Subaru Crew - Meet The Members II

thecat · October 2001

ditto

- hutch

paisan · October 2001

Haaaa

Well yep they could climb it, but with those low bumpers and suspension, it wouldn't do them much good.

-mike

rsholland · October 2001

They're demonstrating traction ability, not climbing ability, or off-road ability. What they were showing was that a BMW AWD, with only one wheel having solid footing, would move forward, whereas the typical 4WD/AWD would not move forward.

The fact that they were on a ramp (or a hill, if you prefer) only made the traction issue more relevant.

Bob

hondafriek · October 2001

I guess it is my turn to join the Aztek bashers,now I have not paid them too much attention but a neighbour just got one.

I have to wonder what would possess anybody to buy such a God awful looking rig like that, it looks like a bitza, you know bitza this, and bitza that put together by a mad mechanic smoking dope.

Ah well I guess there is not accounting for taste no matter how bizzare.

Cheers Pat.

pattim3 · October 2001

Well - I think I'm caught up on my reading here. Someday's it's difficult for me to read everything. Things are really busy at work, and the Fall season at home ties me up with a lot of my children's activities. It should slow down soon, but if you have something that needs immediate attention, please feel free to e-mail me directly at work (pmickel@subaru.com). While I may not be able to be directly involved in your case - I can see that the right people do get involved.

So, thanks for your patience!

Patti

1subydown1togo · October 2001

I was wondering what your opinions are on the most reliable used car prices on-line. I have to sell my uncle's 1999 Camry and so far, with the equipment and mileage(10K), I have gotten prices of $14,600 from Edmunds, 15,600 from KBB and 14,800 from NADA. Are there other sites I can also look at. Thanks to all of you...Serge

kameele · October 2001

For the last several days, but I thought I'd mention this. I have seen a couple of custom license plates around town in the past couple of weeks. One was RS 25 and the other FORSTR. and get this, the first one was on a very nice black Impreza RS 2.5 and the other on a forest green Forester. I'm afraid that I have not been fully indoctrinated as a Soobie chaser, so so I can't mention MY or other trim packages. Just thought it looked interesting.

Kevin

lucien2 · October 2001

UBSLIPIN

GOT STI

22B

RALLYMAN

JHZ 161 ;-)

bluesubie · October 2001

When the VDC was launched, SoA put on a demonstration for it's dealers at Flemington Raceway in NJ. They didn't just say the VDC would beat a certain car. They actually had the other cars there. IIRC, the competition was along the lines of the Volvo XC, BMW X5 and MB M-class. The VDC beat all of them in a traction test.

Dennis

kate5000 · October 2001

There is a thread Real-World Trade-In values in Smart Shopper on Edmunds. A couple of used car dealers used to frequent that thread, and gave pretty sound advice. They mostly specialize in trade-in value, but can give you a good idea what to expect if you sell on your own. They were pretty much on mark with my old Loyale.

barresa62 · October 2001

In regards to selling your uncle's Camry... I used the 3 sources you listed for trade-in values on my 00'OB Ltd when I decided to trade it in on the WRX. From this experience and several others, the KBB values are mostly overvalued and really shouldn't be used. You might be okay in the retail portion (what you're concerned with)but the trade-in is unrealistic for what I was using. It was so out-of-line in comparison with NADA and Edmunds. Actually, Edmunds was closer to spot-on in my case than even NADA. The retail values you list for the Camry seem realistic. My housemate has a 99'Camry but also a 140mile roundtrip commute. He has 70k + miles on this Camry that he bought brand new on 3/99. I was checking values for him in case he was thinking about getting a new car and selling his outright. I played around with low-mileage figures just to see how they compared to his high mileage.

Stephen

kens · October 2001

Anyone having problems with their Town Hall subscriptions? For some reason, none of my Subaru Crew subscriptions are being picked up. When I check for new messages, they don't show up. I checked my subscriptions and everything looks good.

Ken

rsholland · October 2001

I second Dennis's suggestion of having Subaru give demos about their AWD VDC. After all, SOA can't let BMW's claim of AWD superiority go unchallenged, can they?

Bob

subearu · October 2001

I just noticed that my Meet the Members subscription never shows any new messages, but if I go into it, there's new messages. Help us community leaders!

-Brian

bluesubie · October 2001

Bob, that was an actual event.
Unfortunately it was only for dealers/salespeople.

Dennis

paisan · October 2001

I just noticed that there are tons of new msgs here.

-mike

paisan · October 2001

Took 2nd place this past weekend again 2 seconds behind the WRX wagon of Duncan. Ahead of a Type R, Eclispe GT and WRX

-mike

rsholland · October 2001

Hmmm... I wonder what the results were?

