{"id":996,"date":"2007-11-02T11:03:35","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T16:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/996"},"modified":"2007-11-02T11:52:30","modified_gmt":"2007-11-02T16:52:30","slug":"whats-german-for-bat-out-of-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/996","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s German For &#8220;Bat Out Of Hell&#8221;&#8230;??"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>[New Car Love Alert&#8230;]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges.&nbsp; Bear in mind that for years, decades, I&#8217;ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics.&nbsp; Also, that I&#8217;ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even remotely be called a high performance engine.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve finally encountered the issue people are complaining about out there, with the new seven speed automatic down shifting too aggressively.&nbsp; But I&#8217;ve been taking <em>Traveler<\/em> slowly up and down the speedometer and tach and learning how it behaves and I think I know what the problem is.&nbsp; Most American drivers, especially drivers of my generation, learned on automatics that made you stomp down on the accelerator in order to down shift.&nbsp; You do that in this car and it will behave like it thinks you&#8217;re doing some kind of emergency maneuver and race down the gears when that&#8217;s not what you want.&nbsp; In this car, in normal driving, when you just want to rapidly pass someone or accelerate out of a situation, you don&#8217;t stomp down on the gas pedal.&nbsp; You have to back off your old habits a tad, learn to just firmly press the accelerator forward.&nbsp; The car will figure out what you want and down shift in a more normal manner.&nbsp; And then&#8230;trust me&#8230;that speedometer needle will climb like you won&#8217;t believe.&nbsp; The car won&#8217;t slam you back in your seat&#8230;it&#8217;s a luxury sedan not a   Lamborghini&#8230;but the effect of the smooth urgency with which it takes you into loose-your-license territory is&#8230;amazing.&nbsp; At least to me.&nbsp; I guess that&#8217;s what high compression, plus variable valve timing does.&nbsp; Which is why it only drinks expensive premium gas.&nbsp; I&#8217;ve driven big V-8s that had less authority then this six.&nbsp; But they were 1970s V-8s.&nbsp; I can&#8217;t imagine what the engines Mercedes puts in its S class cars nowadays must feel like.&nbsp; Anyway&#8230;the transmission will behave itself, but you need a calm foot on the pedal.&nbsp; You don&#8217;t stomp the pedal down.&nbsp; Just ask it politely.&nbsp; It&#8217;ll deliver.\n<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve never owned a car before, that was actually and seriously designed to be driven at speeds above 100 miles per hour, and taking <em>Traveler<\/em> up the speedometer makes me feel like I&#8217;m suddenly in a completely different world now. The car is way too comfortable for my own good at speeds well in excess of anything you&#8217;re legally allowed to drive on any highway in the lower 48.&nbsp; You know you&#8217;re going fast, it just doesn&#8217;t feel like you&#8217;re driving beyond the limits of the car, or even close.&nbsp; Road noise is minimal, the car doesn&#8217;t feel squirrelly, but tight on the road and perfectly, happily content.&nbsp; If anything, it feels like it&#8217;s waiting for me to ask it for more.&nbsp; That&#8217;s scary.&nbsp; I feel like I really need to take a course in high speed driving.&nbsp; There are places that offer it.&nbsp; Not that you&#8217;re supposed to be doing that on the highways, or that I plan on doing that.&nbsp; Even if it were legal, American driving habits would make an Autobahn here much, much too dangerous.&nbsp; But like Stan Lee said, with great power comes great responsibility.&nbsp; The tires may be rated for those speeds, but the driver isn&#8217;t.&nbsp; That&#8217;s a whole different kind of driving.&nbsp; I need to learn it.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m getting a tad over 25 miles per gallon average.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not awful, but not great either.&nbsp; I&#8217;m used to getting in the low thirties, and that&#8217;s on regular.&nbsp; Now I have to buy premium and while my bill hasn&#8217;t skyrocketed, it&#8217;s something I have to pay attention to more now.&nbsp; Figure my total gasoline expenses have about doubled.&nbsp; But as work is just a mile down the road, even if I drove it all the time, which I don&#8217;t, my gas bill was never all that much to start with.&nbsp; Right now my usage is high because I&#8217;m still in new car love and I&#8217;m busy driving <em>Traveler<\/em> here and there after work just about every day, just for the shear pleasure of driving it as well as the practical matter of getting to know it.&nbsp; At some point that&#8217;ll taper off and then the big cost will be when I take it on road trips.&nbsp; This year my drive to Memphis, Topeka, Portland and Oceano and back cost me about $725 in gas.&nbsp; Double that isn&#8217;t an easy figure to swallow all in one go.&nbsp; So I have to make a point to save up for it.&nbsp; I put a hundred bucks or so every month into a road trip kitty and I can still do them.&nbsp; But I just can&#8217;t petty cash my gasoline anymore like I used to be able to.&nbsp; Now I have to pay attention to it.&nbsp; I have three savings accounts scattered here and there that I&#8217;ve just been putting random spare cash into.&nbsp; I&#8217;ll make one of these my road trip kitty and then just use it for road trip gas and miscellaneous expenses.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[New Car Love Alert&#8230;] So I&#8217;m out of the break-in period, and taking the car a little more and more into its upper ranges.&nbsp; Bear in mind that for years, decades, I&#8217;ve been a stick driver and absolutely hated automatics.&nbsp; Also, that I&#8217;ve never owned a car with anything under the hood that could even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[75,55],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-uncategorized","tag-c300-love","tag-this-and-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}