Post by PG on Oct 31, 2019 10:11:59 GMT
We’ve just got back from a short break to Spain, about 2/3rds of the way between Malaga and Gibraltar, staying in a friend’s apartment. We had a day in Gibralter as we've never been there.
We’d hired a group A car (“Toyota Aygo, Fiat 500 or similar”) from Malagacar.com and we got a Fiat 500. “It’s an automatic” said the lady behind the rental desk and the key fob just said, “Fiat 500 Lounge auto”, so I’ve no idea if it was a 1.2 or a Twinair.
The 500 is clearly hugely popular and when you see it and then climb in you can see why. It was a smart looking thing in a shade of dark grey metallic and does feel a nice combination of retro and yet funky – outside and inside. . The boot was surprisingly big – accepting the luggage that had required us to fold the Mini rear seat down. The seats were a nice fabric and were very comfortable. Spec included climate which was good but that was about it. Plip to unlock and then I spent a good few seconds looking for the start button, only to realise that you had to actually put the key that folded out of the key fob into a slot on the side of the steering column. How 20th century.
Inside, the concentric circles of the speedo (outer) and tacho (inner) work well, but the orange on black LED secondary instruments (fuel, temp, trip etc) inside the tacho look very 1970’s and are hard to read. So much so that later in the trip, what I thought was a ¼ tank of fuel was in fact the reserve and I got a worrying shock as the low fuel light came on mid motorway thrash.
The car did not have sat-nav and I could not see that it had Apple carplay / Android auto either. It had Fiat's U-Connect service. So having downloaded that to my iPhone I expected to be able to hook up my phone to the car, but failed to do so. Directions and sat-nav for our driving each day therefore consisted of Mrs PG having iPhone google maps open and reading me the directions as we went along.
If you are going to buy a Fiat 500 (or hire one), do not, under any circumstances, get the automatic version. It is an automated manual. What was wrong with this gearbox would require a whole forum of its own. First off, no “P” position – which means that you had to go for N and the handbrake, but as you can’t check it is in neutral like with a manual, you always had the fear that it would leap forward as soon as you took your foot off the brake. When pushed across to Auto, it seemed to take ages to engage a gear. The gearbox’s primary purpose seemed to be to smother any power that the engine may in fact have and yet consume vast quantities of fuel while doing so. Progress was something like – put into Auto; wait till it decided to engage a gear; then apply throttle in increasingly large amounts until the car started to move; just as the car started to move it changed up with an enormous pause of nothingness between the gears; finally engage next gear and off we go again; then panic as a hill appeared and mash throttle into floor; then notice that it has bloody well defaulted into ECO again and switch ECO off that results in a 10% reduction in awfulness but little real improvement; repeat ad nauseam while watching fuel gauge go down. The speed limit on the Spanish motorways is 120 kmh – we struggled to reach that and cruising at it was pretty much impossible unless going downhill. Switching to manual mode didn’t help much as with five gears, big gaps between them and no torque, all changing down really achieved was a huge increase in revs and changing up dropped you into a void of nothingness.
I seem to remember that Mrs Racing had a 500X auto hire car that was pretty hateful and very thirsty and that may well have been the same gearbox.
I also had the misfortune to damage a hire car for the first time in my life. The underground car park at the apartment block was a forest of concrete support pillars and was illuminated – or rather not illuminated - by what felt like a single 40-watt light bulb in one corner. There were separate in and out doors that required different presses on the door remote we had been given. So a combination of low light, trying to manoeuvre to use the in door to get out as I’d opened the wrong one, that fucking gearbox, and that fact that I am so used to reversing bleepers and this car did not have them, meant that I reversed into one of the concrete pillars. Well that and that fact I swear it jumped out at me are all my excuses. But let’s face it, it was just old age and a shit bit of driving really.
The damage was confined to the bumper and a cracked light, so the car was still driveable. On return of the car, I fessed up and as I’d got a good deal on their insurance and we have excess cover, the cost to me should be very small. But one still can’t help feeling a complete tit for reversing into a concrete pillar.
