I used the navigation system for the first time today because it was inoperable when we picked up the car in Sweden. (It comes pre-loaded with North American map data.) I input a destination, started it up and turned on the voice to hear it announce the route it had selected.

I put the car into gear and turned on the directional signal. While the system was announcing the route, I noticed that there was no turn signal clicking noise.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I gotta have my click. First, I thought it was some kind of manufacturing defect. The dash turn signal indicator was flashing and I assumed a brand-new car wouldn’t have burned out bulbs. Next, I thought, ugh, what a design miss. How could the engineers design out the clicking noise everyone relies on to know whether or not their turn signals are on?

In the time it took me to think it through, the voice announcement ended and voila! the clicking noise returned.

This astounded me even more. It means that the click must be digital…and it must be playing back through the sound system. As I considered this, I realized that the days of a fundamentally mechanical car are long gone. The old-school mechanical solenoid is obsolete. I remember when you used to have to fish up under the dash to find the turn signal solenoid when it failed. In the XC60, I’d need the source code for the infotainment system to find it.

This XC60 is a thoroughly digital device. It just happens to be an automobile. I suspect there’s more software is in this car than is in my DSLR or my iPad or my smartphone. Here’s a partial list of systems in the XC60 that are software-driven: radar and digital image processing to automatically brake the car if you get too close to a car in front, logic to permit the cruise control to automatically follow the car in front, ABS, DSTC, image processing to sense cars in blind spots and sensors in the shocks that can be set to deliver varying suspension rates. Clearly, the engine and transmission are digital, too (the car runs on regular or premium, so a knock sensor must be affecting the spark plug timing to prevent pre-detonation).

And I suspect my wife’s XC60 is to a Chevy Volt as an IBM PC XT of 1983 is to a Core i7 desktop of 2012. In short, as blown away as I am by this car, I’ll bet that hybrid and electric cars are even dependent on software.

So, bye-bye mechanical turns signals…hello, MP3 turn signal clicks.

While that may seem like waterboarding to those of you who just buy one off the lot, and thank God that’s over!, I actually enjoy the elongated process because I learn so much more about the car that way. Plus, I can wait for the best price and, most importantly, making the process excruciatingly long means I’ll never become an impulse car buyer.

By the time we took delivery of Tricia’s new XC60, I’d learned that the car’s engine is made in a Ford plant in Wales, the transmission comes from Japan and the steel body parts are stamped at Torslanda, Sweden (pronounced in English, I think, like “tush-lander”). These and other useless bits of information plus a cover-to-cover reading of the online owner’s manual really do help cement the decision to buy a car.

For me, cars cost so much — and you keep them for so long — that it’s almost inexcusable to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car that you haven’t become an expert on. After all, you can keep some cars almost as long as you keep your children. (I do realize how unfortunate that simile is, I really do. You try coming up with clever analogies. Post your alternatives as a comment and we’ll see which one(s) are more apt than the one I came up with.)

Anyway, Volvo has been doing overseas delivery for a long time. Long enough that in the distant fog of non-Internet time they felt it would be a good customer service idea to send a letter to a buyer letting him or her know when the car shipped from Europe and when it might arrive at the local dealer.

I received such a letter this morning. (Interesting, it came via email, so this customer service process has been updated somewhat for the Internet age.) You can see a redacted copy of the letter by clicking on the link at the end of this post.

Why is this old school? Well, for one thing Volvo generated a letter, not an email. That makes me think Volvo used to actually snail mail these out. I almost wish I’d gotten a letter postmarked Tushlander, Sweden. The footer is pretty interesting, too, eh? C’mon, how often have you gotten a letter from a car manufacturer with the bank wiring instructions for different currencies in the footer? Quaint.

But a letter like this is old school because it’s outdated. There are bazillion ways to track your car minute by minute as it crosses the ocean. For one, the shipper will give you a status update on its website, using your VIN as a tracking number. After all, if UPS can tell you where that package of gum is, why can’t a logistics company tell you where a freakin’ car is just as easily?

