ZIM IS ME!

Well, what can I say? It didn’t go exactly according to plan.

Here’s the map of the route we (me and my mom) were going to take:

We left monday the 20th at 3 in the morning and all was well. The luggage was in the boot, we were in the seats, the drinks were in the cooler. the cooler plugged into the car cigarette lighter (along with the GPS and Tomtom) and off we went.

All went pretty good, there was no traffic to slow us down, it didn’t rain (which it usually does these days) and within a few hours we had passed Frankfurt. We pulled in to a parking and did our #1s and #2s and ate and drank something and then took a kip for an hour or so.

I did see a few odd things there though… it was 3 women-only park spots:

And someone thought he had arrived at the camp site:

And on we went, set on conquering not only the german Autobahn but also the austrian incarnation. Anyhoo, Germany came and went uneventful, and pretty much the same was the case for Austria. We sped as fast as we could.

And, seemingly in no-time we left Austria and entered Hungary…

…where we had to buy a motorway vignette…

…to join the austrian one on my windshield.

So we past customs and put the pedal to the metal. But not 13km later disaster struck. The engine switched off. The power was gone, the power steering was gone. All I could do was coast down the motorway and into a converted toll booth where they now sold motorway vignettes.

So I called the dutch autoclub who called the Magyar (Hungary) Autoclub to come to my assistence. We waited for about an hour before he showed up. I told him it’s probably the fuel pump that died. He sprayed some oil into the intake and the engine started so he agreed with me.

The problem however was that it was a national hungarian holiday and all the garages are closed. So we’d have to wait until the next morning to get the car fixed. There was no way he could change the pump for us and I couldn’t do it myself because I had no tools with me and I’m an idiot when it comes to these things anyway.

So a rescue vehicle came (over an hour later) loaded up the car and took us to some backwater hamlet of a town called Ottoveny. We loaded the car off the rescue vehicle and parked in a driveway of some hostel.

So we spent the night in Hungary. I set the alarm clock at 8:00. When I woke up I took a shower, got dressed and walked the 300m to the garage. I had noticed a few more people in the hostel but didn’t think much of it. Later on I found out that all the hostel’s guests had broken down. An italian (with the white car in the next photograph) somehow broke the entire fusebox in his car. 2 Hungarians from Germany had a broken vacuum pump. A Bulgarian family lost the servopump of their massive jeep and had been stranded there since Friday. Now, Ottoveny isn’t that big but it’s pretty remote from anywhere when your car’s broken. And all they had to eat in the hostel was goulash or schnitzel. And the only thing to do was sit in the garden or watch tv. Needless to say they were bored out of their minds. The father’s lighter was broken and so he couldn’t light his cigarettes anymore. I always keep a few spare ones in the car, just in case so I gave him one. I suddenly became his best friend.

I went to the garage to check on the progress on the car’s repairs. It took the mechanic 3 hours to change the pump.

On the left is the old one, on the right is the new one.

Thank god I brought a spare otherwise I’d still have been there.

So, just after high noon we jumped into the car and made for Serbia. The roads in Hungary are pretty decent so we could go a bit faster than usual and almost in no time we had reached the Serbian border.

Now my mother didn’t bring her passport, just her european identity card. This was a problem because only EU member countries accept the identity card as a passport. So we had to plonk down €65 for a transit visa (which used to cost €5). So we pulled over at the bank so my mom could go pay for it. I got out of the car, had a smoke and I thought “What’s that gasoline smell?” I looked at the car, I opened the boot, smelled the luggage, nothing. And then I looked at the right side of the car.

Yes, gasoline was dripping from the bottom of the boot! I went ape shit. So I once again called the dutch autoclub informing them that the previous repair was not comepleted correctly because my entire boot (and later on car) stank of gasoline!

Another rescue vehile was dispathed and while we waited for it to arrive I caught the dripping gasoline in an empty water bottle. It was almost full when the dripping stopped and shortly after that we loaded the car onto the rescue vehicle.

It took us for a ride into Serbia and when we finally pulled over after about 45 minutes we found ourselves in an even smaller village than the one in Hungary. The garage wasn’t even a garage. All the repair work was done outside on the dirt road.