I didn’t take any photos as you all know what a 500 looks like. But I did take a photo of the damage for you all to have good laugh at.
We’d hired a group A car (“Toyota Aygo, Fiat 500 or similar”) from Malagacar.com and we got a Fiat 500. “It’s an automatic” said the lady behind the rental desk and the key fob just said, “Fiat 500 Lounge auto”, so I’ve no idea if it was a 1.2 or a Twinair.
The 500 is clearly hugely popular and when you see it and then climb in you can see why. It was a smart looking thing in a shade of dark grey metallic and does feel a nice combination of retro and yet funky – outside and inside. . The boot was surprisingly big – accepting the luggage that had required us to fold the Mini rear seat down. The seats were a nice fabric and were very comfortable. Spec included climate which was good but that was about it. Plip to unlock and then I spent a good few seconds looking for the start button, only to realise that you had to actually put the key that folded out of the key fob into a slot on the side of the steering column. How 20th century.
Inside, the concentric circles of the speedo (outer) and tacho (inner) work well, but the orange on black LED secondary instruments (fuel, temp, trip etc) inside the tacho look very 1970’s and are hard to read. So much so that later in the trip, what I thought was a ¼ tank of fuel was in fact the reserve and I got a worrying shock as the low fuel light came on mid motorway thrash.
The car did not have sat-nav and I could not see that it had Apple carplay / Android auto either. It had Fiat's U-Connect service. So having downloaded that to my iPhone I expected to be able to hook up my phone to the car, but failed to do so. Directions and sat-nav for our driving each day therefore consisted of Mrs PG having iPhone google maps open and reading me the directions as we went along.
If you are going to buy a Fiat 500 (or hire one), do not, under any circumstances, get the automatic version. It is an automated manual. What was wrong with this gearbox would require a whole forum of its own. First off, no “P” position – which means that you had to go for N and the handbrake, but as you can’t check it is in neutral like with a manual, you always had the fear that it would leap forward as soon as you took your foot off the brake. When pushed across to Auto, it seemed to take ages to engage a gear. The gearbox’s primary purpose seemed to be to smother any power that the engine may in fact have and yet consume vast quantities of fuel while doing so. Progress was something like – put into Auto; wait till it decided to engage a gear; then apply throttle in increasingly large amounts until the car started to move; just as the car started to move it changed up with an enormous pause of nothingness between the gears; finally engage next gear and off we go again; then panic as a hill appeared and mash throttle into floor; then notice that it has bloody well defaulted into ECO again and switch ECO off that results in a 10% reduction in awfulness but little real improvement; repeat ad nauseam while watching fuel gauge go down. The speed limit on the Spanish motorways is 120 kmh – we struggled to reach that and cruising at it was pretty much impossible unless going downhill. Switching to manual mode didn’t help much as with five gears, big gaps between them and no torque, all changing down really achieved was a huge increase in revs and changing up dropped you into a void of nothingness.
I seem to remember that Mrs Racing had a 500X auto hire car that was pretty hateful and very thirsty and that may well have been the same gearbox.
I also had the misfortune to damage a hire car for the first time in my life. The underground car park at the apartment block was a forest of concrete support pillars and was illuminated – or rather not illuminated - by what felt like a single 40-watt light bulb in one corner. There were separate in and out doors that required different presses on the door remote we had been given. So a combination of low light, trying to manoeuvre to use the in door to get out as I’d opened the wrong one, that fucking gearbox, and that fact that I am so used to reversing bleepers and this car did not have them, meant that I reversed into one of the concrete pillars. Well that and that fact I swear it jumped out at me are all my excuses. But let’s face it, it was just old age and a shit bit of driving really.
The damage was confined to the bumper and a cracked light, so the car was still driveable. On return of the car, I fessed up and as I’d got a good deal on their insurance and we have excess cover, the cost to me should be very small. But one still can’t help feeling a complete tit for reversing into a concrete pillar.
I didn’t take any photos as you all know what a 500 looks like. But I did take a photo of the damage for you all to have good laugh at.