But the ne plus ultra of tracking is the many sites that combine cargo ship satellite transponders with Google Maps to give you the minute-by-minute location of a cargo ship. For example, the Platinum Ray, which has Tricia’s car on it, is in Southhampton in the UK at the moment. That’s its last stop in Europe on this voyage before it travels to Newark; Baltimore; Brunswick, GA and Charleston, SC on this side of the pond. By the time you read this, it may be on a completely different voyage. Still, you ought to check out this link, then click on “current vessel’s track” to see how precisely where this ship is. You may think me odd or impossibly geeky, but this is just too cool for words. I’m sorry; this is the balls.

But even though I can run technological rings around Volvo’s letter with up-to-the-minute news of where Tricia’s car is as it makes its way to her, I am even more impressed with the letter. It’s a nice touch, trying to keep the customer in the loop, not assuming the customer is technologically equipped to find the ship’s callsign and input it into a tracking site.

It may be old school, but it’s cool, too.

Well, it’s come to this: cheap, tawdry misappropriations of poetic metaphors.

Yesterday, something happened in my car that made it run rough and have no power. Come to find out today (thanks to an emergency visit to my pals at Village European) that the #4 ignition coil is dead. Prudence dictates that if one coil needs replacement, all should be replaced. And, since we’ve got the engine cover open, it’s advisable to replace all the spark plugs as well. (After all, who wants to spark a nearly dead plug? [And if you don't get that joke, I can't help you.])

Oh well…since you have the car, you might as well replace the front pads and rotors; there was only a few millimeters of surface left. All right…go ahead and change the oil, too, while you have it here. You know what? After the dealer aligned the car last spring, I couldn’t stand the way it drove, so do you mind also putting it on the rack?

To accurately describe the feeling one gets contemplating the cost of repairing a late-model BMW, I am forced to (mis)use the poetic term “mortal coil.” Usually, the term refers to the stress and frustrations of daily living.

Today, however, all I can think about is my BMW’s mortal ignition coils — they live fast and die young.

I’m writing this as Tricia catches a nap – she’s a little jet lagged. How jet-lagged? Well, she fell asleep in a tram while touring a car factory today. A very LOUD car factory. That, my friends, is jet-lag.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

It took us longer than we expected to get to Gothenburg. That’s because Tricia’s friendly travel agent (me) decided not to risk a short layover in Copenhagen. That added four hours sitting in an airport to the trip time. We arrived yesterday in a blinding, driven rain to discover that southern Sweden looks like (wait for it)…Portland, ME. Of course, we didn’t see much of the terrain because we arrived at about 1pm and it was already dark. OK, so I am exaggerating…but only a little.

In December, lights out is at about 3:30pm. And sunrise is about 8:15am. So, it’s a short day. However, today the rain ended and the sun came out. It was clear, brisk and cold – again, it was a lot like a nice winter day at home.

We got up early – for the first time in travel memory, I showered first so Tricia could sleep in another 30 minutes – had breakfast next to some Swedes complaining (in English, which everyone seems to speak) about their wives, their mothers-in-law, their teenage daughters– in fact just about everyone who’s female – and then were driven to the Volvo plant.

Before we get to the good stuff a word about Swedes: they’re tall (though not as tall as Finns, I think), many of them are blond and, among younger women, those that aren’t naturally blonde seem very much to want to be blonde, so there’s a plethora of platinum blondes walking around – something I suspect those practical Swedes think is useful. Is it that blonde hair reflecting more scarce light at night is desirable in a country with nearly perpetual darkness? Are blondes preferred so those guys from breakfast can find their women in the dark more easily? BTW, did I mention it gets dark early here?

[Update: Over dinner, Tricia mentioned that a woman sitting near us might be wearing a blonde wig. Later, we went for a walk, where, I kid you not, we saw these long, stringy blonde wigs for sale in the city's megamall. I can't believe the blonde envy thing going on here. Click the thumbnail to see these platinum fantasies full-size.]

