What have you done to your car today?

silversurfer said:
Another good excuse for RWD I must remember next time I'm looking, pic of the SAAB in question?


nobody will ever believe me but I lost a BMW M series on the s bends in the black mountains. Was a super old volvo, not arguing anything except I knew the road far better as it was my route to work and also knew my car and he was just dropping pedal and running upto 100 on the straights which anyone can do
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Saab is just a facelift manual 9-5 estate Aero in steel grey. Had it four years now but is hard to get rid. Just splashed out on some new brakes and shocks too. Coming out of the Celica's summer budget. She's going to get jealous the old Swede is getting all the love!

When you travel the same route for years and years it becomes second nature. You know the overtaking spots off by heart and how fast each bend is. I know it's not big nor clever but a work colleague in his 335i asked me one day what I had under the hood of my Suzuki as he tried to keep up on the way home but failed. Just a simple 1.5 with 115 brake sir.
 
Made the most of the decent weather. Painted the ends of the splitter tie bars black to make them less obvious. Changed the OEM foglight for a smoked one to match my Valenti rear lights. Gave the air filter a damn good clean since it was getting filthy after winter. Also switched out some of the decals for some small subtle ones.

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Machined polished (wasted effort being white even with it being pearl) and painted some bits over the weekend.
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Not the best but by far a lot better than they were!
 
The standard BMW bluetooth iPhone control is a bit hit and miss so I've been wanting to have Apple CarPlay fitted. Unfortunately since the car wasn't spec'd with enhanced bluetooth I couldn't buy it from BMW. Plus, since it's a now subscription at £90 (from memory) a year I thought **** that!

So I bought a coding cable, a wifi antenna (which is needed for APC) and some trim removal tools and set about removing the OEM stereo unit. Took about half an hour and pretty simple to do. I then set about coding in APC which took another 10-15 minutes with the engine running.

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Audio quality and control via APC is much improved as is Google Maps versus the BMW Navigation which seems to want to get on the closest motorway. Very happy although I've now paid the extra for full screen so I don't obsess about economy all the time.

Speaking of economy, took it easy on the way home without booting it and stuck to 75 on the cruise control. Impressive for the engine that’s in it.

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Did 6 hours in the car yesterday in total, Glouceter to Bath, back to Gloucester and then Watford and back via Oxford with some spirited driving, I managed just under 38 mpg. Happy with that.
 
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Definitely pretty impressive economy for that engine. It's not far off what my 2.2 diesel Mondeo would get if I did long motorway runs and sat at 60ish the whole way and that was only 197bhp too - best I ever managed was 41/42mpg on a 95% motorway/5% town driving split. Kind of negated the point of having a diesel hence was a big part of why I got rid of it :)
 
Ordered the most expensive piece of aluminium known to man.

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It replaces the plastic cover that goes over the convertible motor housing which sits under the rear seats to control first and final stages of the roof open/close action. The plastic cover is poorly engineered as were a number of things by BMW in the early 2000s, thankfully third parties have since manufactured much less inferior parts to replace with.

The tabs that hold the mid gear in place on the stock cover are plastic and wear over time causing the gear to slip out too much which eventually eats the gear teeth. All DIY fixes will fail eventually too. The only total fix is a metal cover, and only one guy in the USA started making them in 2018 :rolleyes:

Oh well!
 
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15 month old ford ranger. Spent a year battling with ford for them to say 'Not a defect' go see the ombudsmen.

My father has a 2014 ranger and not a spot of rust.

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