Caught In The Whirlwind
Posts tagged car
Daaaaaaah!
Apr 17th 2009
The car airbag saga continues!
I went down to the dealership yesterday morning to get my front crash zone sensor replaced on my Rogue and, as it turns out that wasn't the problem to begin with. I don't blame the techs or anything as Nissan has a procedure that needs to be followed regarding waranty replacements of things and all they can really do is follow what the service manual tells them to do. But the upshot is I need to go back next week when another part arrives and hopefully that fixes the issue.
They did adjust the steering wheel seal though. And confirmed that the tread on my tires is still ok, even though they gave it a look over last week when I brought it in to be checked out.
So anyway…another week without airbags. This week has been particularly long and stressful which is why I'm looking forward to the weekend so much.
There's a wine tasting and chocolate festival going down at the Utica Aud which my friends and I will be attending. It's been a while since we've gotten to do wine tasting so hopefully we'll find something new and tasty to enjoy while we're out there.
Why Won't You Open?!?
Nov 18th 2008
I had a little bit of car related difficulty today. When I went home for lunch I tried to open my car door and it wouldn't open. After double checking to see if it was locked (it wasn't) I noticed that the handle was a little looser than it should be. Bah!
I think it's probably because it got really cold here for the first time this year. Something probably couldn't take it and broke. So I have an appointment tomorrow morning to take my car in to the dealer so they can look at it. I *think* this would be a waranty repair because it's not like I did anything to it except for opening and closing the door normally. And if it's not I'm going to argue with them about it because it should be… I mean, the car is a year old at this point. the door handle should be in working condition!
This comes on the heels of taking it into the body shop to have some cosmetic work done. I had a bit of a run-in with a dumpster while backing out of a parking space a couple weeks ago. It wasn't huge, but there was a dent and the paint was broken, so I had to go fix it otherwise it would have rusted out. I just got it back from the shop on friday and the repair job came out really nice. It's like a brand new car again, so I'm being all protective of it again, even though there's a few paint chips here and there in a couple places. Darn cheap paint job…
Vox Hunt: The Key Thing
Apr 11th 2008
Show us a key.
Here's the key to my 2008 Nissan Rogue. It's an intellikey, so I don't need to actually physically touch it in order to use it. There's a button on the door that unlocks the car if the key is within 3 feet of it when it's pushed. It also won't start unless there's a key inside the vehicle but once there is one, it starts by just turning a knob thingy.
Also a major plus is the fact that it detects when the key is in the car with the doors locked and the engine off without any people in there and it immediately unlocks the doors and throws a beeping hissy fit. It's physically impossible to lock my keys in my car now.
I love this thing. It sounds so small, but it's one of the things that makes me really love my Rogue.
Just Tying Things Up
Jan 5th 2008
So there's a couple of loose threads that I've left hanging over the past week or so. Specifically the last paragraph in this post. I figured I should post an update because both of those have been resolved.
My car went into the dealer Wednesday night and came back to me on Thursday with working airbags, which is a giant plus in my book. Hopefully it was just an isolated thing and It's not going to keep being a problem…We shall see. They also fixed the squeak from the center console, but I have a feeling it will be back because of reports from various internet sources. On the plus side there, somebody posted that you can do a homemade fix by prying the part off and using some felt on the clips that hold it down to get rid of the noise which seems to take care of it for good.
For school, I was able to get into contact with the secretary which allowed me to register for my final project thingy. So I think we're good there. Something has got to come up though, because with my luck, there's no way I'll be able to graduate this semester. No way at all.
It's Freaking COLD Out
Jan 3rd 2008
I thought yesterday was pretty cold at around 10F getting down to around 1F by the end of the day. But that was before I woke up this morning and saw that the temperature was -5F. Brrrr.
At least I didn't have to use my own car to get to work this morning. As I've mentioned before, my car developed an issue with the airbag light coming on and the parts came in to fix it earlier this week, so I had dropped it off at the dealer last night for service. My mom picked me up to take me to work this morning and her car is in a garage, and therefore not totally cold like my car would have been. So that worked out all right. Hopefully my car returns to me all better tonight though.
