Allpar fails again!

Those of you who have stuck with us for a while must be wondering whether we ever left our old “lots of pipelines with lots of single points of failure” service provider, with the big hour-long downtime today. Well, there’s a simple explanation. I need reading glasses but I don’t wear them.

I’ve been advised to move up to php5, and I thought I’d set up a configuration in the server’s “easy to use” control panel and then save it and run it by the team at Liquidweb. Then I clicked on the wrong button, and the program proceeded to build - or try to build - the system again. Only it screwed everything up, particularly php.

At that point I’d had enough and Liquidweb came in to rebuild everything. They had some problems getting Apache to run until they realized it just wouldn’t take ioncube - which is now out. SSL is also out.

Well, it’s all back now, but don’t be surprised if we have the odd momentary downtime later. On the lighter side, the scripts all seem to work, and just as importantly, all the pages are back. So I apologize for the outage, while being happy with the service overall.

Next time, I’ll just ask THEM to do it!

New video: Chrysler turbine tour

We’re pleased to present a new video on the Chrysler turbine cars, from the Chrysler Corporation Motion Picture Division. This film, which as far as we know is from 1962, was provided by an anonymous donor, and shows a turbine powered car being filled with various fuels, racing down tracks and driving down city streets, and crossing the country; it also includes an animated sequence to illustrate how turbine engines work. Overall a very nice video which is in the turbine car category of Allpar’s TV channel.

Driving Miss Country: video footage

For the very first time, we have video footage of a vehicle under review - the 2008 Town & Country, the world’s most toy-packed vehicle. Coming up in the future, we may well have “adding amber turn signals and a third brake light to your Valiant” filmed.

The URL to all our videos (including the Blooper Reel listed in the User Contributed section) is http://allpar.powertvonline.com/

We have to thank those guys for their help and their patience!

Land Rover: the answer to Chrysler’s problems?

As Ford gets closer to a sale of Jaguar and Land Rover, people have started to talk about how it would be a natural fit for Jeep. This is true, but not for the obvious reasons.

Land Rover has two things Chrysler desperately needs: a good four-cylinder engine, and a small diesel.

The four cylinder gas (petrol) engine is really the big item. Cummins can supply diesels to Chrysler, and their new, very modular design, which will be installed in V8 form in various Dodge trucks and presumably Jeeps, can almost certainly spawn a four cylinder for cars. The Cummins is tough, long-lasting, fuel efficient, and endowed with a name beloved by generations of truck owners. A Chrysler diesel could be laughed at by the news media; a Cummins diesel in a Dodge or Chrysler car, on the other hand, would be formidable indeed. On the other hand, the Land Rover 2.2 liter diesel pumps out a respectable 158 horsepower but has lots of low end torque and the usual diesel good mileage; if Cerberus bought Land Rover, it would presumably be able to build them in a present engine factory, preserving jobs (and postponing retirement benefits) and retaining profits.

The big deal, though, is the gas engine. Chrysler has a lousy four cylinder gas engine now; it went from top of the ranks with the 1994 introduction of the 2.0 to near the bottom with the World Engine, a horrific but buzzword compliant powerplant that, while it makes remarkable power with a turbocharger, is an unrewarding drive without said turbo. The horsepower ratings are great; the driving experience is not, because low end torque is lacking. This engine was foisted upon Chrysler by the overlords of Stuttgart at just the wrong time, as the United States started to value gas mileage and Chrysler increased its drive to take over foreign markets. Just about every review of the Caliber, Compass, or Patriot talks about highlights of the cars, in spite of the engine, which is just about universally disdained.

Land Rover makes four cylinder engines, and an industry insider of note described it as being strong and quite desirable. That is very important.

To deal with the World Engine’s deficiencies, we have been told that there are two choices: either make serious redesigns, or start over. Either might cost billions of dollars, and engines take years to develop, test, and tune properly. Sometimes they turn out surprisingly well, and sometimes they are a disappointment. Buying Land Rover provides a new option: simply use the Land Rover design, retooling the Dundee, Michigan plant to build their existing engine. It would have to be modified, but that would be far less serious than re-engineering the World Engine or creating a whole new powerplant.

That alone could make buying Land Rover worthwhile - just as Ford could justify buying Volvo just in the new Taurus platform. But there’s more.

Sharing with Jeep, Land Rover could make huge profits, because duplication of development costs would be largely eliminated. Jeep could leave markets they are not doing well in; Jeep has pretty much lost its prestige in the luxury 4×4 market, but Land Rover and Range Rover have not. In the United States, Jeep could drop the Grand Cherokee and Commander entirely, and stick with its most desirable vehicles - the hard core Wrangler, the Wrangler Unlimited, the Scrambler pickup, and the Cherokee/Liberty. The basic engineering of the latter could be merged with the equivalent Land Rover for foreign sale, and for an upmarket alternative; while the Range Rover line, with costs dramatically reduced and quality dramatically increased by sharing with Jeep, could be sold in the US, at higher prices. Hummer will always get its “I want to intimidate” buyers, but Range Rover, with some assurance of decent reliability and better appointments and chassis, will be able to get more of its genteel, wealthy, upper-crust buyers.

