The last poster wins

[slayerpaul]

good morning! :)

[Vindekarr]

My weekend car got trashed, hell, it would have been what, two months ago now? I finally replaced it today. The new car's a Ford Falcon Typhoon. All my non-work cars to date have been Japanese, four cylender, and usually compact. My last one was an Impreza, before that I had a Civic. The Ford was not my first pick, but it does fit what I wanted, it's safe, big enough for family use, but also fast and rugged enough to handle trackday use. The selling point though was the price-a new Typhoon normally sells for around 60K, I got a fantastic deal that put it well within my reach.

 

Ford's desperate to sell Falcons right now, they're in good shape as a brand, but the Falcon represents a car of a different, bygone age. A large family car with a massive high performance engine, high fuel costs, and handling requiring a deft touch, it's simply to big, too technical, and too sports oriented to appeal to this generation, when cheaper, more efficient, and equally well made hatchbacks are available. This is a little bit sad-it means the Falcon will be gone forever in 2016, replaced by the arguably better Taurus, and with this financial predicament in mind, and their in-house tuner hemorrhaging money, Falcons, even the ultra-high performance flagship, the Typhoon, are going cheap.

 

Technologically, the Typhoon's a trip down memory lane-it's plenty modern, but this type of car, the idea and principle of it's design, is not. A long time ago, cars like this-family saloons with race-spec engines and suspension, were a common sight since to race, brands needed to make a set number of their race car for road use, called homolgation. Nowadays homologation racing is a thing of the past, and so are this type of car. Now, only the Camaro ZL1 in America, the Lancer EVO in Japan, and the Falcon F6 and Commodore HSV in Australia, still do the idea well.

 

Perhaps the funniest thing is, how differently the police treat you in them. It's a monster of a car-I can't really stress when you spend your week driving an SUV, how beastly 400 horsepower feels-but it doesn't draw anywhere near the attention something like my Impreza did. The Impreza suffers from it's reputation as a street racer's car, and while I'm proud of my spotless criminal record-I've only ever had one ticket(and that was for illegal parking, and even then only because some jackass stole the no parking sign) but they do pay more attention to imports. It's a wierd thing.

http://i1170.photobucket.com/albums/r535/Yurimarkov/800px-FPV_FG_F6.jpg

Mine is black. All black.

[naomis8329]

A beautiful machine to be sure and I must admit although I like the thought of a pure black beast, the red would be what I would go for with either a cream or black interior.

 

A lovely car and one we don't get here in the UK. I definitely need to move back home :D

[billyro]

Only 116 more posts until the 30,000 post mark! >:]

[slayerpaul]

:thumbsup:

[naomis8329]

are we there yet?

 

:D

[Iv000]

Ok then, why did Apple decide to put a 4Mpix camera in the new iPod 5G, while the previous 4G model has a 0.8 Mpix camera?

And then more Ram, and a bigger display, and more stuff.

That's like telling me 'Ha, you've got inferior hardware. You should feel bad and go buy this new shiny piece of hardware that is the same like the last one but just so much better so you'll want to upgrade!'

Well I definitely won't upgrade :armscrossed: ...ok I will but in a year minimum

 

There's fine balance between hating every single thing about Apple and not doing so because their stuff is somewhat useful. :dry:

[brokenergy]

:psyduck:

[naomis8329]

But that is the point isn't it. Getting something upgraded, bigger, better and then you have to go out and buy it coz it is just that, bigger and better than wot you've got.

 

Unfortunately this is wot product development is all about. Its wot makes us buy the new product. The new Playstation and XBox are bigger and better than the previous machines. Doesn't mean the older machine is no longer a good machine, in some respects it is a better machine as it has been reworked and the software is glitch free and we know wot we're getting works. The new stuff is an unknown quantity and may not work right, may burn out faster (remember the recall on one of the XBoxes due to the laser burning out faster than it should've).

 

Sometimes its better to stick with wot you've got, wait a year or so for all the glitches to be ironed out, and then buy it. Why pay over the odds for something that will reduce by 50% (usually) within the next 12 months? Makes no sense to me. Why buy something whilst its in the "Cash Cow" phase, one should wait for the plateau, especially in these hard times, where every penny counts towards a loaf of bread or a pint of milk :D

 

My opinion, and you can agree or not, makes no matter to me :D

[Vindekarr]

I have a Samsung, it's thinner AND lighter than yours mwuahahahahahahahaaaa.

 

And yeah, the Falcon is an Australian exclusive, it's made here and nowhere else. A long time ago, in Australia we had a slew of cars that were totally unique, or modified from imports so far that they weren't recognisable. There is a massive motorsport culture here-always has ben, and one of the main tweaks cars used to get for here was a larger engine, due to both the petrol headedness of the locals, and the immense distances between cities. The Falcon made it's way over in the 1960s from America-after the Americans got rid of it, the model stayed on here until now, and will until 2016(TBC, Ford have suggested they MIGHT make another model yet) As a child, Australia had little diversity in it's racing, but plenty of rivalry, and the Falcon was one of the most omnipresent elements in the local touring car scene even before a strange rule decision made it one of only two cars that could be entered. Nowadays it's most popular with the cops, the Victoria Highway Patrol use exactly the same model I've got, albeit with a different engine, as their pursuit car, a role it's well suited for.

 

They actually used to be the #1 selling car in the country for over a decade, however, in the 1990s they went into a steady decline, and now contribute so little to the sales quota that Ford's not only pulled the plug on it, but also has suggested it's pulling the plug on it's local factory aswell. And that's a pity. We have such little industry left, if Ford goes, we'll only have two car factories left-we used to have 26 factories and 7 brands building locally, until quite recently, but a string of bad governments and bad decisions have meant it's far cheaper to import, and so most cars in Australia are Japanese or German, and made in Thailand.

Edited October 16, 2012 by Vindekarr