I picked up the Miata from the dealer on the 28th and have driven it every day since. Today there was a Miata club event that I was going to attend. It started over on the west side of town, so I picked the “Avoid Highways” option so as to not get in inbound Portland traffic on I-84. I still arrived early at the meet-up spot because, well, I started early. By this time I’d probably put a couple hundred miles on the car, but it wasn’t until I started driving with the group that I noticed that the steering wheel was not lined up correctly. It appeared to be about 5 or 6 degrees off to the left.
So after the Miata event, instead of going straight home, I stopped into the Mazda dealer. They looked at it, confirmed it was off an pulled into a bay. After waiting a couple hours, they decided that they needed more time and ordered up a Lyft for me to go home in.
Somewhere in those couple hours I got bored. The Mazda dealer shares a lot with the Toyota dealer, so a quick estimate of total cars there is 200 maybe. For the heck of it, I trolled both dealers’ used car pages and came up with one manual transmission in my price range, but it was nothing I’d be interested in. So I went outside and wandered around the lot. On the second to last row there was a Hyundai Elantra N, hmmm. I was interested in the Hyundai Veloster N, but couldn’t find a manual anywhere near here, maybe I should take the Elantra for a spin.
Car #9: 2025 Hyundai Elantra N. $31k with only six thousand miles on it. I went into the Toyoto place and asked if I could drive the car. They hooked me up with a salesperson, and we went out to look at it. She wanted to pull it out of its slot, but when she opened the door and saw that it was a manual, she let me do it. I didn’t want to get on the freeway, so we just did a few miles on a rectangular surface street loop. Even though the power-to-weight ratio is better in the Hyundai, it didn’t feel substantially faster. The first thing I noticed was the digital gauge cluster; it was exactly like the one in Santa Fe Sally’s 2023 Hyundai Tucson, which was a letdown. It is also hampered by the same thing a couple cars I thought were possibilities have: an extra foot and a half of unnecessary length.
I’ve lined up a test drive on that Porsche 718 Cayman, and then I think the only thing left would be to get in a Golf R of the same vintage as the GTI…