Bob

1subydown1togo · October 2001

Here is the link...Tommi comes to Subaru..."wherfore art thou Richard?"
http://www.speedvision.com/pub/articles/racing/rally_off_road/011015a.html

rsholland · October 2001

How long are these autocrosses? What sort of times are people posting? I'm curious if they're about the same length (time) as what the BMW people just put on. Our times were mostly in the 1:30 range. Is your autocross about the same length, or is it longer?

Bob

1subydown1togo · October 2001

Thanks for all the tips on the Camry...

rsholland · October 2001

that the link referred to the current Subaru Rally Team as being "B-level," not very complimentarybut then neither have the racing results for this year been very complimentary...

Bob

bluesubie · October 2001

As I mentioned in my first post, the VDC beat the competition. ;-)
IIRC, there was a test using a water on a sheet of plastic.
Hopefully Patti knows about it and can supply more info. If not, I'll ring up the owner of Flemington Subaru. He's the one that told me about it.

Dennis

rsholland · October 2001

Sounds like we need a showdown here; sort of a modern-day shoot out at the OK Corral...

Bob

bluesubie · October 2001

I emailed Patti and she shot me a quick response. She'll provide more details later. She said she posted it about a year or so ago. She was there the week following the dealer's meeting.

Ok, who has the time to search for that post? :-)

Dennis

rsholland · October 2001

available then? I'm talking about the current set up, which is different from earlier BMW AWDs.

Bob

paisan · October 2001

Ours in NYC and upstate NY range from 30 to 80 seconds. They involve tight turns, and multiple slaloms. The SCCA ones are generally tighter than the NASA events.

-mike

paisan · October 2001

I un-subscribed and re-subscribed to the whole subaru owner's club area and this seemed to fix the problem.

-mike

bluesubie · October 2001

The BMW was probably the X5. Since I don't drive on wet plastic or metal rollers, I would be more impressed with real-world applications though. Snow, wet asphalt, sand and following paisan through South Philly. :-)

Dennis

subearu · October 2001

it still would be neat to see how the various AWD systems make it through the test. Those systems don't know it's plastic and metal rollers!

hmmm, I'll pause and wait for another successful re-subscriber answer before I re-subscribe to 23 discussions...

-Brian

kens · October 2001

Mike,

I tried the un/re-subscribe trick, but it didn't seem to work for me.

This is frustrating!

Ken

subearu · October 2001

my message center now seems to be updating properly now - and I didn't do the re-subscribe thing.

basically, I just compared what was showing up as NEW in the Subaru Crew page to the Message Center.

So, it's fixed? wonder why a townhall person hasn't chimed in...

-Brian

hypov · October 2001

How does it work?

paisan · October 2001

Mine doesn't seem to be working again...

-mike

paisan · October 2001

Hey for any of you who are interested in ECB nudge bars, the cutoff date for the nudge bar group buy is Oct 31st. E-mail me ecb@iace.com for details etc. They have some nice bars for the foresters and the outbacks/legacies!

-mike

http://www.ecb-usa.com

armac13 · October 2001

I was wondering where everyone had gone. The only posts I was getting were on Forester. Its still not working for me.

Ross

pattim3 · October 2001

to me. I noticed a problem last week, but currently all seems well.

Patti

pattim3 · October 2001

Of course, I can't find my notes about this event. I'll keep looking. From memory: We had a series of courses set up against the new BMW, Mercedes and Volvo. All vehicles had AWD and some sort of traction control. The events were:

Race them two laps around the course (we had to have a "professional" driver with us).

1 course on a wet skid pad (huge plastic sheet covered in soapy water) - full throttle from start up - timed test - drive between a series of cones and jam on the brakes.

1 course where we had to drive through an "intersection" of cones, come to a full stop, and accelerate into a curve, full throttle, on a wet soapy surface (again timed) and not taking out any cones.

I remember the VDC handling the course with ease. I did not like the BMW because the in the "stop and hit it on a curve" excercise, the traction control system would not let me control how fast I went. It basically would not let me speed out of the way of what was to simulate a situation where a "truck was bearing down on us through and intersection". It completely bogged down.

I agree (and so did other employees that were there), that this would be the ideal set up to sell a lot of cars. I was told that it was -

1. - expensive

2. - there were liability concerns (we had to sign a bunch of waivers).

Some dealers set up similar courses after the event at their facilities. Folks loved them. I really wish we would do it more.

