Holden VF Commodore Development and Testing

A tribute to the engineers. They have spent the last 10 years developing this car, having poured so much of their talent and passion into the car. Their hard work has paid off, this is the most high-tech, most appealing and dare I say it, the best Commodore yet.

Now Some Photos From The Development Journey

The New Holden VF Commodore

The 2013 VF model line-up heralds the biggest update to Holden’s enduring Commodore sedan, Sportwagon, Ute and Caprice range since VE and WM were introduced in 2006.

Holden has redefined Australia’s favourite home-grown family car with cutting-edge technology across all models, new levels of luxury and refinement, fresh exterior styling and completely revised interior design. Every model in the VF Commodore and WN Caprice range benefits from improved fuel economy thanks to a combination of significant mass reduction, multiple aerodynamic enhancements, updated powertrain calibrations and new electric power steering system.

Holden’s entry level Evoke sedan with frugal 3.0 litre SIDI V6 now achieves fuel economy of 8.3 litres per 100 kilometres, a 6.7 per cent improvement over the model it replaces. But perhaps the most significant fuel economy improvements are reserved for models powered by Holden’s 3.6 litre SIDI V6, which are now up to 8.2 per cent more efficient. Meanwhile, all VF luxury and performance models powered by Holden’s Gen IV V8 now achieve fuel economy under 12.0 litres per 100 km in the official ADR81/02 test.

Commodore is also safer than ever before. Every safety metric across the VF range has been analysed and upgraded. Already boasting world-class safety credentials, VF focuses on further progressing occupant protection, particularly in the areas of child passenger safety and side impact performance, and the introduction of pedestrian protection measures. 

Also forming part of Commodore’s innovative safety package are advanced technology features such as Auto Park Assist, Lane Departure Warning, Forward Collision Alert, Blind Spot Alert, Reverse Traffic Alert and colour Head-up Display. A reverse camera and front and rear parking sensors are standard on every single VF model – even VF Ute. Due to all of these new safety features, the new Commodore will be even cheaper to insure when you approach insurance providers.

New Global A electrical architecture also enables a world of new technology features making Commodore the most technically advanced vehicle ever designed, built and engineered in Australia. VF introduces the innovative MyLink entertainment system on every model, complete with eight-inch colour touch screen, embedded technology including voice recognition and Siri Eyes Free integration, full iPod integration with Gracenote® technology and built-in apps like Pandora® and Stitcher SmartRadioTM.

Commodore’s ground-breaking technology extends to other technical innovations that enhance the way Commodore drives, such as electric park brake, Hill Start Assist, Hill Hold and Trailer Sway Control. Backed up with a lighter, more agile chassis for confident and predictable handling, VF elevates Commodore’s traditional fun-to-drive characteristics to sophisticated new levels.

Cutting edge technology is applied to the way Commodore is constructed, with Holden and local suppliers pioneering sophisticated new hot metal stamping techniques and GM’s first mainstream application of aluminium body panels, representing a genuine first for the Australia automotive

manufacturing industry. Commodore’s new aluminium bonnet, boot lid, suspension components and instrument panel beam contribute to impressive mass reductions and underpin VF overall quality and refinement. 

Puzzle the Prof: Rick Bass's "The Hermit's Story"

In the dwindling days of Short Story Month and my “Puzzle the Prof” contest for 2013 , Richard Pangburn has asked my opinion of Rick Bass’s “The Hermit’s Story.”  I am happy to oblige, for I like the story very much.  For those who have not read it, let me provide a brief summary before I comment on it.

“The Hermit’s Story,” a magical tale about the entry into an alternate reality, begins with a sort of poetic overture about the blue color of an ice storm.  The narrator and his wife have gone to the home of Ann and Roger for Thanksgiving dinner.  The power is out, and after the two couples eat pie and drink wine before a roaring fire, Ann tells a story about an experience she had twenty years before up in Saskatchewan with a man named Gray Owl who hired Ann to train six German shorthair pointers.

After Ann has trained the dogs all summer and into the fall, she takes them back to Gray Owl to show him how to continue to work them.  She and Gray Owl take the dogs out into the snow, and Ann uses live quail to show Gray Owl how the dogs will follow the birds and point them.  They work the dogs for a week until they get lost in a heavy snowstorm, drifting away from their home area by as much as ten miles.  When they come to a frozen lake and Gray Owl walks out on its surface and kicks at it to find some water for the dogs, he abruptly disappears below the ice.

