Private Fleet Car Review: 2015 Audi TT Quattro S Line.
It’s a rare occasion for A Wheel Thing to be in the seat of a proper sports car; with a huge nod of thanks to Audi, A Wheel Thing went one on one with the Audi TT Quattro.
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Turbo technology for consumer level petrol powered cars has come a long, long way since the 1970’s. Audi’s bolted a “hairdryer” to a 2.0L petrol engined four cylinder, with a massive 370 Newton metres of torque available across a mesa flat range, from 1500 to 4300 revs. With the TT weighing just over 1410 kilos unladen to a total gross weight of 1730, it’s a measly four point six kilos (roughly) being moved from each metre of Mr Newton’s finest torques.
Private Fleet Car Review: 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander XLS Diesel.
Mitsubishi’s update to the Outlander is a mix of looks and minor suspension work. There’s revisions front and rear to the sheetmetal and refinements to their engines. A Wheel Thing takes the 2016 Outlander diesel XLS for a run, backing up from the petrol version tested recently.
Private Fleet Car Review: 2016 Toyota Camry Atara SL
It’s amongst the first of the last from the Australian manufacturing arm of Japanese goliath, Toyota. To say the Camry has had a facelift is to say the Burj Khalifa is a tall building. Effectively, every single component externally, bar the roof and the window line, has been redesigned, re-engineered and rebuilt. The 2.5L engine stays at the same capacity and offers two different peak outputs, depending on which Camry you buy. A Wheel Thing drives the top of the range Atara SL, wondering if a cardigan was required and was pleased to find out the answer.
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It’s Toyota’s venerable 2.5L four, offering 133 kW or 135 kW (with the dual exhaust model) at 6000 rpm. Most drivers, of most cars, will never see that rev limit, which makes this number irrelevant. What is relevant is the torque, at 4100 revs of 235 metres of Mr Newton’s best, up four over the single exhaust.
Those Signs On The Dashboard
One of the things that you have to learn when you buy a new car is what all the information displayed on the dashboard is what all the warning lights mean. In the cars I remember from my childhood, like the old Mitsubishi Sigma station-wagon my dad let me steer down the driveway, and the Simca that was the first car I owned, there were only a few warning lights: usually the fuel light.
Today’s cars have many more sensors and information systems to let you know just about everything that’s going on with its inner workings. This information is usually presented to you via a little light on your dashboard. But these little lights don’t (or usually don’t) come right out and say something intelligible and straightforward like “Fog lights not working” or “Engine about to explode”. This is because the car was probably designed by Germans, built by Chinese, intended for Brits and sold to Aussies. Just as well, or these information lights might end up with classic examples of Chinglish along the lines of “Lanterns for use when soft cloud sleeping on ground not happy”.
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