As far as the BMW claim - I can't really respond to it. I've never had to take the car on a series of rollers. I can say that when I bought the VDC to Sugar Loaf in Maine on our ski trip, I could not get it stuck and I put it through some tough tries. I had folks checking out the car as I tried to traverse some very slick, steep climbs, deep, loose snow and...at one point...a very muddy trail. BMW had a display going on at the resort. Some folks checking out the BMW came over to check out my car and what I was doing - I was bored that day - couldn't ski - and they were really surprised at what it could do.

Sorry - long post and not much detail - but you know - age on the brain and all - my memory is not that great these days ;~}

Patti

subearu · October 2001

figured it would be expensive to do. maybe GM could foot the bill

wonder if we could rig up a 'real-world' test, sans the rollers...

my message center seems to be working fine again this morning, but I'm still bringing up both the message center and the Subaru Crew page to see new posts.

David - the message center lets you go to one page showing all of the topics you 'subscribe' to with new messages. you can click a 'read subscriptions' button to just cycle through your new messages.

-Brian

rsholland · October 2001

We had to sign waivers too.

What I liked about BMW's ramp test was that it clearly illustrated how effective an AWD/4WD system is, in a fairly controlled environment. You could clearly see when a tire (or tires) were gripping, and when they weren't.

No, this wasn't a "real-world event." No lab-type test ever is. However, it did show how these systems would react in real-world situations, and the advantages of one AWD system over others.

Mike, juice, Hutch- what did you guys think of the ramp test?

Bob

bluesubie · October 2001

Patti and the VDC was victorious!

I have an idea. Since all of those other dealers are in the Flemington area anyway, we could just get a bunch of people to test drive at the same time and find a little track. Maybe even sneak into the Raceway for a few minutes. :-D

Wow, even SoA made their own employees sign waivers.

Dennis

rsholland · October 2001

These Subie forums seem to be unusually quiet these days...

Bob

kens · October 2001

I think it's partly due to the fact that the subscriptions aren't working. If you just check your messages, the entire Subaru Crew set of discussions don't show up. People probably don't think there have been any messages in the last few days.

My subscriptions are still not working as of this morning. Where are our hosts?

Ken

ateixeira · October 2001

I didn't even know there was any activity here. My Message Center fails to list any Subaru Crew topics! Drew, Karen?

-juice

rsholland · October 2001

Last year, when Edmunds switched over to this new system, I had problems with my subscriptions. Anybody remember? I certainly b*tched enough.

I have never used that "feature" since...

Bob

ateixeira · October 2001

Bob: we took the middle course, too, but that's odd because your times were quicker. Perhaps they changed the course a little? I can't imagine the instructors could knock two seconds off their own times in a day. We used a blue 330 sedan, IIRC, maybe your car was quicker?

The BMW demo was a setup. They may have shut off the VSC on the RX300, who knows. There is a button right there on the dash. Also, on the first day they tell me they are not sure about the VDC, then on the 2nd day he tells Bob he's sure it will not make it? Nonsense, he has no idea, as I'm sure they didn't even consider the Subaru a competing model.

Another note - the RX had severely worn tires, which would have a great affect in the slalom and skidpad race against the X5 with plenty of tread left on them. I smell foul play...shame on BMW.

I was far more impressed with Mercedes' demo, which showed their own car with and without ESP, clearly showing the difference it makes on the exact same car.

The individual lap times did not factor in the belting of the driver. I noticed a little motion sensor just beyond the cones, but before the first turn, and then another set before the last curve. But you were closer to the instructors than we were, and deserve a pat on the back for a good run. Any cones? Did your team win the relay?

-juice

1subydown1togo · October 2001

In response to yesterday's question,"wherefore art thou?", the answer is...Peugeot

http://www.speedvision.com/pub/articles/racing/rally_off_road/011016a.html

rsholland · October 2001

You really can't compare the lap times from two different days. I'm sure, that at the end of the day, they take in all the equipment (cones and timers) for security. When they put the equipment back out the next day, if they don't place it in "exactly" the same place, the times could differ substantially. Our timers (start and finish) could have easily been placed closer together. I'm sure that's why the times from Thursday to Friday differ so much.

Our team lost the race. I didn't hit any cones, but several people did.

Bob

1subydown1togo · October 2001

I also just went thru unsubscribing and re-subscribing to all my boards...no luck

rsholland · October 2001

a Subaru VDC were present for testing. I can see why it wasn't, however. BMW (I'm sure) doesn't think of a Subaru (even the VDC) as being in the same market slot as a BMW. The only other competitors there were up-market brandsAudi and Lexus.

Bob

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