Ann decides to go into the water after Gray Owl, for even if he is already drowned, he has their tent and emergency rations.  However, when she crawls out on the ice and peers down into the hole where Gray Owl disappeared, she sees standing him below waving at her.  When he helps her down, he says that what has happened is that a cold snap in October has frozen a skin of ice over the shallow lake and then a snowfall insulated it.  When the lake drained in the winter, the ice on top remained.  Ann goes back to the shore and hands the dogs down into the warmth created by the enclosed space beneath the ice.

The world under the ice is a magical one, the air unlike anything they have ever breathed before. The cold air from the hole they made meets with the warm air from the earth beneath the lake to create breezes.   Although the ice above them contracts and groans, they feel they are safe beneath a sea watching waves of starlight sweep across their hiding place.  When they build a fire from cattails, small pockets of swamp gas ignite with explosions of brilliance.

The two head for what they hope is the southern shore, the dogs chasing and pointing snipe and other birds.  They finally reach the other shore and walk south for a half a day until they reach their truck.  That night they are back at Gray Owl’s cabin, and by the next night Ann is home again. The story ends with the narrator considering that Ann is the only one who carries the memory of that underworld passage.  He thinks that it perhaps gave her a model for what things are like for her dogs when they are hunting and enter a zone where the essences of things. 

When  “The Hermit’s Story,” appeared in the 1999 Best American Short Stories collection, Rick Bass said in his contributor’s note that as soon as he heard about a frozen lake with no water in it, he knew he wanted to write a story about that.  Because he was trying to train two bird dogs at the time, he made up a bird-dog trainer as a sort of wish fulfillment and had her go up to Canada and fall into such a lake.

Such an event alone, as dramatically potential as it might be, does not, of course, make a story.   What makes the event a story is Bass’s exploration of the symbolic significance of the magical world into which the characters enter.  That magical world is presaged even before they break through the ice with the blue world of the ice storm described by the narrator in the opening paragraphs in which the blue is like a scent trapped in the ice.  It is further emphasized by the fact that the storm has knocked out the electricity, creating a world of darkness.  In the midst of this cold, blue, dark world, the two couples sit before a fire, creating the classic setting for a story to be told.

When Ann and Gray Wolf work the dogs in the snow of Saskatchewan, they travel across snowy hills, the sky the color of snow so that it seems they are moving in a dream.  Except for the rasp of the snowshoes and the pull of gravity, they might believe they had ascended into a sky-place where the entire world was snow.  All this is preparation for their descent into the improbable, magical world underneath the frozen lake.  When they look up, the ice is clear, and they can see stars as if they were up there among them or else as if the stars were embedded in the ice.

The closest the narrator can come to articulating the meaning of the experience is to suggest that it perhaps was a zone where the appearances of things disappeared, where surfaces faded away and instead their very essence was “revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.”  Much like a magical journey in a fairy tale, the experience under the ice is a journey into a realm of dream and desire, which suggests that the world is a much more magical and mysterious place than we usually think.

Style is especially important to this story, for without Bass’s poetic descriptions, his rhythmic prose, and his suggestions about the mythic significance of the experience it would be merely an interesting anecdote, depending solely on the unusual nature of the frozen empty lake.  The opening paragraph, by repeating the reference to the color blue and the fictional metaphoric phrase “as if,” sets up the entry into the fairy tale world.  This “as if” metaphoric quality also is used to refer to Ann’s transformation of the dogs from wild and unruly pups into well-trained hunting dogs, “as if” they are rough blocks of stone with their internal form existing already, waiting to be chiseled free.  If the training is neglected, they have a tendency to revert to their old selves, “as if” the dogs’ greatness can disappear back into the stone.

Although often metaphoric, Bass’s style is not flowery, but rather simple and straightforward.  He does not tell the story in Ann’s words, but rather has the narrator retell it, thus filtering the story through two points of view.  Neither Ann nor Gray Owl talk much during their experience, and when they do it is in the simple straightforward language of people reduced to basic states.  In telling Ann about the lake, he says “It’s not really a phenomenon; it’s just what happens.”  And when she asks if he knew it would be like this, he says, “No.  I was looking for water.  I just got lucky.”  Although there is no indication, other than his name, that Gray Owl is Native American, his dialogue reflects the common literary convention of having Native Americans speak in short declarative sentences. 

Bass, a naturalist who has written nonfiction books about the Yaak Valley in Montana, also devotes much of the story to his fascination with the natural world of, as well as the dogs and the birds they hunt.  For example, when the birds flush out snipe from the cattails underneath the ice, Bass spends at least two pages pondering the presence of the birds, wondering if they had been unable to migrate because of injuries or a genetic absence. 