After I told the mechanic what the problem was but that I couldn’t fix it myself on account of the aforementioned 2 points we joined forces in getting the car fixed. I knew where the problem was and how to get to it, he had the tools to do it. When we uncovered the fuel pump cap this is what we saw:

Fuel was leaking from the cap. The problem was the incorrect placement of the o-ring, making a seal between the fuel tank and the cap. Instead of putting the o-ring inside the hole, so the fuel tank edge could fit into the profiled o-ring, they put the o-ring on top of the fuel tank, which caused it to leak.

In the mean time my mother was invited to come into their garden and have a few drinks while the men went about the business of fixing the problem.

We were done after about 30 minutes.

And off we went yet again. So we drove and drove (and quite fast I might add) but by the time we reached Beograd (Belgrade) it was already pretty dark and my mom preferred to spend the night in a motel. So we pulled over about an hour later.

The next morning off we went again, making good use of the Coupé’s hill climbing ability. It was amazingly fast up every hill and the new fuel pump seemed to add some economy to its fuel consumption. So we drove and drove and not too long after we came to the fork in the road. Keep left for Thessaloniki (Greece), keep right for Sofia (Bulgaria), so we kept left. An hour later we exited Serbia and queued for entry into the former province of Yugoslavia Makedonia.

My passport was ok, but my mother’s identity card was not. And no, we couldn’t buy a visa on the spot. The custom’s officer instructed us to turn around and go back to Serbia, and then go through Bulgaria to Greece. We were denied entry. And to make things even worse, since we had just left Serbia 30 minutes earlier the €65 visa we bought was null and void. So we had to get another one.

The new route looked like this now:

So first we had to drive abck all the way to Nis, which was about 200km and then take the motor way to Bulgaria.

We had to pay an entrance fee of €2 to even get into the line @ the customs office. Imagine that! And then after we passed customs we had to get another motorway vignette. The thieving bastards. And even worse, gasoline in Bulgaria is around €2 per liter! I was gladded I had flled up just before the border.

So we entered Bulgaria. The motorway was in such a deplorable state that I was comparing it to the dirt road in Serbia where my car got fixed for the 2nd time. And the maximum speed limit in Bulgaria seemed to be 60 km/h, because that’s all we saw, apart from the signs that said 40.

The motorway took us into Sofia, where the roads were even worse. Potholes the size of horses.

We finally crossed the border into Greece around 21:00 on Wednesday, August 22nd. And about an hour later we finally arrived at our destination. Thank the stars.

So, in short: we made it, it wasn’t easy, took us a lot longer than anticipated. The car is fine now though, and tomorrow I’m getting it cleaned to get rid of all the gasoline the carpets have soaked up.

The car’s fixed. There’s still a few things that need to be taken care of but the damage as shown earlier is fixed. Took slightly over a week which was a bit nerve wrecking but I picked up the car on Friday and already put a few km on it driving back from the garage and driving around these days, just because I missed the car and because I love driving around in it.

I’ll be posting irregularly when I’m Greece, but then again, I post irregularly here as well. No difference there then.

We’ll be, as usually, staying in Nea Potidea.

It’s located on the south side of the canal that cuts the peninsula off from the mainland, which you can see here.

More of that back log:

I’ve been neglecting this category a bit. So here’s the back log:

Fourtitude writes:

Pure Light Technology – The First All-LED Headlight in the World

Since 1992, red LEDs have been used increasingly for high-level brake lights, as well for tail lights and regular brake lights. Audi became the first manufacturer to feature peripheral white LEDs as daytime running lights, first on the Audi A8 W12 in 2004 and then on the Audi S6, Audi R8 and Audi A5/S5 from 2006.

Innovations in the field of lighting technology are often based on the development of new light sources. Halogen bulbs were followed by xenon headlights, which were subsequently expanded to include cornering and static turning lights. Thanks to the rapid advances being made in LED technology, it will soon be possible to reproduce the same functions with these semiconductor elements too.