Back to the narrative. Pelle from Volvo greeted us at precisely 8:15am and presented Tricia her car. The car is quite nice – and I breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the interior. We ordered, sight unseen, an interior that isn’t available on cars that dealers import into the US. I did it for two reasons. I couldn’t stand how monotone the US interiors are and it makes Tricia’s car a unique souvenir of this trip.

Tricia got to drive the car on the delivery center’s “test track,” which was a muddy stretch of earth about 700m in length. Volvo takes it history seriously — they claim one of the reasons the company was started in the 1920′s was to build cars that could take what were at the time poor paved roads in this country. So I suspect that even though highways here today are better than at home, this “test track” was built to demonstrate the spirit of the original Volvos.

After the test drive, we visited the Volvo Museum. There were some nice P1800′s in the collection. But what stood out is how the company’s history — and the depth of its collection — stops abruptly at about the year 2000. Why? It’s obvious — the company was nearly dead when Ford bought it in 1999 and today it’s the first major Western brand to be owned by a Chinese company nobody in the occident has ever heard of. As a monument to Swedish industrial prowess, the museum just couldn’t find a way to integrate its current history into the exhibition. I really looked hard for something that hinted at the company’s last 20 years; in fact I searched the entire museum. I found one reference to Ford (on a time line that stopped in 1999) and none — nothing at all — about Geely. The visit turned out to be a fascinating lesson in the power of museum curators.

Back to the delivery center for lunch — Swedish meatballs…surprised? — and then to the sleepy-time factory tour. I was disappointed because the stamping shop was idle. I wanted to Tricia to experience the earth-shaking pounding of floor-to-second-story metal presses stamping out car body parts. It’s my favorite part of a car factory tour because it’s the ultimate metaphor for a pounding headache — and the worst, I repeat worst, industrial job one could have. My heart goes out to people working in car stamping plants.

Anyway, Tricia must have known she got the quiet version of the tour and promptly fell asleep just as the Volvo tour guide got excited describing the marriage of body and powertrain. This was my second car factory tour and in the first one the tour guide was also hopped up over this “marriage” process.

I guess you just have to be there. But I don’t get why it’s so cool. It’s just another step in producing the car. In Volvo’s case, it’s done by robots; in the BMW plant I was in, it was being done by two mädchen who, at the time, looked marriageable. I assumed that in BMW plants, only young single women performed this task, so that’s why it is called ”marriage.” However, it appears to be an industry term — and those Swedes have ruined the metaphor for me by using (German) robots.

After the tour, we came back to the hotel, where I sat in Tricia’s car until it got too cold (and dark. Have I mentioned that it gets dark early in December in Sweden?) reading the 400-plus page owner’s manual.

Tricia went to our room for a nap…and I as write this, she’s happily catching up on her sleep, counting white Volvos in her sleep.

BTW, here’s a little video of stills from our day. Looks like we had fun, doesn’t it? We sure did.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Having done both BMW and Volvo deliveries in Europe, I gotta say that Volvo’s program is better, with two exceptions. First, they gotta replace their US travel agent. Second, I’d trade the two free map updates in the US for a pre-load of Scandinavian maps when the car is delivered. I brought an old GPS I’d loaded with Scandinavian maps (you really need it), but using an add-on GPSs in a new car cheapens the experience.

Biggest, most pleasant surprise? Volvo delivers the car with a full tank of gas, something that costs a small fortune with petrol costing about 14kr/liter.

Today’s news is that Massachusetts has minted another new driver, who models her newly printed learner’s permit here.

Having thought through this process in detail in my mind, I realized she’d want to try the permit out as soon as possible — a scary thought for a driver who has never before been behind the wheel of 3000 lbs. of motorized metal. It’s even more frightening around here, where the appellation “masshole” applies to maybe three out of five drivers one encounters on the Commonwealth’s crumbling highways.

So, in a very effective bit of long-range planning, today was not the first time our new driver took the wheel. In fact, we’ve been practicing in parking lots for months. Simple stuff: getting set behind the wheel…where the controls are…turning left and right…stuff you shouldn’t have to learn the first time you are in traffic.