With the curiosity of the naturalist, he wonders if the snipe had tried to carve out new ways of being in the stark and severe landscape, holding on until the spring would come like green fire.  If the snipe survived, the narrator reckons, they would be among the first to see the spring; they would think that the torches of Ann and Gray Owl were merely one of winter’s dreams.

The fairy-tale, folklore nature of the story persists throughout, with the narrator considering at the end that Ann holds on to her experience as one might hold on to a valuable gem found while out for a walk and thus containing some great magic or strength.

Puzzle the Prof: A Few Words about Annie Proulx's Stories, especially "The Great Divide"

      For my “Puzzle the Prof” contest, I received a request to talk a bit about Annie Proulx’s story “The Great Divide” from her 2008 collection Fine Just the Way It Is.  However, for some reason, this “comment” disappeared from my blog.  I cannot remember who sent the request, but I do recall that the sender liked the story very much and wondered what I thought about it.  Before I comment on the story, let me put it in context.

     Proulx bookends the stories in the third volume of her “Wyoming Stories” series. Fine Just the Way It Is, by citing the book’s title in the first and last tale, thus locating them in time and space. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity.  Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.”

      In her powerful 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, one of Annie Proulx’s narrators says ominously, “Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”   Well, if that book painted the desperate side of rural big sky life, then her second collection, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, is largely a light-hearted companion volume.

        Made up of six very brief tall-tales and five longer stories, Bad Dirt (which refers to rough country roads) is, by and large, a snort-out-loud hoot.  For example, in “The Wamsutter Wolf,” Buddy Millar moves right next door to Cheri, an overweight hellcat from high school, and the bully who once broke his nose.  Well, things just go from bad to worse, culminating with Cheri sneaking over to Buddy’s trailer and climbing into bed, late night runs to the emergency room, fear of jealous reprisals, guns at the ready, and so on and so on.  Great fun.

        In the third volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, although Proulx depicts a Wyoming that many of the natives like just the way it is, the way it was, and often still is, is often unforgiving and vicious.  The five strongest pieces are perhaps better characterized by the title of the final story, “Tits-up in a Ditch,” which refers to a cow that tried to climb up a deep slope and slid back down in the ditch and died.

         Whether the story takes place in the late 19^th century or the early 21^st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you.  In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” one of my favorites, Archie and Rose try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.

            In “Testimony of the Monkey,” a silly argument over whether to wash the lettuce splits up Marc and Catlin, two rugged outdoors enthusiasts.  When in anger and spite, she takes an ill-advised trip into harsh territory alone and catches her foot in the crevice of a rock, the rest of the story, which alternates between her painful efforts to free herself and her hallucinations about rescue, is predictable, but none the less agonizing.

            Proulx indulges herself in this third collection in a couple of playful fables about the devil in “I’ve Always Loved This Place” and “Swamp Mischief” and a couple of more serious legends about a Bermuda Triangle sagebrush and an early Indian buffalo hunt in “The Sagebrush Kid” and  “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl.”

However, the most powerful stories are those that reverberate on the final page of the collection when Dakota Lester tells the parents of her husband, who has lost both legs and half his face in Iraq, “Sash is tits up in a ditch.”  And so are they all in this scrupulously written Annie Proulx collection.

“The Great Divide” covers a twenty-year period—from 1920 until 1940—in the life of Hi Alcorn and his wife Helen, and thus has the temporal “feel” of a novel, albeit recounted within a brief span of twenty-five narrative pages. The story is located in the area of Wyoming where the Continental Divide—that line that separates where water flows either West toward the Pacific or East toward the Atlantic—is located. If you drive on Interstate 80 through Wyoming, you will cross the Great Divide twice—first about 5 and a half miles west of Rawlins, Wyoming and then again about 58 miles west of Rawlins.

The young husband Hi Alcorn has succumbed to the sales pitch of a man named Antip Bewley who is selling plots for a so-called colony he has named The Great Divide.  Helen met Hi only a few months after he had returned from The Great War.  He is nine years older than Helen, who is nineteen, and has suffered from mustard gas and a wound in his leg, leaving him with a limp.

Failing in several attempts to make a go of it, Hi decides to throw in with Helen’s brother-in-law, Fenk, capturing wild horses, but gives it up when he cannot tolerate the fact that the horses are sold for pet food.  He gets work in the mines in Rock Springs, but his son gets polio from the school children in the town and has to be put in an iron lung.

By 1940, Hi feels the pull of the wild desert and takes up with Fenk again catching wild horses.  The story comes to a rapid close when Hi is pulled off his horse and breaks his leg, which necessitates his being taken into town to a hospital.  When the doctor examines him, he discovers that the kick of the horse has caused a blood clot that has killed him.  The story ends when Fenk goes to tell Helen:

Her mind snarled like a box of discarded fiddle strings.  Civilization fell away and the primordial communication of tensed muscle, ragged breath, the heaving gullet and bent fingers spoke where language failed.  She knew only what Fenk had not yet said and didn’t need to say. And shut the door in his face.

