Is The Miata A Good First Car

I recently had a friend who has a 15 year-old ask me that. Below is my response. I know there was a thread over in the Miata.net forums about the very subject, but I couldn’t find it. Somehow I overloaded the search capacity of the forum by putting the word Miata in my search string. Go figure. If you can think of any I missed, good or bad, add them in the comments.

I think a Miata is a terrific first car, but I might be a little biased. 🙂

First a couple of good reasons.

  1. No back seat. This decreases peer pressure to get the driver to do something stupid by 2/3rds. It also decreases in car distractions by the same amount.
  2. A Miata is not a very powerful automobile, if he ever decides to “see what she’ll do” he will be hard pressed to get it to 90MPH coming down the High Rise.
  3. The Miata is a very safe automobile and can take a lot of abuse while protecting it’s contents.
  4. It is also highly maneuverable and won’t roll over like a SUV with it’s high center of gravity.

Now a couple reasons why it wouldn’t make a good first car.

  1. While safer than an SUV it is small and can be overlooked by inattentive SUV drivers.
  2. In some circles a Miata is stereotyped as a girlie or a gay car. This is mostly fueled by uniformed muscle car or pickup truck drivers. (It’s a running gag over on the Miata.net forums.)
  3. It is rear wheel drive, which lends itself to being used for drifting.
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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 498

A Collection Of One

Doh!This Sunday afternoon Donna, her cousin Laurie, and I are going to see the Trans Siberian Orchestra in Columbia. To get ready we have been listening to their Christmas Eve & Other Stories CD in the car.

Tonight we traveled to Augusta to go to Best Buy where we were to pick up a gift card for her boss (and the Jason Bourne Collection for me.) I was at a loss as to what to get for my boss. He has two small boys, so I thought while at Best Buy I would pick up a DVD with some My 3 Sons episodes and just mark through the 3 and replace it with a two. Then I’d tell him I edited out all the scenes with Chip in them. Turns out My Three Sons isn’t on DVD. Dang. My wife, the sensible one (as if that isn’t self evident already) suggested we get him a Tran Siberian Orchestra CD.

We found the Trans Siberian CDs easy and right next to Christmas Eve & Other Stories was The Christmas Attic. When Donna asked did we have that, I said no. She said, “Buy it.” So we did. Less than 3 months after selling my entire 486 CD collection, we now have a collection of one.

Finding the Jason Bourne Collection was a lot harder. I looked up front in the new release area, but the only DVDs there were single disc Bourne Ultimatums. I checked the Drama aisle and then the Action/Adventure sections to no avail. I then gave up and figured when I did my in store pickup of Forbidden Planet I’d ask the clerk where to find it. The line for in store pickup was 4 deep, so we divided to conquer. I stood in line and Donna enlisted the help of Pamela Landy to find Jason. Actually she found a tall guy in a blue shirt and asked. His first response was, “We have that?” but led Donna to the close proximity of where it should be before he himself had to ask another associate. Turns out the nondescript silver package was up front on a big display stand. It was on the bottom row of about 15 rows of giant yellow headed Homers on the cover of the Simpsons Movie.

DOH! My boss is a Simpsons fan. I should have bought him the movie. I’m always one step behind….

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 497

Miata Polaroid

Miata Polaroid

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 497

It Is Starting To Smell A Lot Like Christmas

Seems like every third commercial is for a fragrance. Both men’s and women’s. The actresses all look familiar, like famous people, they probably are, but I can’t be sure, my subscription to People expired in 1981.

I saw a commercial for a vintage Tide T-shirt. If you bought one the proceeds would go to help Hurricane Katrina and victims of the California wildfires. Cool, I’ll help. The shirts are $15, but I never found out how much they wanted for shipping. I would have given them my credit card data to buy the shirt, but first I would have to register to use their site and to do that you need to give them the usual phalanx of info. Forget it, not like I’d ever use their site again.

The Bourne Ultimatum was very good, left me wanting more. It really never slows down for you to dwell long enough on the improbabilities and impossibilities to let them spoil the movie. I wonder if the series is available in a three disc set or are they waiting for the 4th movie? I don’t know if they are going to make another movie, but they sure left it open for one. Matter of fact they probably already have a script, just retool the second movie a little…

To wash the bad taste of At World’s End out of our mouths from the other night, we popped in TDPM this afternoon.

Governor Swann: Perhaps on the rare occasion pursuing the right course demands an act of piracy, piracy itself can be the right course?