Car Picture Post!
Nov 13th 2007
I had promised this for a week now, but I was finally able to take some pictures of my Rogue for those who were interested. Beware…many pictures ahead.
There's the overview of all the large pictures…now I've just got small stuff left to show.
There's a closeup of the center console with the stereo system and such. It's playing XM Radio at the moment, Iron Maiden happened to be on. The cable is connected to the Aux input jack and the other end is usually hooked in to my iPod.
It's a 6 CD changer that supports MP3 CDs as well. Another cool surprise is that it supports the display of CD Text on the few discs that have it, so it can display artist/song name information on CDs.
The circle looking things above the radio are the air vents in the closed position, which you probably already guessed but I needed some text to fill in the rest of this picture.
Here's the steering wheel and gauges and such. The top two buttons on the left hand side under the up and down toggle thing control the bluetooth phone system so I can make and pick up calls while driving. The next button down is volume control, and the next is source selection for the radio. The right hand side is the cruise control buttons.
The two paddles that are to the left and the right on the inside of the wheel are paddle shifters used when I want to put the car into manual transmission mode, useful for getting more acceleration if I'm forced to slow down/stop on a hill. I just hit one of those and it switches to either the next highest/lowest gear from the one that I'd be running in if I switched to Manual mode using the shift lever.
The orange circle thing is a drive computer and it displays my gas gauge, temperature readings as well as the odometer/trip odometer/mile to go until I run out of gas, how my gas mileage is doing, etc. All the warning lights are on because I turned the ignition without turning on the engine…so never mind those
Now for the back end. Not much to say here except that I love the pop up storage organizer thingy that's shown in the top picture. There's compartments with nets between them so things don't move around. Great for carrying grocery bags around.
The storage space is pretty decently sized and a lot larger than it looks from the outside. I can easily carry laundry and stuff back there without any problems.
I also had taken a picture of the key, but it doesn't look like that made it up to Flickr so I won't be able to post that. which means I'll just throw out a random picture of the door handle showing the button that you can hit to unlock the door when the key is within about 3 feet of the door.
Still very happy with it. The only annoying thing is that I'm still searching around for a good place to stick my iPod.
Very Busy…
Nov 8th 2007
It's been a busy couple days so I haven't had time to post much. I've been running around to school and busy writing papers for my World Religion class, trying to finish Software Engineering assignments that I can see taking up way too much of my time in the near future. Tonight is the first chance I've had to really relax since Monday night. A friend of mine is coming over to hang out for a while.
The Software Engineering thing is worthy of a little rant. The professor for this course is a little Indian guy. At least I think he's from India. He speaks with a very heavy accent and says an awful lot of "Umm…ahhh…err" when he's talking. He also tries to get lecture done as fast as possible. I think I've mentioned this before, but for the past couple weeks we've been getting out of class after about 30-40 minutes of lecture. Not that I'm complaining of course…but he's practically out the door before the students realize the class is over.
He's also incredibly annoying when it comes to homework assignments. They have to be named specifically, submitted in a specific way and if one thing is done wrong in regards to how the assignment was submitted, even if it's minor, he won't grade the assignment, period. He is so incredibly annoying with this. He rejected one of our assignments becasue it wasn't in a folder on the cd. So make a folder and stick it in there! Ughh. I've had just about as much as I can stand from this guy.
A quick car update: Still loving it. The stereo system, as I think I've mentioned before, is all kinds of awesome and I'm getting a handle on how it drives. It's a bit bigger than my Civic and I'm sitting higher up, so I'm still getting the feel of how I need to be situated when I park, but I'm getting a lot better at it now. Still no pictures since I haven't had time and it's dark out at night now due to daylight savings time. I'll probably post some up on the weekend.
At the moment I'm trying to figure out what the best way to mount my iPod is. The cupholder configuration isn't quite as useful for this purpose as it was in my Civic. For now I'm just happy with CDs though. All in all, very happy with my choice. Very happy.