I can understand the appeal of this story’s straightforward narrative flow and language style.  However, it seems to me that a summary of the story pretty much sums it up.  Compared to what I think are more stylistically and thematically complex stories, such as “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and “Tits Up in a Ditch,” I find it novelistically ordinary and flat.  It has the classic simplicity of a young couple trying to make it during the Depression in the rough world of rural Wyoming, but for me it lacks the complexity of other stories in the collection.

Puzzle the Prof: The Voice of Edward P. Jones's Stories

In response to my “Puzzle the Prof” contest, Keith Hood writes that he would like to hear what I have to say about Edward P. Jones, noting that I cited Jones’s Aunt Hagar’s Childrenas one of my favorite collections of the twenty-first century so far and his story “Marie” as one of the 200 stories from Boccaccio to the twenty-first century that I most admire.  Keith quotes from Garth Risk Hallberg’s review of All Aunt Hagar’s Children about Jones’s “omniscient voice, detached yet curiously intimate, plainspoken, quiet,” adding that the voice “wraps itself around characters, good guys, bad guys, men, women, and children, and loves those characters, and makes them live."

Indeed, I have admired Jones’ stories since the publication in 1992 of his first collection Lost in the City.  Let me comment briefly on that first collection before taking a look at “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children.

Convinced that most readers had only a narrow idea of what Washington D.C. was like, because they were familiar with it only through novels that dealt with downtown power, and politics, Edward Jones has said that in his first book he wanted to create a collection of stories that, like James Joyce’s Dubliners focuses on ordinary people in various African American D.C. neighborhoods.  Lost In The City, published in 1992, was short listed for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Jones has said that he spent the next 10 years thinking about a story of black ex-slaves, who became slaveholders themselves.  The result was The Known World, his first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and the Lannan Literary Award. The following year, Jones won the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” All Aunt Hagar's Children, a second collection of short stories, several of which featured characters introduced in Lost in the City, was published in 2006, and was short listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Widely praised by reviewers and critics, Jones represents a new wave of African American writers who write about individuals rather than about race and about the personal rather than the political.

The fourteen stories in Lost in the City, patterned loosely after Joyce’s Dubliners, are about people of various ages who face challenges of growing up, surviving, and succeeding in African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Some of the stories are brief lyrical pieces in which characters face loneliness and loss.  For example, “Lost in the City” is about Lydia Walsh who, while at a hotel with a man, receives a call that her mother has died in the hospital.  She does a line of coke and calls a cab, telling the driver to get her lost in the city so she can postpone accepting her mother’s death.

Strength of character in the face of disappointment and disillusionment is the motivating force of Jones’s stories. Typical of his proud and capable characters is the young mother in “The First Day,” a brief lyrical piece about a woman taking her daughter to her first day of school.  The story is told in first person by the child, who is learning things about her mother, for example that the higher up on the scale of respectability someone is, the less her mother will let them push her around. 

The strongest character in Jones’s collection is eighty-six year-old Marie Delaveaux, living alone on social security. When she is condescended to and ignored by a young employee at the social security office, she slaps the girl.  Two weeks late, a young university student comes to interview her for an oral history project.  When he sends her copies of the tapes, she plays them and then puts them away, saying she will never listen to them again, even though they recount a history of hardship and courage.

The central themes of Jones’s stories are dependant on the trials, challenges, and triumphs of his characters.  When Lost in the City was first published, many critics noticed immediately that although all the characters were African American, the stories did not focus directly on racial prejudice or adversity resulting directly from white oppression.  In fact, there are very few references to color in any of the stories.  Instead of being about characters suffering as a result of their race, the stories were about characters who just happened to be black, facing the problems of living with very little money in small neighborhoods in a large American city. 

This does not mean that the situations the characters confront have nothing to do with their color.  It does mean, however, that Jones writes stories that are not narrowly limited to issues of race.  If there is a central theme, it comes from a warning that an old man tells his five-year-old grandson:  “Don’t get lost in the city.”  This is repeated in a variation in another story when a father warns, “Never get lost in white folks’ neighborhood,” and echoed when the young woman in the title story tells a cab driver to get her “lost in the city.”  Finding one’s way in the city by identifying with one’s neighborhood is the driving force of many of Jones’s stories.

