Cars Part Two: A new little friend.

Yes, I'm finally getting around to it. We have had a new member of our family for the last couple weeks, so here goes:

Things I love about Yeti:
1. Despite the fact that he has an automatic transmission (which technically should be in the "don't love" column) he has cool paddle shifters that control the automatic transmission and provide almost as much control over the transmission as I would like.
2. Despite the fact that he has an automatic transmission and a fairly small engine, he is surprisingly responsive and peppy. He's not going to beat much of anything off the line, but he gets going much more quickly than Merlin did.
3. He has a startlingly large amount of room inside for such a small car. I have a good 6 or 8 inches of head room, and more knee room than I did in Merlin. Nicole's dad, while skeptical at first, said "I could ride comfortably in the back seat of this car, even all the way to St. George." My boss got in the passenger seat, looked up, and said, "Whoah!"
4. He has really bright headlights and good bright fog-lights. This (the headlights) was a feature I loved about my Civic (I did really wish my Civic had fog-lights), and growled about with Merlin. This was one of the few things that Consumer Reports hadn't given stellar ratings on, but given that they bombed the headlights on the 2001 Civic and I liked them anyway, I thought I'd take a chance. I'm vindicated.
5. He gets very good mileage. Our worst tank (actually the only full tank we've bought so far) was lots of city driving and lots of high-ish revs (traffic is a little crazy in Orem these days due to insane construction). and was a grand total of $26, totalling between 30 and 31 mpg. Big smiles when we're used to spending $40 to fill up, and getting around 20 mpg in city driving.
6. He has a 200 watt stereo with an MP3-capable CD player. This means my 16+ hour classic rock playlist fits on 2 CD's. The volume control goes to 40, and even I can't handle much more than 20 unless we're on the freeway going fast with the windows down.
7. He has real cup-holders. While Merlin's cup-holders barely held the bottom of a pop-can by less than an inch, these things take care of business, dwarfing a pop can and having no problem at all with the bucket-like large drink from Subway. They are even lit from above so you don't knock over your drink when you go reaching down there in the dark.
8. He sounds great. Honda Fits are in a unique position that most of them are sold before they even get to the States. Therefore, most dealers mark them up $1,000 over MSRP as soon as they hit the lot. Ken Garff Downtown in Salt Lake was good enough to add actual features for this, including aftermarket black rims (we didn't keep those--to much $$$), all season rubber floormats (we like), a sport grill insert (cheap so we kept it) and a Honda Racing sport muffler which we kept because we liked the white car better than the black one they had and taking off the muffler would have taken a day or so. The result is that you get this nice low-frequency growl at the lower rpm range (from 1000 to about 2300 rpm) and a very pleasant (to me) hum in the upper rpm range. I like it.
9. He's quite a sporty looking car. The Sport model, which we bought for the cruise control and aluminum rims) also has an underbody kit which adds greatly to the visual effect of the car, making the Sport model not look like a little granny grocery getter.
10. He places Nicole and I a little closer to each other. In Merlin it was a bit of a reach to hold hands across the way, but Yeti makes it nice and close.
11. And last but not least, he leaves lots of room around him in a parking space. At school, where they only paint the lines about half as long as "real" parking spaces, he only sticks out about 2 feet, and he leaves plenty of room for getting out the doors, even when people are parked close to the line in adjoining spaces. He also parallel parks like a dream.



Things I don't like (as much) about Yeti:
1. I would really have preferred a manual transmission. Due to the small size of the engine, it would be nice to be able to launch at a higher rpm if you were in a hurry to get across an intersection or something. This turned into a real deal-breaker with Merlin due to the fact that he had no guts until the turbo started making boost.
2. Yeah, that's pretty much it. What can I say, he's a definite keeper.