The results? This brand-spankin’-new driver was able to drive home from the Registry safely and almost perfectly.

It was with self-preservation in mind that I hit upon pre-permit practice sessions. But it worked perfectly. I recommend it to all parents with eager, inexperienced drivers.

BTW, am I alone in being shocked that the mandatory driver’s education class and road instruction costs $800?

In today’s Boston Globe Magazine, Clifford Atiyeh’s “The Crusade Against Cars” tackles car lovers’ central dilemma today:

“Social responsibility” is the media topic du jour, the latest feel-good narcissism of those leading government, corporations, and other big-mouth organizations. Part of the idea is to give an appearance of top-down restraint – that it’s not OK for the CEO to upgrade his Gulfstream V while downsizing his company. In the auto world, social responsibility comes with good intentions – tougher federal fuel economy mandates, tighter emission controls – but for car lovers like me, it’s a sucker punch in the face.

In other words, it’s hard to be both “authentically” green and also love cars that aren’t.

Reading Atiyeh’s piece created a moment of synchronicity for me.

Just yesterday, I was at an undercarriage session of the Boston Chapter of the BMW Car Club. An “undercarriage session?”

Simple. You take your car to a BMW dealer who allows you into the shop to go over the car with one of their master mechanics. If, like me, you own a car that costs a fortune to maintain, the opportunity to have a master technician take a look at your car for free is like Prozac for budget anxiety.

The session was held in a newly reconstructed BMW dealership and, to put it mildly, the shop was beautiful. Brightly lit, spotless and odor-free, even with cars’ engines running.

I mentioned this to the tech who was giving my car the Nth degree and he said, “What don’t you see here?”

I was stumped. Turns out there were no exhaust hoses to connect to the tailpipes of running cars. None. Cars that are run in the shop empty emissions directly into the shop, which must have had 36 bays.

The tech explained that today’s cars are so clean that the building’s architects were able to design a single airflow system that moved enough fresh air through the shop to obviate the need for separate exhaust hoses. He also mentioned that OSHA and other government regulators had been there to verify the system was working and there wasn’t enough airborne pollution to harm anyone.

His explanation for how this was possible was simple. He told me that cars today — at least the new and late-model BMWs they work on there — just don’t produce enough pollution to necessitate a separate exhaust system.

Maybe instead of Atyieh’s defiant rejection of social responsibility all we need to do is lock a few greenies in a garage with 36 running BMWs.

Now it seems that the best the new chairman of General Telephone and Motors, Ed Whitacre, brings to the mix is a reprieve of the desperation move Lee Iococca made when Chrysler emerged from one of its routine trips through bankruptcy court. Let’s take a look at the embarrassing result of Whitacre’s reported directive to create a massive new taxpayer-funded marketing program to get back market share. If this represents the best marketing the “new” GM can muster, I want my $60 billion back.

The real question is, what if you really did want to take advantage of this “guarantee” to drive, say a new-generation Corsica…er…Malibu or you have forgotten that the F-platform Camaros competed with Yugos in the cellar of the quality ratings and you wanted a new one. What if a retread executive from, of all places, AT&T, convinced you that you really could get your money back if you didn’t like the bucket of bolts the polyester clad, red-faced liar at the local dealer sold you? What would that be like?

It would be something like this and this:

• You have to keep the thing at least 30 days — get this, called the “vesting period.” Amused yet? Yeah, they think they’re building equity with you during this period
• You don’t get back those noxious “fees” GM’s dealers charge you to process paperwork (hey…maybe restaurants will start charging separately for the water they wash dishes in and the paper they write the check on)
• Did you take a loan to buy your new lemon? The interest is — you got it — on your nickel
• No leases need apply
• What do you actually have to do to return the thing? Simple: return it to the dealer — who’s absolutely going to want to see you — and fill out a bunch of paperwork, including “any…documentation GM or the Administrator may reasonably request.”

Bottom line, GM is right back where it was…misleading people instead of building cars people want. As I once heard someone say, same circus, different clowns.