“All Aunt Hagar’s children” is a phrase Jones says that his mother often used to refer to black people.  He originally planned to use the phrase as the title of his novel, which he finally decided to call The Known World.  Hagar was the female servant of Sarah in the Old Testament, a kind of iconic mother figure for African-Americans. W. C. Handy once wrote a song called “Aunt Hager’s Blues.” You can hear Louis Armstrong play and sing it on YouTube.

“In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, may be a fairly representative example of the “voice” that Keith Fort refers to.  It’s also an example of how Jones echoes characters in his first collection by referring to them in the second collection.  A minor character, Miles Patterson, in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” in Lost in the City shows up in “In the Blink of God’s Eye” as the baby that Ruth Patterson finds hanging from a tree in Washington, D. C. “So this was Washington,” the voice says, “where they hung babies in night trees.” 

The baby hanging in the tree may be an allusion to the famous 1930s song, “Strange Fruit,” written as a poem by a Jewish high school teacher after seeing a photo of two lynched African Americans, and then made famous as a song by Billie Holiday.

Darryl Pinckney, in his March 29, 2007 review of All Aunt Hagar’s Children in The New York Review of Books, says that Jones’ attitude toward his characters has much to do with what he calls “the gentle caressing tone” of the stories in his second collection.  Pinckney says that Jones is the “shepherd of his invented world; protective toward his flock, his people.” He calls Jones is an “historical lyricist,” using language to shield and elevate his characters.

Whether you call it “voice, style, or tone,” the magic of a writer’s language to create a certain musical rhythm is difficult to describe, even more difficult to account for how language can “elevate” characters.  The two central characters in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the young newlyweds, Ruth and Aubrey Patterson, are indeed described in something other than a realistic or naturalistic way, and the result of the lyrical, folklorish word choice and rhythm of the language does indeed make them seem characters in a traditional folklore tale rather than characters in a realistic story.

The story takes place in 1901, just after Ruth and Aubrey have gotten married and moved from Virginia to Washington, D.C.  It opens with Ruth “hearing” the old song of the night the way she did in Virginia and “ever mindful of the wolves, would take their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey’s still-hairless white face and descend to the porch.” The verb “descend,” and the reference to wolves and the song of the night prepare the reader for Ruth’s seeing in the glow of a gaslight a “bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple tree that hadn’t borne fruit in more than ten years.”  The appearance of the bundle is strange enough to make her fear something “terrible and canine” to burst from it and to create a supernatural aura around the experience:

 An invisible hand locked about her mouth and halted the cry she wanted to give the world.  A wind came up and played with her coat, her nightgown, tapped her ankles and hands, then went over and nudged the bundle so that it moved an inch or so to the left, an inch or so to the right.

 The simple device of repeating the phrase an inch of so to the left, an inch or so to the right adds to the sense of an otherworldly moment.  The ballad-like nature of the story is echoed throughout.  For example, when Ruth learns that Aubrey has decided to move to Washington, she does not want to leave her generations of family in Virginia, but knows she is a married woman pledged to her husband.  “And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.”  In one of the few references to race in the story, the Voice situates the couple in the folklorish world of their heritage: 

They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with—the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.

However, as the book title reference to the Old Testament slave Hagar suggests, Jones locates their heritage even more primally in the Judeo-Christian folklore of the origins of human life itself.  The sermon the preacher gives after coming back from burying his mother emphasizes the storytelling rhythm at the heart of “”In the Blink of God’s Eye”:  “I’m next in that long death line that started with our Daddy Adam.  And with Mama Eve.  O Mama Eve, we forgive you for pickin that fruit and biting into it with not a care for all of us what was to come after you and face death.”

Because the plot of the story centers on the conflict between Ruth’s desire to keep the baby found in the tree and Aubrey’s desire to father a child of his own, the story must, in ballad fashion, end with a resolution to this conflict; Jones presents the resolution in the tone and rhythm of an otherworldly tale. 

Aubrey has gone to Virginia to bring Ruth back, but when he sees her chopping wood in the snow, he also sees the “grey smoke rising from the chimney with great energy, and it was, at last, the smoke, the fury and promise of it, the hope and exuberance of it, that took him back down to the horse.”  Aubrey’s decision to turn back and give up hope of reclaiming Ruth because of the smoke rising from the chimney is a device typical of fairytale rather than realistic narrative.  The metaphor “In his mind, Ruth’s husband shrugged” is based on something inchoate and intangible.  In the terms of the folktale, he is no longer Aubrey, but rather “Ruth’s husband.”  His trip back to Washington on a horse through the snow ends the story in fairytale fashion.  “The dank smell of the horse rose up and held fast like a stalled cloud before his face.  Ruth’s husband smiled and told the horse he forgave her.”

