I’ve yet to get a call back. This makes me sad, it seems they don’t have enough service people for the volume of cars they sell and support… and it makes me sad that I have to take my car in for service already after 5 months.

More and more I miss my A4 Avant. Quattro especially today, I spun the wheels a ton going over some wet railroad tracks at noon. It was scary..

First the positive things – it’s a ton of fun to drive.. it also gets a lot of attention when I drive it (I’m not quite sure if that would be a positive or negative thing yet, as.. well, most Canadians aren’t ones to try to attract attention to themselves, that’s probably why I hate hate hate those 20 inch chrome wheels that fools put on their SUVS)…

It gets great gas mileage, and it was great to drive with the top down on Friday when the weather was, well, bloody unbelievable here in Portland..

The not so positive things – I’m having problems with it.. I’ve had the gas gauge, which is electronic (a series of lights below the nav screen) just go off – saying my tank was empty. I’m also having almost stalling problems when I first start it when it’s cold, it’s taking a few minutes to really idle properly. I have somehow gotten a window crack on the top right of the windshield, I’m thinking maybe a stress crack..

And I get tired of shifting.. blasphemy I know some of you say, but maybe I’m getting old, I miss my A4 and it’s tiptronic automatic. It’s loud on the highway, because of the top.. and the xm radio I had installed really only works about 1/2 the time, due to where the dealer put the antenna (I can’t even describe to you where it is, it’s so odd.. basically it’s inside the car, in the header metal above the windshield.

All in all.. it’s fun to drive when I’m in the mood to drive it like it should be driven, but that’s not all the time… I feel like I shouldn’t be complaining, I should feel grateful I even have a cool car like this. Hopefully after I get everything fixed on it I’ll feel better about it.

Me and my MINI Cooper S Convertible, originally uploaded by Lucien W. Dupont.

Surprise surprise, look what showed up today – we weren’t expecting it to be ready until next week, but the prep folks had been working overtime to get them all done, so in addition to signing all the paperwork, we picked it up too!

So far, this is the fastest little car I’ve driven, with a super high quality of materials on the inside. I’m having an issue with the XM radio they installed (it doesn’t receive a signal), but other than that things are working great.

Still, it’s pretty cool to know where the actual car is.. I look forward to the day (hopefully before 2010) where I can log onto ford.com or miniusa.com, completely configure my car, figure out all the paperwork, and then track the day by day status of the building of the car. (all the pictures and video archived on a dvd that is delivered with your car).

Auto manufactures would just need outlets or branches to handle the test driving of the vehicles.. (consider the there’d be no backroom dealing, no shady sales people..

Thinking about it.. that’d be my ideal job, it matches my love for cars with my love for computers… anyone want to offer me a job to make it happen by 2010?

His description of the weekend and the pics kinda makes me want to move back to CA, given our lovely oregon winter of clouds and coolness right now.

Financing is left, and the wait to pick it up. We’re buying this one, and plan to pay it off quicker than monthly (in ESPP chunks, if you know what I mean).

It does however seem MUCH worse if you try to track your MINI’s progress. Then it seems to take forever to get into production status – followed by ANOTHER forever to get out of the factory, a third, subtly longer forever to make it to the docks – but then the forever’s just seem to get longer. There are at least three eternities rolling slowly and painfully past as the boat with the car on board creeps across the ocean at speeds that only qualified glacial geologists can measure. The Hindu calendar has a special word for the amount of time the car takes to get through the VDC – and the truck bearing your new baby to the dealership has a speed comparable to that of an asthmatic snail carrying two heavy bags of shopping.

Fortunately, the drive home in your new car make physicists wonder whether Einstein really was correct about that ‘not going faster than the speed of light’ thing…which completely makes up for it. In the end, the total time is still 6 to 10 weeks.