9/ 16 update: You gotta read…and I mean you gotta read TTAC’s post that details the dealers’ terms and conditions on this program. Check out #7. Dealers now have an incentive to sell you the car for close to MSRP…then buy it back at 67% (2009 models) or 74% of MSRP (2010 models), pocket the bogus fees they tacked on to the original sale, pocket another $1000 for their trouble, then resell the car your kid vomited on the carpet in and which you used to pull parking meters up and in which the upholstery was an ashtray to the next dupe for as much as the floor salesman can extract.

Geez…if this is GM insisting that its dealers treat customers better, I’d hate to see what’d happen if they declared open season on Grandma.

Drivers on the Pike have long been deserving of the appellation “Masshole” — you can’t believe what I’ve seen people doing.

They eat, they sing, they use bedpans, they trim their nails…heck, they even paint their nails, they throw things at you, they drive winter “beatahs” so they can dare you to slam into them when they cut you off at 90MPH to get onto 128.

But nothing has scared me more in the last few years than watching Betty in her Hummer SUT and Bob in his Escalade texting. They text with one hand…they text with both hands. They take cell phone photos of themselves cutting people off, then they text the pix to family members with a “woot.”  They text while they are painting their nails.

Now, finally, there’s a YouTube video for them, that should be required viewing before being issued a Fast Lane transponder:

But I gotta say, this video has four minutes of the most spectacular drifting I have ever seen. “Oooo!,” you’ll say when you see Ken Block smash the fluorescent lights. “Whoa!,” you’ll shout when he slams the driver’s rear wheel into the water balloon in the hand of a dummy (which is seated comfortably in a folding chair). And you’ll be outta your seat when your see Block slam out of a doorway and drift clockwise to within inches of the edge of a dock.

(But what’s up with the paint-ball stuff? Does the shooter celebrate because he hit the car or because he just lives to shoot again?)

This might not rise to the level of an Internet meme, but it’s pretty close.

(Oh, and you can skip the last few minutes…unless, of course, you wanna see the clothes.)

I’ve been reading Consumer Reports since I was a teenager.  Without a doubt, they the most authoritative consumer product testers. And they know it.

I’ve always been amused by their combination of geeky testing regimens and their 1930′s-derived Socalist practices (purchasing a subscritption to the magazine makes you a “member” of Consumer’s Union and eligble to vote for their directors).

But they’ve always been both supercilious and self-righteous. For years, they claimed “no advertising” but gleefully pumped their (now-made-useless-by-the-Internet) car pricing “service.” Finally, after years of duplicity, they changed their claim to make an exception for their own ads without blinking an eye.

But when they decide they don’t like something, look out. They’ve tortured Suzuki (who deserved it) and Bose (who didn’t). CR was the earliest — and most smug — detractor of SUVs.

Unlike almost any major American news outlet today, their masthead contains zero, none, nada email addresses for readers’ responses. Alone among American journalists, CR doesn’t need to hear from anybody. Even the blog post I am about to blast doesn’t take trackbacks…their bubble is complete.

On now to a piece of advice I read tonight in CR’s auto blog. Tony Giorgianni’s mostly banal post on getting the most from a new car (offering wisdom like RTFM and “get winter mats”) also offers the surreal advice that new car owners should “Change a tire. It’s…a good idea to do a trial run with the jack and spare tire…”

Now I don’t know what planet Tony and CR’s editors are on, but I absolutely guarantee that nobody…and I mean no one…is going to test changing a tire. It’s so ridiculous that only CR could give this advice with a straight-laced face.

You betcha, Tony. When I get my next new car, I’ll suck down a large dose of fish oil and prune juice, then run right out and practice changing tires.

Update: As of the day after I posted a comment with a link to this post on Consumer Report’s original post, they haven’t approved my comment. Sure, they could argue I am trolling for traffic. But I’m not, and I don’t think they really believe that either. They’re just keeping the membrane impenetrable.