When Aubrey reaches the bridge across the Potomac, the story ends this way:

The horse stepped onto the bridge to Washington, her white breath shooting forward to become one with the white of the snow.  Ruth’s husband patted her neck. The top button on his coat came loose again and he rebuttoned it, thankful that he hand had not yet stiffened up.  His heart was pained, and it was pain enough to overwhelm a city of men.”

What Jones succeeds in doing in this story, and many of his other stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, is  transforming--by the Voice of the storyteller-- mere people in the world into characters in universal stories—not just individuals who live and die and are forgotten, but rather characters who embody the desires, wishes, dreams, and fears of all of us.

BMW 1-Series 116i

By Michal Kieca

Engine: 1.6 Litre 16-valve Petrol. Power: 100kW @ 4400rpm | Torque: 220Nm @ 1350rpm
Transmission: Eight-Speed Torque Converter Automatic

Fuel Consumption listed: 5.7 l/100km | Tested: 6.8 l/100km

Price (as tested, exc. on roads): $39,593

           

Overall Rating: ★★★★

Plusses: Punchy, frugal engine, unbelievable 8-speed transmission, roomier interior than before, delightful steering and handling.

Minuses: Interior quality issues, slightly cramped interior, expensive to buy, options can quickly inflate the price even more, awkward styling.

OVERVIEW

BMW have delivered the a revamped second-generation 1-Series hatch, a car that has come in leaps and bounds from the cramped and somewhat flawed original. It is packed with more equipment and the range features superb frugal petrol and diesel engines. It is an enjoyable car to drive, thanks to being the only car in the segment to feature rear-wheel drive. Any keen driver will feel right at home in BMW’s smallest car.

There's also more room inside the cabin and a bigger boot, too – making the current car a rival for cars like the VW Golf and Ford Focus, as well as upmarket alternatives such as the Audi A3 and Mercedes A-Class.

Whilst many of the original model’s problems have been fixed, the new car is not perfect – it’s still cramped in the back, the styling of the front is a tad polarising and, although the 1-Series packs a premium feel, it isn’t exactly cheap to buy. Finally, with such tough competition from the brilliant new Golf 7, the 1 Series is going to have to be special, very special.

DESIGN: ★★★★

There is no getting away from it that the original 1-Series was not an exactly pretty car. With this model, BMW promises more dynamic handling, a roomier interior and fresher, more modern contemporary looks. Longer than the old 1-Series by 85mm, the current car has a wheelbase that has been extended by 30mm, with 21mm of that extra length gone to additional rear legroom. Both tracks have been widened, too, by around 40mm at the front axle and over 60mm at the rear.

Although bigger, the new car is 30kg lighter than the old one. The chassis is completely new, meaning that the car’s body-in-white is now more than 30 per cent more rigid than before. That should help ride and handling. The new 1-series, like the last, has all-independent suspension – MacPherson struts up front and a five-link rear end.

Chief Designer Adrian Van Hooydonk’s styling hasn’t completely neutralised the unwieldy proportions of the 1 Series, but the styling is a clear improvement. The new car looks leaner and vastly more aggressive than the last. The biggest aesthetic bugbear remains the car’s profile, though. Short, tall and backward leaning, it still looks awkward from many angles, especially from the side.

THE INTERIOR: ★★★★

Without exaggerating, I can say that certain 2+2 coupés accommodated rear seat passengers better than the original 1-series hatchback did. But thanks to longer rear doors, the current car is one that you could justly describe as being large enough for most people. The legroom in the back is much improved with enough space for headroom too. The massive transmission tunnel does hinder foot-room for the centre passenger though. The BMW is still not exactly a practical car, but it’s usable enough.

In the front, there’s plenty of headroom, shoulder space and legroom, and drivers should be able to find their perfect driving position. There is an abundance of telescopic adjustment on the steering wheel, and the comfortable seats also provide vast adjustment. The centre stack is ever so slightly angled towards the driver, dividing the driver and front passenger zones. It’s an attractive interior that seems well judged for an entry-level BMW, if a little short on flair and excitement.

And how is the quality? The material quality of BMW’s fixtures and fittings certainly seems good. From the tactile, silver painted audio and ventilation knobs to the glossy black air vent surrounds; some of the interior trim is genuinely appealing. However, on closer inspection, many of the cabin’s elements don’t spell premium at all. The door trim looks rather cheap and the dashboard features some harder plastics lower down. But by far the worst part of the whole interior package is the pedal placement, they are all too far to the right meaning that you will always feel somewhat to one side.

