Lady Elanore

Not sure you can have both, as your Eurobox would only have standard power :p I also didn't mention that your Eurobox was RWD as standard, but I think you assumed that anyway

So here is a question... as a petrolhead, definitely not a 'Batthead' (is that a thing or have I have imagined that term for 'leccy powered car owners?) and in this case, not a dervhead, what is most important in a car to an enthusiast? You might have to bear with me a little on this, so probably best get a cup of tea if you intend reading on. over the many years, I've bought cars based on the usual factors, handling, power, soundtrack, looks and interior stuff, but until recently I've been able to mix and match the variation of these factors prevalence as my heart and purse-strings allowed. I have always put acceleration pretty high up in my 'want' category, it's the easiest and most accessible of the kinetic...or fun... factors in a quick car, of course handling is important too and so sometimes I've bought a car that was quick in a straight line, but a little lacking in the handling department (Fiat Uno Turbo ie mk 2-boosted) or handled well but was a tad slow (Fiat X1/9 - but so pretty), but the excess of one factor balanced out the lacking of another, at least in the enjoyment stakes-if not necessarily the nerve shredding understeer of the Uno Turbo Some cars have looked great, handled well and performed well (Mk1 Clio 16v) or accelerated like a stabbed rat, hung on tenaciously but had the interior like a 1970s Toyota (Subaru Impreza Turbo Mk1-the interior was less interesting than watching 2 people playing noughts and crosses, 'first to a thousand'). But one thing remained constant, at least in my eyes, most of my fun cars, have had interesting engines. My Beta Coupe had a twin cam when Ford were still churning out the single OHC Escorts, my Clio had a revvy 16v when the 205Gti had an 8v. Of course the Subarus had those interesting Boxers, my Strada 130TC had the twin 40s snorting away when the rest of the world were going to civilised injection, my M135 and M4 have a creamy straight 6 with ...er..."good pick up" to quote a great movie, even my 123D BMW had the worlds first twin turbo 4 cylinder diesel and the first production one to break 100bhp per litre and have an alloy cylinder head (I wasn't going to mention diesel, but it's my thread). Anyhoo, I like a nice engine, but all the ones I would like to own are 6 cylinders and upwards. This has become a big problem. Now that petrol cars are becoming pariahs, small 4 cylinder and 3 cylinder engines are making their way into more and more big cars. Plus all cars are getting bigger with every generation. The new M4 is massive, it is also heavy and really expensive. The new C class only has 4 cylinder engines, no 6 or 8 cylinder versions will appear ever again. The RS5 and RS4 is also big and lardy and no doubt will have a 5 cylinder at best in the next iteration. Basically you will be lucky to have a 4 cylinder engine in a fast, yet small car, that doesn't have some lumpen great battery pack stuffed into it somewhere. It's the future and it's coming to a street near you soon. All this has made me realise that acceleration is not the most important thing for me by a long stretch, after all 'leccy cars are ballistic in a straight line. It's not the level of grip that really matters that much-apart from a safety aspect of course-'leccy cars do tend to have super low centres of gravity. It's the soundtrack and the ability to modulate the cars behaviour with you right foot (other feet are available) that excites me. Lighter weight, at least compared to forthcoming cars, means change of direction is easier and more fun, 'leccy cars have their weight spread out of a long section for the car, so their polar momentum isn't so great, even if the centre of gravity is. There isn't anything wrong with 4 cylinder engines (3 cylinder ones can sound great) and my next car may well be a small 4 cylinder one, but it's not what I want and I can't have what I desire any more, at least on my budget. An A45S is no doubt a fantastic car and one I could easily live with, except it sounds like an electric toothbrush that's been swallowed by a cow...and that cow is standing in the next field. An RS3 goes really well and even doesn't understeer too much these days, but they have killed the soundtrack with filters. There is the Alpine which admittedly is a great looking and handling car, but like the current Boxster/Caymen has a plain old 4 cylinder. I want more in a new car!!! All this had led me to the odd position of thinking about Mustangs. In a years time my M4 will be gone and although times have been a little tough of late, I am hoping by then I will be in a financial position to get a new car and besides it's nice to fantasise. Normally I wouldn't have dreamt of something so big (which I hate) quite heavy (which I hate) Suspect handling via youtube infamous oversteer (which I don't mind so much as long as I win), rubbish fuel economy (not a fan) dodgy recycled plastic looking interior (it is American) not as quick in a straight line as I would like (scream if you want to go faster) and some unusual choices in design (10 speed auto anyone?). BUT, it has that engine and that engine makes that sound (apparently there is a 2.3 engine, but I believe this is false news and sent to scare us). So finally I have come to my rambling point. The noise an engine makes appears to be the most important thing to my car buying purchase. I am amazed, I thought it would be handling or some such. I am basically the automotive fan equivalent of a McDonald's 'loyalty queen' customer. So if we all had a similar standard Eurobox designed car - and you can assume it does everything quite well and safely - which one option of individuality would you add to it, what is most important to you? You can only pick one! Handling (however you like it) Roadholding Acceleration Braking Off-road ability (includes simple 4x4 option for those who live where it snows a lot and it's hilly) Interior quality Interior toys Exterior looks Exterior functionality (think tough Landrover Defender) Space (more) Weight (less - or more if you want to tow) Fuel consumption Sound (includes subtle vibrations of engine were appropriate) Running costs