 

When I first bought my 330i with the notorious iDrive (which, by the way, is very, very cool), I was stuck by the fact that the car seemed to be less a mechanical device than a digital one with wheels. That impression has only been confirmed over the last three years as the car has needed just three oils changes but half a dozen reprogrammings. When the car is reprogrammed, it takes the dealer more than a day and, if it crashes, not only does it have to be restarted, but the frakkin’ car (what am I going to do when Battlestar Galactica ends??) won’t even start until the entire image is properly downloaded. OK, I gotta admit I think that’s kinda cool, especially when the dealer does it on his nickel and you get a BMW loaner to drive for two days.

But that isn’t what’s pissed me off. What gets my goat is that for the last three years, each reprogramming has added new functionality. The dealer doesn’t know what’s in the new release of E90 software. BMW keeps it a secret. They seem to see this as service and not as a benefit to owners. We upgrade our computers, why doesn’t BMW encourage us to update our cars?

Want some examples? Here’s partial list of functionality that’s been added to my car over the several reprogrammings it has had:

• MP3 was added to the CD player
• Color schemes in the graphics display were changed
• iDrive performance was improved
• A new automatic ventilation program was added to the climate control
• New commands were added to the voice control system
• Mileage has improved by about 3%

So, what am I bitching about? Simple: if I didn’t have these things done under warranty repairs, I’d have never received them. Dealers won’t upgrade the car on request; you have to have a warranty problem. Plus, they have no idea what’s in these updates; they simply apply them when instructed to solve a problem — even a problem that has nothing to do with the lack of functionality provided in the updates. BMW never makes the list of enhancements public. My question is: why?

Think of the revenue stream from upgrades from people who own a 2006 model which, when produced, didn’t have a timer to start the ventilation system on hot days, but which through the magic of software can be made to have it. (This actually happened in my last update and I had to download a manual for a 2007 model to figure out how it works!)

I know why BMW is the best brand in the world. But nothing’s perfect…I suspect it’s more than a little German to keep adding functionality to older products but keep it a secret. Oracle, IBM and Microsoft people: sleep well tonight. BMW isn’t about to steal your maintenance agreements.

There’s a very entertaining series on one of my favorites blogs, TTAC, entitled “General Motors death watch“. I am sure they are much hated at GM, but, frankly, I think the bloggers there have been evenhanded. GM has been a mess so long, I can now officially be excused for buying a new, manual three-speed Chevy Vega in 1973. (I paid $2300 for it, courtesy of Nixon-era price controls.) Still, I think TTAC has been waiting for rigor mortis so long, it can’t see that GM is already a carcass.

Lately, the auto press has been falling all over itself to praise GM’s new cars, especially the interior fit and finish of models like the Enclave and the CTS. Interior fit and finish is especially important to me because, after all, you sit in the thing for three to five years and every flaw eventually becomes something you stare at and wonder, “How could they let that out of the factory?”

I checked out an Enclave in the showroom; the panels in the exact center of the dash under the analog clock were misaligned. I didn’t bother to test drive it, knowing that misaligned panel would drive me crazy. Now, I’ve taken to peeking through the windows of parked Enclaves to see if it was just a sample defect. Nope. They’re all like that.

This week, curiosity got the better of me and I test drove a $50K ’08 Cadillac CTS with four-wheel drive and the direct-injection engine. The showroom unit had a terribly misaligned panel where the front passenger’s knee rests against the transmission tunnel. Defect just on that one? Guess again. A different unit, the one I drove, had the same problem. Now I have another GM model to stare at in parking lots. The fit and finish in that car was no better than an 80′s Corsica, despite all the press fawning over stitched leather and the stupid Viagra-enhanced navigation screen. (The latter gives itself an erection every time you push a button on the dash. Reminds me of one of those pump-kits that promise…uh…lengthening).

I have no freakin’ idea at all what these press guys are smoking. If an average car nut like me can see this stuff in seconds, why don’t they?

Still, the promises of resurrection from GM management continue. Yesterday, GM told analysts it’s going to be profitable in a couple of years. That reminds me of the kind of wishful talk that accompanied Roger Smith’s attempt to “take on the Japanese” in the 90′s. At the end all he could offer was a “a used Buick.”