PERFORMANCE: ★★★★★

Even with this entry level 1-Series, BMW has delivered an unbelievable drivetrain combination that works perfectly in all conditions. The 116i’ s torque arrives extremely early thanks to the twin-scroll turbocharger, throttle response is crisp and the car revs very nicely all the way to the redline. The engine so sweet, cultured and refined that it really is one of the best power plants on offer in any car. The powertrain is all the more exceptional because, when fitted with ZF’s excellent eight-speed automatic gearbox and BMW’s Efficient Dynamics fuel-saving ancillaries as standard, it makes the car so smooth to drive and amazingly frugal. The transmission slurs gearshifts, concealing them behind a veil of precision, so much so that you never know when they occur. It never “hunts” between gears, downshifts instinctively, quickly and holds onto gears without hesitation. This really is an amazing transmission mated to a brilliant engine, making for outstanding performance in the real world even if the engine doesn’t provide much punch on paper.

RIDE AND HANDLING: ★★★★

When BMW conducted some early market research, it came out that the majority of 1-series owners wanted better refinement. Thus BMW says that they focused squarely on providing the second-generation car with a more absorbent ride.

The current 1-series is considerably more pleasant and relaxing to drive everyday on Australian roads, both in town and in the country than the car it replaced. Gone is the tendency to fidget and pitch along an uneven road, the car can finally settle down on the road and let the passengers enjoy the ride. The soft-sprung but effectively damped suspension set-up does a very respectable job of smoothing out an undulating road surface at normal speeds, and it keeps the car’s body in check over large bumps. The chassis compromise never feels sloppy or too soft. The car manages to straddle a well-judged line of refinement and sportiness.

The new 1-Series’ electro-mechanical power steering is a big improvement over the old car’s heavy hydraulic system. The steering is nicely linear, light when parking and firms up nicely when out of town. It is a good system, completely alien to the torque steering antics that plague many front-wheel drive cars. The handling is similarly good. The car has decent balance in the corners and handles with minimal body roll, changing direction with agility. The car has plenty of grip and if you do eventually run out of it, the 1-Series unfortunately understeers. Not a great thing in a car that has perfect 50:50 weight distribution and rear-wheel drive.

The brakes are sharp and responsive and overall the chassis electronics work well, complementing the chassis, be it during braking or during cornering.

VALUE AND FEATURES: ★★★

The new 1-Series is 5% cheaper than before and comes well equipped with stop/start, brake energy recuperation, alloy wheels as well as BMW’s excellent iDrive system. This is also the only small hatchback with rear-wheel drive, which does count for a lot. Unfortunately this is where the 1-Series’ good points in terms of value end. The car is overpriced, especially compared to the new Golf, which is a vastly better car for less money. The BMW might have rear-wheel drive and an arguably better badge on the front, but it just can’t justify the enormous 6-grand price difference over the Golf.

SAFETY: ★★★★★

The BMW 1-Series comes full of passive and active safety features. ABS, brake-force distribution and brake assist with ESP and TCS are standard. The car has 6 airbags and achieved a 5 star EuroNCAP rating.

VERDICT:

BMW has addressed the main criticisms of the old 1-Series. It might not set any class benchmarks, but for the first time it is spacious enough to meet most expectations. It’s well mannered to make for perfectly comfortable everyday use. And although the materials still leave something to be desired in places, the cabin quality is now on par on with other premium compact car offerings. 

Overall better dynamics, greater refinement and usability, the superb powertrains and a more appealing driving environment make this a 1-Series that is not only much more complete than before, but also much more appealing to buyers. 

Project Two tour America and The Universe

By Jonathan Monkhouse

Yeah, so it's like 15 days until #P2RoadTrip starts. I'm trying to be cool about it and everything. Whatever. Meh. Sure. Whatever. Sure.
Th' thing is, I'm not cool about it at all. I am both shitting myself and heart-attack-inducingly over excited about the whole thing.

So, for those of you I haven't seen in the last 3 months (no doubt I have subjected everyone else to the only thing I've talked about in that time period), the "Project Two American Tour of the Universe" breaks down into three sections:

1) Düofest
2) #P2RoadTrip
3) 44hr Improv Marathon

I know, the names alone are enough to give someone a wet dream. Okay, me. They give me a wet dream. Right now. As you read this I'm having one.

Section One: Düofest, 5th-9th June.
The Düofest is Philadelphia's festival of two-person improvisation. Chris and I decided to apply for it on a whim, way before thinking anything through. I had already been invited to Austin (see section 3), so I knew I wanted to be there then, and Düofest kinda lined up a bit, -ish, so we went for it. Cue a couple of months of not hearing a response until it dawned on us that we hadn't got in.
Oh well.. we've sorta bought the plane tickets in hope, why don't we go and see it anyway? There'll be some cool shows and nice people, and we can try to weasel our way into after-show parties by putting on very posh British accents and being impossibly high-status. Cool. It'll be more expensive but still great.
Then a couple of weekends ago we got an email from the Düofest organisers: "a group have had to pull out, you're next on our list, wanna play?"

