Cairns – I covered 3000km in total in both of them – and was the last rental car of the trip. However, I also hired another vehicle.

 

[[TW]Fox]

2003 Toyota Landcruiser

I’m not entirely sure how to approach reviewing this. I’ll do it conventionally first.
Appearances – dated. Looks old. Has a huge roo-bar fitted to the front which means if I make even the slightest error, my victim will be killed to death. Inside, the interior is absolutely dire. Horrible plastics, looks terrible, rubber floor without any carpet, manually operated windows, a radio borrowed from 1983 and yet again steering which pulled to one side. The odometer didn’t even work so I had no idea what the mileage was. On the road, things were even worse.

My Landcruiser was fitted with a turbodiesel engine developing 12bhp. Thrash it to death and nobody notices as they cruised past me in their... well... anything, actually. I think somebody in a Corsa, sorry Barina, had me off the lights at one stage. Cornering? Well.. this thing redefines barge. So, a terrible car then.

Well not quite. You see, I didn’t hire the land cruiser to drive up and down the lovely roads of Queensland.

Off the coast of Queensland is an island called Fraser Island. This Island is a world heritage site – it is the worlds largest sand island. It is an island formed entirely of sand. On the island are rainforests, plains, and even several villages, but no roads. Just sand. It is accessible only to 4WD vehicles and has a network of sand tracks (All filled with huge ruts, enormous crests and big dips) and a beach which runs the length of the island and is known as the 75 mile beach. On the beach, you can drive at 80kmh up to 2 hours either side of high tide. So, we hired at a Land Cruiser and set off to explore it.

Driving off road was brilliant. I had a GREAT time and didn’t get it stuck once. You just don’t care about dashboard plastics, bhp, handling or anything like that when you are cruising over sand dunes and tackling challenging tracks at 40kmh. Or climbing over rocks and fording creeks. Great fun. So yea, this bits only really here to show off. So there. Na na na naaa na.

Some notes.

Well thats all the cars covered, this bits where I’m going to put all the random musings I’ve had whilst driving these cars.

Firstly, rain sensing wipers. What a good idea. None of the cars in Australia had these for reasons I don’t fully understand, even though they ALL had auto lights. Frankly, I’d rather it were the other way round. I can see when its dark but having to constantly adjust the speed of the wipers as the strength of the rain varies is very annoying. Dont knock these till you’ve tried them guys.

Manual air conditioning sucks. Really, it does. You don’t realise how good climate control is until you’ve had it. In the Ford Falcon, the car was always comfortable. In the Aurions I was constantly adjusting the vent temperatures and fan speed. Guys, spec Climate Control. It matters.

Kangeroos – are totally cool. Now looking at the possibility of a pet wallaby. It’s not a car but I thought I’d mention it.

Australian Mountain Roads. They have LOADS of these. Absolutely great fun and mostly, very little barriers. It’s like the health and safety mafia from the UK just don’t exist over there.

Travelling places – It costs a fortune and really I could have bought a new exhaust, and some satnav, and a remap, and some tyres, or put it towards an M5 but you know what? None of that stuff is as good. Go places guys, I never used to bother but now I’m glad I did. Cars are great but.. going to cool places is greater. Australia is a fantastic country, and one every one of you should consider going to if you ever get the chance. At one point flights were down to £399 a person. You wont get to the States for THAT much less. Visit Australia.

But don’t hire a Camry.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Are you on commission from Toyota

I wont be getting my cheque if I am

 

[[TW]Fox]

Having been to fraiser island myself (over 10 years ago) when i couldn't drive, it still left a lasting impression on me as one of the best places ive ever been too.

I will go back one day, got to be done the only question wheather to rent a car or bike! (both would be nice)

Didn't see any bikes whilst I was there, just lots of 4x4's and off road tour buses

 

[[TW]Fox]

We didn't do the sunrise thing but we did swim in Lake Mckenzie (?) which was absolutely awesome

 

[[TW]Fox]

I honestly wasnt that bothered and was going to spend all my cash on an M5 or something. Then my GF went away and insisted I went to Australia. So I did, and now the 530i is staying for a few more years

Great times

 

[[TW]Fox]

I wonder if there will be a Part 3?

