The Exigent Duality
Much Belated Z Car - 08:36 CST, 11/25/20 (Sniper)
Someone recently asked me why I drive a now-eighteen year-old car, when I can easily afford a brand new one.

The first reason is simple: I just don't drive very much. A couple of years ago, I traveled twelve hundred miles in that entire year! My car is essentially full-time garaged, sometimes for weeks at a time.

The second reason is a bit more complicated.

When I bought my then-six year-old 350z in 2009, my plan was to own it for four or five years, then leap to the inevitable V8-powered "440z", or whatever it'd be called. And indeed, the car industry was moving that direction, with Chrysler and Ford having just revitalized their Pony Cars with fresh new eight-cylindered power plants.

But over the ensuing eleven years, and the car industry went in a direction I simply failed to anticipate: forward progress didn't merely stop, but shifted into a reverse gear.

Modern cars have gone backwards via both smaller engines, thanks to the State's "CAFE" mandates, and with "features" such as cameras which spy on their own drivers, "ASS" systems which kill engines at every stop light, steering wheels which wrestle control from the driver and which have nearly slammed family members' cars directly into concrete barriers or veered them into oncoming traffic, plus State-mandated GPS systems and black boxes.

And relative to median family incomes, car prices have exploded as well, especially for someone like me who enjoys Japanese sports cars in particular.

The net effect of all of this is that it's difficult for me to justify the cost of a new car, when my rear-wheel drive, 50/50 weight balance, three hundred horse power existing car already does everything the new cars do, minus the annoyances. So it's with a bittersweet feeling that after all of this time-- an eternity in car terms, really-- Nissan is finally releasing a new "400"-branded Z car. Here is a profile shot comparing it to my very own Z. I rather like it, in spite of the hideous banana yellow color:



Apparently, it's even going to be offered with a manual transmission, the absence of which is an absolute deal breaker for me.

But now the downside: the CAFE mandates have struck once again, and this new Z has a twin-turbo V6 in lieu of a proper V8. As someone who frequently drives a V6 versus the 4-cylinder turbo in wifey's Subaru Impreza WRX, this writer can personally attest to the old saying, "turbos are God's way of saying you don't have enough cylinders." You lose a lot in terms of sensation and satisfaction with the move to smaller engines.

The sad part about this is that larger engines get better gas mileage in real-world driving, with real-world drivers, because the added low-end torque and overall muscle-like feeling of power means people don't mash the throttle: wifey's aforementioned WRX can't get out of its own way under three thousand RPM, and as a result my borderline-classic car Z with its much larger engine is more economical, because the up-shifting can realistically happen much earlier.

The only reason turbos get better mileage on government tests is because they can be kept out of boost. But no one actually drives like that: it's like how Top Gear, many years ago, showed the kind of fuel economy one gets when pushing a Toyota Pious-- it was worse than an M-badged BMW. And surely enough, essentially every time I am near a Pious the driver is flooring it at every light just to get reasonable acceleration.

Let's not also forget that reliability walks in step with simplicity: an engine with two turbos, plus correspondingly sophisticated cooling mechanisms, is destined to create the kind of long-term issues I saw when researching BMW's twin-turbo V6 3-Series line once upon a time-- those cars typically don't even make it to eighty-thousand miles without catastrophic failures: in essence, they are designed sort of like cellphones, but for the " lease-and-trade-in every few years" C-Suite execs who don't ever own cars long-term anyway.

But back to this new Z: As more details about the car emerge, I'll also be curious to see if it has obnoxious "assist features". And I wouldn't count on it costing less than forty thousand USD either.

And let's not forget: State actors in China, Europe, and the US have all indicated that they plan to outlaw internal combustion engined cars, in lieu of virtue-signaling external combustion, non-autonomous transportation appliances: does a car like this new Z even have a future? Time will tell.