That would be nice, but that’s not the whole point. The whole point is also to get more people to buy the Journey, Caliber, Sebring, and Avenger, and that will only happen if they have decent engines under the hood. If Land Rover can fix that problem, everything else is gravy - and the Compass can easily disappear, since the capacity will be needed for Calibers and Patriots.

Of course, Cerberus could license an engine design from Fiat or Peugeot, or another company that doesn’t compete in the United States. But with Land Rover, Cerberus could get a massive profit-maker that fits right into their current skills and technologies, with a stellar reputation among those who don’t know any better. It’s a great deal.

2008 Town & Country impressions

Today we took delivery of a 2008 Chrysler Town & Country for review. While we hope to have a fairly complete review a week from today, we did take a quick test drive and have some preliminary input.

The rear seats look horrific but are actually comfortable. The middle seats’ swivel-ability is absolutely thrilling to kids, but a bit awkward, requiring more force than we would think to get started. Clearance is moderately tight but people will get used to that; getting in and out with the seats facing backward is not impossible but you’d rather a kid do it than your 350 pound Auntie Fannie or Uncle Flabbie. Oh, and a note to the intrepid folks at Chrysler: you might want to add Swivel ‘n’ Go to your owner’s manual index.

The ride is much nicer than the past models and the wind noise is far, far better than in the past, and for that matter, in our opinion, better than in the Sienna. Cornering is not bad but the tires on our model tended to squeal more easily than we’d like. Acceleration is surprisingly quick - but it ought to be, since we have the 4.0 liter. The transmission shifts more quickly and crisply than we remember from the last ride in a six-speed vehicle. Gas mileage has been about 18 mpg so far, on a nearly new vehicle (not yet broken in) with city driving.

Our test car lists for over $36,000, but that includes the ParkSense rear park assistance, rear view camera, side airbags, stability control, ABS, powerliftgate, HID headlights, three power doors, remote start (on the fob), cruise control, three-zone automatic temperature controlled air with filter, MyGIG hard-drive music system, Infinity sound, heated front and middle row seats, fog lights, second-row power windows, eight-way power driver and passenger seats up front, and turn-signal-enhanced mirrors. Our test car also has the swivel seats at $500 with table, and the dual DVD entertainment system running the bill up to $2,020 including satellite TV. The power folding rear seat was only another $600. The end result is a minivan just under $40,000… still well beneath the Cadillac Escalade in price.

I’ve modified this blog entry to account for the fact that I’ve gotten the seats into a comfortable position - while still not my favorite, they no longer qualify for nasty cracks. We will have video soon.

Update: we have pictures and much more detail now at http://allpar.com/reviews/2008/minivans.html

American shoes! (off topic)

This weekend, I went to replenish my supply of New Balance sneakers. I used to get whatever sneakers seemed cheap and decently made; then I refined the list by going with companies that pretended to have labor and environmental standards; then I switched to New Balance so my arches wouldn’t collapse and my back wouldn’t spasm, always wincing at the “Made in China” label that I really do try to avoid (usually without success - it seems like just yesterday Apple made computers in California and Ireland, but now, like everyone else, they switched everything to China, and that’s just one example.)

Not that I have any particular problem with Chinese people, because I don’t. I find China to be an interesting, enigmatic nation, with good and bad qualities. Like most Americans, I’ve mentally disconnected today’s China from the one we indirectly fought in Vietnam, and the one which is still doing rather nasty things to Tibet. I don’t know of any purely good national policies, though I’ll admit part of that is ignorance. Still, I’d prefer to support countries that provide meaningful civil rights to their citizens, and don’t turn their country into a toxic cesspool.

This time, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a number of New Balance shoes are made in the United States. Whether this has always been true or not I don’t know, but it seems new to me. They have five factories in the US, some of which produce shoes mainly of imported materials, and some of which use at least 70% American goods. Each shoe comes with a tag explaining what “Made in America” means in lawyer-speak.

The American-made shoes were $6 more than the imported ones. That’s about 10% higher, and I happily paid the price. It does make one wonder exactly how much is saved by exporting so much to China, when all is said and done. Is New Balance subsidizing American manufacturing, or is there really not such a huge pricing difference? When I was in retail I learned that the actual cost of production was often minimal compared with distribution, packaging, and markup. Doubling labor cost doesn’t mean doubling the price; it could mean a trivial increase.

Regardless, now I can have my healthy spine and arches, and American-made shoes as well. The lesson: just like the commercial used to tell us to “look for the union label,” we should be looking for the American (or Canadian or Mexican) label. Sometimes there actually are options.