Following up, oddly enough I just returned from one of the local weekly car events where I met a guy with an Austin Healey. He explained that his last tour with the car involved shipping it to Norway, where he found the fuel to be not that great for his car in terms of the way it ran. This surprised me, all we’ve had for years here is sold as E10. But that’s what he said, unprompted by me.
Another guy there today arrived in a really nice GT40 replica compete with Gurney Bubble over the driver’s head for more room. I detected the unmistakeable smell of Avgas as he taxied by 
Silvaire wrote:
He explained that his last tour with the car involved shipping it to Norway, where he found the fuel to be not that great for his car in terms of the way it ran
What do you mean shipping it to Norway? he sold it?
He ships the car over for driving events in Europe, tours in certain areas including one in Norway, then afterward it comes home.
I have a friend who has done the same thing with an Alfa Giulietta, it’s now been shipped from Europe to the US three times including factory shipment in 1959. Lately it’s been harder because the Panama Canal is operating at reduced capacity, so last time it came home by ship to Houston, then rail.
Silvaire wrote:
He ships the car over for driving events in Europe, tours in certain areas including one in Norway, then afterward it comes home.
That’s one way to do it I guess Tell him to use 98 exclusively the nest time in Norway, and nothing but 98. Esso and Shell is OK, and Trønder Oil. Lots of Circle K stations here, but they don’t have 98 at all, only 95 E10.
Still odd though. The car enthusiasts has even made an app/web app showing all the places for “safe fuel”.
This looks interesting: 0-60mph in under 2 seconds
0-60mph in under 2 seconds
…and your bank account $250K – $0 in the same time. Interesting though. The CEO is ex-Tesla, Lotus and Jaguar and was the chief engineer for the Tesla-S. They’ve got an impressive management team. And in California there’s no shortage of people with $250K to pop on a driveway status symbol. Good luck to them.
Well, after now 3 months with the RAV4, the summary is, it is a nice family car and it does what it does quite well. That youtuber who claimed that “it will grow on you” was quite right. I’ve gotten quite used to it and my Eco Score has improved from the low 70ties to the mid 80ties, which interestingly has not had too much influence on fuel consumption. Over all, the car has had a consumption of around 7 l/100km, but that has a lot to do with the fact that 99% of it’s use is in the city. Outside, I do regularly get summaries in the app of 5.5 l or even less. They tell me that with the summer tires, I can expect better consumption, which we will find out shortly.
An interesting summary in the app is that the car drives purely electric roughly 36% of the time. That is more than I expected. It also shows the battery is in good state.
The software update has made quite a difference in the behaviour of the warnings and particularly the lane keeping assistant is a lot better behaved. It has not changed anything in the MFD display, but at least Android Auto does no longer go offline all the time. I pretty much ignore the Toyota MFD features other than the DAB+ radio and mostly use Android Auto which, after experimenting a bit, is a pretty neat system.
What has caught my interest is the plug in hybrid variant of the same car. While it is not yet available 2nd hand at a reasonable price, it’s data look quite exciting. In fact, you have both worlds available, which would suit me pretty well. It has a purely electrical range of about 70 km, which means I could drive to work for a couple of days before I need charging, but together with it’s ICE it can go about 1000 km on one fuel load and the average consumption, as you don’t use fuel too much, is said to be 3.5 to 5 l/100km. Now that is thought inspiring: Managed right, I would be able to drive my short work drive electric almost all the time, go shop and charge for the free hour and get about 15-20 km charged and only use gasoline for trips larger than 70 km or basically as an APU to charge up the battery. I will certainly look at this in a few years time once the prices of those models are down at a reasonable level.
I don’t know how other countries have addressed this…
A recent news article describes how one needs continuous data connectivity (3G 4G or 5G) throughout the vehicle charging, yet at most public charger locations at least one of the four UK cellular networks (there are many more than 4 but they piggyback onto the 4 e.g. Tesco is a stripped-down Vodafone deal) has no connectivity, and the charger cannot be used by those customers.
The connectivity is required by the phone app which controls the billing.
If true it does seem unbelievably stupid because people will rely on the “remaining charge” indication to decide when to stop for a recharge (with “coffee”) and if they find they can’t, that’s a big problem. OTOH it is no worse than finding the only available point has been vandalised, etc.
What I don’t get is why the charger cannot offer a free wifi access point for this purpose. Or does it not need connectivity itself?
On a similar topic, this $250k car has amazing specs. There is clearly no real limit on how much power one can try to push through the tyres!
Peter wrote:
There is clearly no real limit on how much power one can try to push through the tyres!
Not at all, but there’s clearly a limit on grip and, in terms of practical use, space. Some of this stuff might be fun on the Bonneville salt flats but you wouldn’t be able to make use of it in the real world.
There was a period in the mid 1980s when Formula One cars ran extreme turbos and were said to output almost 1,500bhp in qualifying setup. As that evolved, there was (for the first and only time) feedback from the drivers saying that beyond a certain point more power wasn’t actually helpful.
Peter wrote:
The connectivity is required by the phone app which controls the billing.
10 years ago perhaps There’s still the possibility. You can charge through a phone app, but I have never been to a place where the only method was through a phone app. The usual method is a chip device you have on the car keys. Everything else is handled by the charger, and the bill comes in the e-mail or automatic depending on how you arrange it.