Yes in a few years time when I go back

 

[[TW]Fox]

I'm flying to Sydney in December with my girlfriend for 3 weeks, during our stay we are planning a 5 day break to Fraser Island. We want to hire a 4wd for Fraser Island and stay at one of the resorts there. Can you tell me who you used for the vehicle on Fraser Island & prices. Thanks.

I used Aussie Trax 4x4 and it cost about $450 for the day including the ferry, vehicle access permit and the vehicle itself. This was based on 3 people.

It was a bit of a rush doing it in one day but I struggle to see how you'd fill 5 days on Fraser Island. Perhaps do a two day tour with a night camping or something? It's a great place but spending 5 days there means you'll lose out on seeing other things especially if you are spending only 3 weeks in Australia.

Are you spending most of the 3 weeks in Sydney? Fraser Island is North of Brisbane, it's some 1000km from Sydney.

 

[[TW]Fox]

How do you camp in australia? Just out in the open? Tent hire? etc

Proper campsites run by the national park authorities on places like Fraser Island. On Fraser, all the campsites are enclosed in fences to keep wild Dingo's out.

I still think 4 days is a bit much, you can probably fill 4 days on Fraser but obviously the law of diminishing returns applies - by day 3 you are seeing more of the same and could probably better spend the time seeing other great places in the area.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Haha, my wife just bought herself a Kia Rio (though a 2009 one). Its not a bad little car actually.

It very much is a bad car, don't kid yourself

To buy such a thing in the land of the $35,995 driveaway XR6 is criminal

 

[[TW]Fox]

I especially enjoyed your 'Go places guys...' recommendation (I realise what you meant really though).

Which was what?

 

[[TW]Fox]

Thanks for the reply, I spent a week in Melbourne and thought it was a fantastic city

My second Falcon (FG?) did have digital climate, but yea, the Commodore was a lowly Omega!

 

[[TW]Fox]

The Statesman is lovely, whenever I am out in Oz my drivers often have these.

You mean the yellow cab from Sydney airport?

 

[[TW]Fox]

Well, into week 2 of the Aurion and have to say it's been a good all rounder. Mine also pulls to the left though.......

Had an XR6 for the first day, but the bright orange paint job and me sticking my foot to the floor at every opportunity soon had the girlfriend punching me that much that i had to swap it for the Aurion. Done over 2000km in it and still not had my mind changed that as a mile muncher this thing takes some beating. Longest trip so far was about 600k's from Hervey Bay (after doing Fraser Island, though we did it as an escorted trip in an Land Cruiser Sahara, a very nice piece of kit!!) to Coffs Harbour.

Sounds like you are pretty much doing my trip in reverse! I really loved the Falcon. I also went from Coffs Harbour to Hervey Bay but I stopped at various places on the way (ISTR it being Byron Bay, Surfers Paradise and Brisbane).

What did you think it Fraser Island? Any reason you chose to be escorted? Loads more fun doing it solo

Does your Girlfriend not realise the Aurion was faster than the Falcon? I got the Aurion after about 3-4 weeks of annoying my girlfriend with Falcons and stuff so I think by then she was immune to my need to test the performance at every other set of lights

 

[[TW]Fox]

Reason for doing Fraser escorted was due to it being summer, loads of people were getting stuck, the tracks were just pure sand so all the tourists and a lot of the tour operators were getting bogged down, whereas the Landcruiser just plowed through it all. They say it's far easier to drive there during the winter months as the tracks get more rain and provide more traction. Other reason is that we only had 1 day to see as much as possiblem and i can imagine i would have just wanted to be 'hooning' around the sand tracks rather than seeing the sights!

I didnt get stuck once, it was completley awesome Saw loads as well but again only spent a day there.

Finally gave the car back today. One little tip, if you plan to do any big trips, look into it a bit more than simply thinking you will be able to just drive, they have a lot of toll roads now without toll booths, you can get an epass or some type of e-card that allows you to travel and it just deducts the money as you go, rather than having to phone up all the time when you pass a toll sign (penaltys are a lot more than the actual toll).

Had a letter from Thrifty saying I'd got a penalty months back but never heard anything more..