The little numberplate looks like a staple across a pair of butt cheeks Why couldn't they have made it 80% the size overall :( I suspect the next M2 will also be a bit lardy :( Might as well go buy a big old Mustang before it's too late to enjoy a great sounding engine. The Mach 1 looks great and from what I've read on some M3/4 forums there might be one or two people jump ship, especially after the lean financial years many of us have had.

Harry chats to prof Gordon Murray about his new hyper track car thingie (the one with the Henry hoover built in) via Zooooom

Although I also think these renders look superb. Now that is a car I could live with

Well, things are going super dooper for the new car... https://www.carscoops.com/2021/02/2021-bmw-m3-and-m4-recalled-over-improper-welding-leading-to-braking-issues/

This is in a similar vein. I have no ability in anything remotely like this and marvel at these men's skill and beautiful work. It's one of the reasons that I will miss Ant Anstead from wheeler Dealers, I have discovered, rather late in life, that I love watching men fettle bodywork!! Who knew? (waits for innuendo posts to follow... )

I watched that night and was gutted. Left a comment on the site saying I wanted to hug the car and tell her it will be alright in the end

I need to start to drink white wine. This will sort out the packaging problem. Sometimes the most obvious answers are just staring you in the face I guess

That works whilst I have enough bottles, but once they are depleted I'm back to a Newtons Cradle of bottles

I've had my Samsung fridge/freezer for a couple of weeks now and it's really quite impressive for the money. It's really quiet and makes an interesting noise which is softer in tone than regular compressors I have a small digital thermometer which goes down to something like -30C so I can check my fridge is performing ok and although it took the freezer over 10 hours to get down to -18C and the Fridge to around 3C it's held temperature very accurately so far, or at least without much variation in temp. I like the freezer super boost thing, as it has coped with my batch cooking very well, to bring many litres of soup down from warmer than ideal (for putting in a freezer) to rock solid frozen lump in a few hours. Frost free is of course a boon The fridge has useful little wheels on the back too, so you can scoot it around the kitchen to its final resting place (not as serious as that sounds :D) It does have one shelf in the fridge that slides out, so you can access stuff from the back of it, completely pointless exercise as far as I can see and the door bin for big bottles is possibly a bit too deep as anything smaller than a 1 litre bottle of milk rattles about in it and if you open the door in an over exuberant manner - who hasn't - then things can fall over like standing passengers on a bus that's performing an emergency stop.

The designer of the next gen 4 series has said he felt that the car had to split opinions. They wanted to do something different. I suspect the fact that the Chinese love big grills had more to do with the styling than they would like to admit

On a personal level, I have no objections to occasional posts that are purely links, most do it including myself, but endless link posting kills threads and shows a lack of commitment and effort to the forum. I've posted in the past that I would prefer that 'link posters' refrained from any thread I start, but it falls on deaf ears... or eyes... or something like that. How hard is it to actually put your fingers on a keyboard and bother to put a tiny bit of effort into constructing a 'real' post occasionally? Maybe we are dealing with a form of 'bot'??? Even in his own threads I checked one and the last 8 post where pure links, not a single words of text.