Nissan Rogue: First Impressions
Nov 6th 2007
Last night I went out and picked up my new Nissan Rogue. It started early when the insurance company called and confirmed adding it to my policy. So I was glad to have that potential snag taken care of early on. Then we (we being my mom and I) went over to the bank where I had my Civic's loan at to pay off the final payment. So for a grand total of 5 hours, I was the owner of a totally paid off vehicle.
We headed out to the dealer right after work (and man, was that a long day) to begin the process of signing stuff. Unfortunately, the address on my drivers license is wrong (which I noticed Saturday), so a lot of the documents had the wrong address on it. I believe we got that all corrected and I need to go visit the happy fun DMV in order to get it changed on my license. Sigh.
Anyway, the car is great. I'm 100% satisfied right now. It drives well, very smooth ride. The road noise is really quiet as well. I'll probably post more later (with pictures) but just a couple things I want to mention. The stereo is all kinds of awesomeness. Very good sound quality which was something I was looking for since I tend to do a lot of music listening in the car.
Also, the bluetooth headset system works really, really well. I did some testing of it last night. Whenever I get into my Rogue and turn the car on, my blackberry automatically hooks up with the car. If someone calls the radio/cd stops playing and the stereo "rings". I hit a button on the steering wheel to answer and all the sound comes through the car speakers and I can just talk. Apparently it sounds really good from the other end too. I can also call people using voice commands.
There will be more later…
Tilty Cities Here I Come!
Nov 3rd 2007
I'm not sure if I had mentioned this on here previously, but I've been in the market for a new car. My Civic is pretty much paid off (going to the bank tomorrow to make the final payment) and I'm looking for something that's better in the winter since in this area we can get a lot of snow and ice. Little Honda Civics aren't exactly the best vehicle for the snow.
So I was looking for something in the crossover class of vehicle. Something small with AWD or 4WD. Up until I started looking around, the CR-V was my first option, but I really don't like the new style and after driving one of my parent's CR-V's, my legs bumped on the dashboard which became somewhat painful after a while. So I started looking around and came upon the Nissan Rogue. I fell in love almost immediately. It had everything I was looking for, looked good and as a bonus, had more goodies included than the CR-V did for less money.
This morning I went out with my Mom (since I really suck at buying cars and negotiating pretty much anything) to the local Nissan dealer to take one for a test drive and get some numbers. About 2-3 hours later I'm walking out of there with a brand new 2008 Nissan Rogue SL, in Indigo Blue.
The test drive sealed the deal. It just drives so smoothly and…well, I could gush on about it all day, but I don't think I will. One of the coolest parts of the Rogue model I'm getting is the key. It's not a traditional key, exactly. It's an intelligent key. Basically, any time the key is within 3 feet of any of the car doors, I (or anybody else) can press a button on the door handle to unlock the door. You also start the car without using the key. As long as the key is inside the car, you can start it. It's also impossible to lock your key in your car because the car detects if the key is inside and beeps very loudly at you if you try to lock the doors.
There's just too many cool features and such to talk about, from the transmission (CVT, so there's no gear shifting unless I want to because there's a manual gear shift mode too) to the bluetooth phone system that will hook in with my blackberry to do handsfree phone calls…
I'm very happy at the moment. As for why I'm going to go to tilty cities now…if you haven't seen the rogue commercial on TV, just hit play below:
Busy Busy Weekend
Oct 27th 2007
Well after the whole lot of nothing that was last week, this weekend is going to be an awful lot of activity. First up today I'm going over to my friends place to watch some Anime/Mystery Science Theater/Other movie type stuff which will be nice since I haven't really had a chance to relax recently.
Tomorrow though is the big activity day. Guitar Hero III is finally coming out, so obviously, I need to go pick up my pre-ordered copy from Best Buy tomorrow morning. Then back home to rock out before heading out to Albany with my parents to go see the Blue Man Group perform in Albany. October is the month of concerts.
In other news, I'm considering trading in my car for something that doesn't totally suck in the winter. Still thinking on the financial type stuff that's going to be involved in that though so that may or may not happen depending on certain other factors. We shall see. I'm probably going over to a few dealerships next weekend to check things out and get a feel for about how much this is going to run me. I'm almost totally done paying of my current car though, which is part of what brought this about.
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