Each light unit consists of a housing, a chip or chip array, a circuit board and a heat sink. Electric ventilators ensure effective heat dissipation and also defrost the headlight units.

The LED headlight that will in future be available as an option for the Audi R8 is made up of the following components: LED dipped beam headlights as the primary function. Here, basic light distribution is taken care of by LED arrays, each consisting of four chips, which shine out of free-form reflectors. A further three two-chip LED arrays for light in the region of the light-dark boundary and for the headlight range are located behind the lens. Directly adjacent to this is the main beam headlight comprising one four-chip LED array inside each of the two reflector shells. The 24 white LEDs for the daytime running lights are distinctively positioned along the bottom edge of the headlight unit, giving it a three-dimensional and sophisticated appearance.

The turn signal with its eight yellow high-brightness LEDs is placed on the top edge of the headlight unit pointing towards the single-frame grille, where it combines with the strip of LED daytime running lights to form a frame around the headlight.

LED technology in Audi concept studies:
As long ago as the start of 2003 that Audi first unveiled an operational, slat-shaped LED fog light in its Pikes Peak show car at the Detroit Motor Show. An initial concept for an all-LED headlight was presented in the Audi Nuvolari quattro at the Geneva Motor Show in that same year, and in September the Le Mans quattro turned up on the eve of the Frankfurt Motor Show with LED headlights. The dipped beam light distribution already met the statutory requirements at this point. A fully functional LED headlight with lenses made from aluminium tools was featured on the allroad quattro concept car back in 2005. The Shooting Brake concept car then showcased an LED headlight with a bionic design, whose form resembled a pine cone. This same basic idea has now been transferred to the new series-production solution for the R8. The Audi Q7 V12 TDI (Detroit 2007) has already provided a preview of the next generation.

Audi Technology ABC
LED: light-emitting diode. Semiconductor light source which emits cold light at low voltages of 3 to 4 volts. The revolutionary new LED arrays in the Audi headlight produce a luminous flux of 400 lumen at a current strength of 1 A. Such luminous efficiency is unprecedented for LEDs.

Lumen: the unit of luminous flux. Describes the luminous power emitted by a light source.
Audi is now premiering the first and only headlight unit in the world to deploy LEDs for all of the front lighting functions. Apart from the daytime running lights, these functions comprise the turn signals and the dipped beam and main beam headlights. Various groups of LEDs, known as arrays, produce the correct light distribution and brightness. Each headlight unit has a total of 54 LED light sources.

The outstanding benefits of LED technology include its low energy consumption (50 watts for the dipped beam headlights, 6 watts for the daytime running lights), a colour that is similar to daylight for enhanced contrast and more pleasant visual perception, the non-wearing design, lower voltage requirements, compact dimensions and the increased freedom of design.

A special permit from the EU has paved the way for incorporating front-lighting LED technology into series production ahead of schedule. This is because the corresponding EU regulation is not expected to come into force before 2008. Audi is a founding member of the working party that was set up in 2003 to bring about speedy approval for advanced and powerful lighting technology.

Source

Well, went by the garage today. to my amasement the car’s almost finished already. They just need to send it out for paint and refit bumper and headlight. These guys are really amazing.

Here’s a few pics from the work shop:

The car’s going to be ready for pickup on Wednesday or Thursday. This means that my trip to Greece will suffer no delays, so I am quite pleased.

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.

It’s funny that a lot of complaints about the chinese automobiles seem justified, but then even worse cars get the go ahead.

You might recall the Jiangling Landwind and that it failed its crash test:

Now earlier the Chery Windcloud was given the go ahead. Some people wonder why:

As you can clearly see the entire front section of the car is decimated, including the driver’s seat. How is that any safer than the landwind where the driver doesn’t get flattened but just decapitated?

I just talked to the damage expert. According to him the damage to my car renders it a totall loss. Damages are around €3000, and according to mister Expert this exceeds the car’s value, despite it being the luxury model (2.8 liter V6, leather interior, climate control and quattro drive) and you can’t find anyone like it for less than €6000.

So now he’s checking his lists and what not. More to follow.

Part 1 is here.
Part 3 is here.