I don't know why I bother sometimes. I don't normally see certain posts, but against better judgement thought I'd read a couple. I already posted an actual description of my link (not a 'cant be ar$ed to bother writing any actual content myself) and in it described my link as part of a series. But to have a 'mere' link posted from the series that I had already gone to the trouble to describe, is salt in the wound. Looks like back to the ignore list...

This is part of a series of explanations of the new M3/4 I think they might have a lot of explaining to do I still like the styling, love the engine and expect it to be seriously quick, but IT'S TOO BIG AND HEAVY!!!! Anyhoo if anyone is bored

I watched that recently (I'm obviously subscribed to the lovely Harry) and he has got to return the car to its natural colour. So much better than black.

Btw did you follow his beautiful Espada series? Utterly gorgeous. Although I am still not sure about his roof mod.

Harry has become a firm favourite for me. Harry, Steve Sutcliffe (probably my favourite road tester) and Chris Harris are a class above the rest in my book. Harris is a slightly younger version of Steve Sutcliffe, but I don't think there is anyone comparable to Harry. He doesn't just spout the press junket, he is first and foremost a car fan and gives snippet of info that are fascinating. His depth of knowledge is astounding. Perhaps it's a voice thing? I do like a man with a calm voice, rather than the usual histrionics that car reviewers have these days and that ruddy forced laughter they all eschew!!!! Don't get me started Mat Watson (I do like the Car Wow 'stick of truth' however)

The Amazon Echo 3 is still available. I've a mixture of Amazon and Google devices and I find Amazon devices perform slightly slicker and integrate very easily with other smart things, but Google is much more able overall as you don't have to use key phrases. I guess this comes down to it's super advanced speech AI stuff. The Amazon stuff sounds a little better than the Google stuff overall I think (although not a huge amount in it), but in a busy and noisy kitchen, smart speakers are quite useful when you ask them to perform"louder" to overcome extractor fan noise and your hands are full/wet and you don't want to touch the speaker. There are other options like the Google Home Hub, which is a small tablet with built-in speaker. It doesn't sound great, but you could Bluetooth link it to a Bluetooth speaker of your choice and control the audio with voice commands from the google device. That way you get the best of both worlds and a handy voice controlled tablet to boot. https://www.amazon.co.uk/amazon-echo-3rd-generation-smart-speaker-with-alexa/dp/B07V1KH27C?th=1

I think Hoover do some 70cm wide American style fridges, which aren’t quite so big, they might even be called 'Slim American Style FF'

It's 20+ years old and I couldn't in all consciousness give it to someone else in case it did something awful. The compressor is a bit noisy these days. Would need a PAT certificate if I sold it.

Funnily enough I have just moved frozen goods from my old 2 draw freezer (part of old fridge freezer) and put them into the new 3 draw freezer. New freezer is barely any bigger in capacity thanks to it being Frost Free and the increased gubbins that go with it, as well as better insulation of course. Looking forward to getting the Samsung. Should give me around 170 litres of combined freeze capacity. Great for bulky things like bread, which I eat a lot of nowadays, as it's hard to find food on site anymore while I am working outdoors (I used to love fish and chips from next to the footie grounds. I'm actually quite excite at the thoughts of having separate draws for frozen veg, bread, meat etc. Who said I don't have a life? A bonus of having the freezer first is I can do a proper defrost for fridge collection, as I don't have to worry about spoiling frozen goods and as it's cold enough outside, I can hang up a bin bag with my fridge contents during the defrost (it will be a big job I fear )

I've just had a mini freezer delivered from Appliance World, they have been excellent. Ordered it on Wednesday and even though they don't do specific times for delivery, they roughly accommodated my wishes. Would have loved a bigger fridge freezer but space and shape of kitchen means the Samsung fridge freezer plus this mini freezer should be perfect. I don't know why I didn't do it earlier, as my job means often getting back from working away and nothing to eat when I get in. Or if I do some batch cooking, I can't freeze things like bread due to lack of space. Beko is humming away at the moment busy chilling down. I was a bit alarmed that it didn't simply go into freeze mode and the compressor solidly for a few hours. It seems to be doing it in steps and having a think about things as it goes - at least I hope that's what it is doing. Hopefully the Samsung will land in 10 days or there abouts

What fridge did you buy in the end? (I posted in your fridge thread earlier)

You had me at the quad screen spilt