Sort of in the wild...
Pretty hard color to photograph if it's in shadow.
Saw it at a light and it took me a second to figure out what it was. Then had to figure out how to stalk it down. It turned up at a dealership.
Some days it takes the longest time to get stuff done. I shouldn't be chasing cars today.
And yet I'm still thinking the Caterham's going to be more fun to drive ...
ReplyDeleteCaterham 485 in Switzerland.
I'd been concerned about becoming one of these statistical people who wrecks something just because of trying to take it into situations where it wouldn't naturally perform well, so I went looking for "Caterham in the mountains" and "Caterham on windy roads" videos.
But Caterham does not (yet) make the Caterham I want.
I want a hard top Caterham with plenty of room for my head, and I want a reasonable bit of cargo space, because now I want one very agile vehicle to do nearly everything except for hauling heavy and large cargo.
Yes, I know this sounds like Rowan Atkinson's thing where he drives his McLaren all the time to do errands and that he's got at least 50k on the clock of one of his, but he does have a point about driving it instead of just owning it.
There's one thing I love about the Caterham though ... well, actually, an entire group of things.
No satnav (or SatNad), no EDR, no intrusive "entertainment centers", none of that.
Dials, buttons, knobs, switches, steering wheel, shifter, pedals, seats ... all of the usual stuff, and none of the rest.
A while back I almost went up to New England to look at a rather overpriced but beautiful old Grand National with something like 5k miles on the clock.
It's not that it wouldn't steer like a pig with steroids injected into its ass, but that it'd be free of all of the stuff that they're doing wrong with cars these days.
I want the performance handling and all that, but could vehicle manufacturers stop cramming "Internet of Things" bullshit into vehicles?
I'm really getting tired of sweeping my vehicles for bugs (and occasionally finding new ones) after "recommended dealer service" visits.
But I've done the "expensive toy" thing already.
This little but not little car looks like it'd survive Caribbean and European driving habits just fine ...
So maybe I don't really want the 170 series after all. :-)