Aaaah, that’s better.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 497

Emperor’s Christmas Present

Agusta Commons Christmas DecorationsI headed over to the closest LTS this morning to get the tire plugged. I walked up to the unmanned desk and spun the tire to get the nail facing up. When I did this I noticed a tear in the sidewall of the tire right to the inside of where the nail was. Yikes. The nail was a long framing nail and after puncturing the tread area (the initial clicking that went away) it must have gotten bent and worked its way over and punctured the sidewall (the squirming and rapid deflation.)

When the desk guy came out and asked if he could help, I told him, “Maybe not any more.” I showed him the sidewall and told him I realized that eliminated the easy fix. I asked if he might have a used tire in my size to tide me over ’til after the holidays. He searched and couldn’t come up with anything, so I asked what he had in stock in 195/15 x 15. He had a Michelin Raptor for $75. I thanked him and said I’d let him know.

When I got home I checked the Michelin website and could find no mention of a tire called Raptor. Searching the web led me to a Riken Raptor made by Michelin, but it doesn’t come in 15″ sizes, so what was that guy thinking? Next up I started calling the other 5 tire stores in town and discovered that 195/50 x 15 is not a popular size in these parts. I guess if it doesn’t fit a pickup truck or an SUV… Two of the local tire stores had something in that size, first place had some Kuhmo AST tires for $65 a piece and the second had some BF Goodrich g-Force Sports for $82. A little research let me toss out the Kuhmos as the AST is an all-season tire. The BF Goodrich’s were listed as an Ultra High Performance Summer, much better.

Headed off to Miata.net for more in depth research. A few tires got the best reviews, my current, but holy, Toyo T1R, The General Exclaim UHP and the Bridgestone Potenza RE750. I widened my search area and started calling Augusta tire stores. Nobody had any of those top three or anything else in my size. I checked in at TireRack.com for some reviews of the g-Force and was pleasantly surprised, it ranked 7th of all the Ultra High Performance Summer tires they sell

Merry Christmas your Highness – four new BFGoodrich g-Force Sports.

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 497

Took The Air Right Out Of The Sails

Augusta's Christmas Tree on the CommonsOn our way home from dinner out with friends tonight we detoured through the “valley” to see some Christmas lights. At one point going through a neighborhood Donna said, “It sounds like you picked something up in a tire.” I slowed a bit, but after a few seconds the sound went away, so I shrugged it off. About 10 minutes later as we were accelerating away from a traffic light, the back end of the car squirmed. When I shifted into second, it did it again and we could tell we had a flat. I limped ahead another 100′ or so into a small lighted parking lot.

It took a couple minutes to clean out and disassemble the trunk to get down to the spare. Jacked up the car and swapped out the flat tire for the bitty compact spare. Fortunately the regular tire and wheel fit back into the trunk, but only because there wasn’t any air in the tire and then still it was a tight squeeze. Because of the time, our only chance to get it fixed was if the tire center at Wally World was still open. It was on the way home, but although Walmart is open 24 hours, the tire center part must close their doors at 8:00 PM because it is dark when we get there.

The only good thing about this puncture is at least it is in the center of the tread area, so I can get the LTS to put a plug in the tire tomorrow. The tires are getting worn, but there is enough tread still left to possibly get me through until early spring. Just for the record I checked to see how many miles I have on these tires and it turns out I’ve got 30K on them. I wonder if the T1R is supposed to wear better than it’s predecessor the T1S? Because I was usually only able to get 25K or so on the older model Toyos…

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 496

Back In The Saddle Again

Sunrise Over Ford Conger FieldThis morning when we passed the steeplechase field and I pointed out the sky, Donna said, “Stop and take a picture if you want.” So unlike two weeks ago when she made this same offer, this time I did stop.

For the first time in 3 months I have used “bicycling” as the category for a post. I think we may have taken a 2 mile ride a couple months ago to test the new rear wheel after bending it on some railroad tracks. But tonight was a full fledged 7-1/2 mile ride. We headed over to the Gatewood subdivision to check out the Christmas lights because, as with Halloween, the residents there seem to go all out. I don’t mean this in any way to be rubbing it in to my more northern readers, but I was wearing cycling shorts and a short sleeve jersey for this adventure — it was 73° at 8:00PM.

This is highly unusual for us. We aren’t normally getting snow or anything, but this time of year the average high is around sixty and the low should be in the middle thirties. The Emperor’s top has been down and I’ve had the boot cover on it since Sunday. We’ve had a nice run of low 80° days this week, but a return to normalcy is on tap for the weekend, by Sunday it will be a high of 56 and a low of 28.

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 496