SiriusXM

Wrangler Wrap Up

Instead of just hosing the Rubicon off, I actually gave it a proper washing. I also cleaned off the the Weather Tech rubber mats along with vacuuming it out. Even though I am 6′ tall and have fairly long arms, I had to go inside the house to bring out the 2-Step Steel Folding Step Stool Ladder to get the roof clean. 🙂

If I have one complaint with my experience with Crazy Dave’s Rental Cars, it is, it would have been nice when renting to someone whose car had shut off inexplicably leaving him stranded on the side of the road twice in the last couple weeks that the vehicle he would now be driving had a stop/start system. The first time it happened was a heart fluttering moment. So, in spite of that little hiccup, I will be giving Crazy Dave’s a 5 star rating, because where else can you rent a new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon for 2 days with unlimited mileage for the cost of a half a tank of gas.

Stray observations in no particular order:

  1. It is a chore to drive on straight roads. There is a ton of play (compared to the Miata) in the steering wheel at top center making it a full time job. It does feel good in curves though with the wheel turned some, all the slack is gone.
  2. It is a half a foot wider and a foot longer than a Miata, but I quickly figured where my corners were and felt comfortable driving in traffic.
  3. It had the government mandated backup camera, but even with the hard top on the all around visibility was excellent.
  4. The way high seating position was really nice in certain spots, especially when leaving parking lots and entering streets. Other vehicles and street-side landscaping were much easier to see over.
  5. I don’t know specifically what our gas mileage was for the 100-125 miles we put on the Jeep, but the running average for it showed 19 MPG. This is only 2/3rds of the Miata’s 28 and only slightly over half of the Mini’s 36. The cost is somewhat offset by the fact that the Jeep uses regular grade gas compared the the Miata’s & Mini’s premium.
  6. The low beam headlights included in the LED Lighting Group Package nearly make the high beams redundant. In my few miles behind the wheel at night it didn’t seem like the highs gave you much more down the road visibility, the only thing it seemed to do was light up the trees.
  7. It was nice to have the satellite radio, so I could catch up with what was playing on The Coffee House channel compared to 8 years ago when we had it free for a year with the Purple Whale. While that channel is as close as I can get to Radio Paradise, it is definitely not worth the $15 a month they want for the service.

That’s enough for now, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things, but our experience with our extended test drive hasn’t made us want to go right out and buy a Jeep, but neither has it totally dissuaded us from buying one either.

Thanks For Nothing

We got a letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago to let us know that there was another 2 week free trial of XM Satellite Radio coming up. Cool, I thought, that would give us something different to listen to in the Purple Whale on the weekend trip to Florida. The Friday before Labor Day on the way to work I punched the button marked XM and turned it to my favorite (and really only) station, #31 – The Coffee House, and got a few seconds of song, a few seconds of static, song, static, song. I punched the AUX button to go back to the USB drive.

In the past we have had issues with reception around home because of the copious tree cover, so I figured we’d try it again once we started the trip and got out into the farm land near Barnwell. Well, it wasn’t any better out there, so I went back to the recorded stream of Radio Paradise. I tried it one more time along flatland I-95 and this time it never even locked on the station, the display just showed “LOADING” for a a minute. Then I just gave up on it.

I don’t know where the problem was, my end or theirs, but where ever it was, getting 14 days of one channel of satellite radio was not reward enough to call anyone.

Oh, You Temptress

Got a letter in the mail the other day from my old friends at SiriusXM. They are turning on my satellite radio for 2 weeks starting today, running until the 27th. Hoping that if I like it I will renew for 6 months for the low sum of $25 (of course that doesn’t include taxes and fees) They are also they are hoping that after the six months you will forget to call and cancel and the price will automatically jump to the regular price of $15+ a month.

I’m not really tempted as all they have to offer me is the one channel in their line-up I did like, The Coffee House. Sorry Ms. XM I’m already married to the lovely and eclectic RadioParadise and I’m quite happy. I will probably listen in for the fortnight though, a guy can listen, right?

Satellite Radio

Here at home, music is served up in the Emperor via MP3s recorded on 10 CDs stored in a changer in the trunk. I have not listened to over the air radio for, well, as far back as I can remember (which due to repeated drug use in my youth, is not far), so what was I to do for two weeks in a rental car. It will be a base model, so would it have an iPod interface? Doesn’t matter, don’t have one anyway. Probably have a CD player, but all my audio CDs are long gone. Satellite radio? Doubtful. Hey wait a minute, a friend in the Miata Club has an extra Sirius unit that I could borrow, brilliant.

For testing purposes I temporarily hooked up the Visor in the Miata. Not bad, there were a couple channels I could enjoy and even a few I could listen to for a while, nice.

The expected Chrysler Sebring turned into a Ford Mustang and it had a CD player that read MP3s. I had brought along a couple of my Radio Paradise MP3 CDs for listening to on the laptop in case of spotty internet or whatever, so I popped one in and off we went.

The Mustang even had an extra ciggy lighter socket along side the external input jack in the console which would make powering up the Sat Radio real easy. My intention was to at the first early evening stop to install the Visor. Well one day led to the next when we weren’t done driving and seeing the sites until 7:00-7:30 at night, so I didn’t even get a chance to try the install until the sixth night of vacation.

I ran the antenna cable from the trunk through the rear seat backs gap, plugged in the power cord, hooked both into the unit and hit ON. Nothing. OK, maybe the key needs to be in run before the aux power jack is hot. Nope. Dang, did I break the radio in transit? I plugged it into the primary cigarette lighter in the upper center of the dash and sure enough the satellite radio came right on.

So what gave? Was that port broke (blown fuse?) or was it there but not hooked up because the car didn’t have a certain option package? Anyway, I didn’t want to drive around with the wire draping down the middle of the front of the dash and I didn’t want to have to worry about unplugging it every time we stopped where any nefarious individuals would think there was something worth stealing, so in the end I wrapped the Visor unit all back up and stored it the luggage.

I think we ended up playing those 2 CDs four times through (alternately) for the 2 weeks. Each disc holds about 170 songs, so it really didn’t come off as too repetitious.

Thanks anyway Rudy.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 176