"Unequivocally, yes," was our reply. And we meant it. Hard.

So there we are. We're performing on an international stage in front of seasoned improvisers at an established festival of improv in a city we've never been to before and barely know anyo.... wait... sorry, I was just a little bit nervous-vom into my own mouth. It is The Best Thing Ever Ever, and monstrously terrifying. I am so excite.

Our 5 days in Philly will also include improv workshops with Jet Eveleth and Scott Adsit. Jet did my favourite show I saw in Chicago last year, a TwoProv with the adorable Susan Messing. It was so awesome I coughed up a lung and named my iPad after her. Also she looks nice. Y'know.. niiice.
Scott brilliantly plays the producer in 30Rock and has improvised with the best people and worked with Tina Fey and is excellent and also looks like he's probably a really ace guy.

Section One of this trip is going to be fricking incredible.

Section Two: #P2RoadTrip, 10th-19th June.
For as long as I can remember (long term memory - 23 years / short term memory - when I typed 'typed') I've wanted to drive a car across America. I'm certain it dates back to when I was about 9 and had a gerzillion pictures of American muscle cars blu-tac'ed to my bedroom wall. In ageing I have forgotten how much a 'gerzillion' is, replaced the Mustang pictures with images of fine art and Jet from Gladiators, and become self-aware of what a douche I am... but the desire to do a USA road trip has never gone away.

We needed a way to get from Section One (aforementioned) to Section Three (aftermentioned). A plane would be too fast. Neither of us can skate. So we're hiring a car in Philly and driving to Austin. It's more than 2000 miles. Or to be more accurate; it's more than 2000 miles if you take the route we are.

Worlds Largest Statue of a Gorilla Holding
a Volkswagon Beetle, Leicester, VT

We're going via Washington, Nashville and New Orleans amongst other places. Fairly rapidly - we're doing it in 9 days - but hopefully we'll have time to stop at "The Biggest Ball of Twine and Goat Skulls In the World" or whatever we find on the open, middle-American highway. I'm imagining it to be a bit like Smokey & The Bandit crossed with Thelma & Louise. (Chris is Thelma. I'm The Bandit.)

As well as staying with some fans of Chris' from his extraordinarily excellent Doctor Who podcast (The Ood Cast), we have a Project Two gig in Houston on the 18th. Wee!

And we're renting a convertible to do it. The same type Michael Scott drives in The American Office. Wins.

Section Two is going to rock my little socks off.

Section Three: The 44hr Improv Marathon, 21st-23rd June.
In 2011 I met Parallelogramophonograph at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They're an improv group from Austin where they own their own improv theatre on their own, and are (at the time of writing) approaching their 500th show as a troupe. I love their improv, it ticks my box and floats my boat and gives me improgasms. Which is all literal.

In 2012 they came to the UK to be part of the Slapdash Impro Festival. I have tricked someone into letting me rent a big house and I could fit them all in for 10 days, so they stayed with me. It was awesome. We stayed up every night draining bottles of Crabbies in my kitchen and nerding out wholesale about improv. As they departed at the end they said "hey, Dude, Ace-man, Dude, King, Genius, (I paraphrase) we're doing our annual improv marathon next June, it'll be 44 hours long, wanna play?"

"Unequivocallyes," I replied. There was no space between the words. Admittedly it probably came out all desperate and ADHD-y. It was. It was not cool.

I'll be performing 44 different shows with 44 different casts in 44 differing hours, along with 7 other Austinites as 'The Marathon Players'. I have been chatting to them all online. They are delightful and sexy and I can't wait to meet them in person.

Also, one of those 44 show slots looks like its going to be a ProjectTwo show, so we'll be doing our TwoProv thing with 7 extra people. This fact makes me smile and nod slowly with a hint of confusion around my forehead area. Awesome.

Section Three is going to be a mighty powerhouse of thrill.

So, yeah. I'm pretty chilled about it. The best trip ever?.. whatevs. No big deal. ... Uh, as I was writing this I found out the Project Two performance at Düofest is going to be 7pm on Saturday 8th June. Prime time. Just a couple of slots in front of Scott Adsit & Jet Eveleth's show.

You know that thing about me being cool about this whole thing? It's not true.

Jonathan is the creator of LondonImprov.co.uk
The Project Two website is scifiimprov.co.uk