Turbo Toyota JZX90 MarkII TourerV

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Aristo-cracy

Well after much searching for a replacement car for the Soarer I decided that a Toyota Aristo was to be the perfect choice.
With the luxury and power of high end European car and styling from the pen of the Ital Design studio, the Aristo is a superb car. Priced ridiculously low for such a great car they are an absolute bargain. Good examples with less than 100 thousand kilometres can be had for between $13 and $20K.

The 3.0V version with a twin turbo 3L six cylinder engine has a nominal rated power output of around 206kW or 280HP so they bristle with performance. In reality though examples of this engine have been known to produce closer to 340HP as they came from the factory. You've got to love the Japanese "Gentlemen's Agreement"!

This particular car has factory leather interior, cruise control, electric everything including sunroof and folding mirrors. In fact the mirrors even have an ultrasonic device to blast away frost on those cold winter mornings! The only option that was not available was not available was a manual gearbox, but in a way that would be contrary to the design brief: to make a luxurious powerful 4 door sedan to shame the best of the European brands.

Of course there have been people to do the conversion with the 6 speed manual Getrag gearbox from the Supra and this would certainly increase the sportiness of the car.

I am more than happy with the automatic gearbox however as it is a superbly designed and programmed unit that always seems to know what gear to be in and has a silky but purposeful shifting character. Besides it makes driving the car a dream.

I am certain that I am going to enjoy every moment of my Aristo ownership. Buy local? Forget it. When it comes to a balanced combination of luxury, handling and performance, I know of no other car that can deliver like Toyota did in this model, especially for the price!

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Car Hunting

Today I went searching for a car to replace my wifes current car. The car she currently has is a great car, and she loves it, but it is getting a bit old and it is about time to upgrade.
I am not one to purchase cars brand new. I feel that buying new is poor value. Thankfully there are many people who like to purchase new and have the money to be able to do so. Hopefully in the future I will be able to do so but for the time being I feel that a car that is less than 10 years old constitutes very good value for money if you can find a low km example in good condition. This is even moreso the case with the choice of a quality import vehicles that are available.

I am the first to admit that I love turbo cars, ever since I first drove one which was a Mazda FC RX7. It was a great car and it initiated me into the world of turbo performance. In hindsight it was not an incredibly fast car, but it certainly was on a much higher level than any domestic car I had driven up to that point.
When I first bought my Toyota JZX90 MarkII I was absolutely stoked with the power, luxury and pure driving pleasure that it brought me. After some modifications it has become a lethal powerhouse of excitment. I know there are a few exceptionally fast vehicles out there that would be quicker than mine, such as 800HP+ Supras and blown big block V8 cars, but there is definitely no mass produced production cars that can come anywhere near my "Chaser" as they are mistakenly know.

My point here is that once you have tasted a pleasurable, good handling, very powerful car, you simply don't want to settle for a limp econo-box that is purely an A-B machine.
So today I did the drive around to a bunch of the import dealerships to see what they had in stock. My wife loves the Toyota Soarer, but I like the options, space and power of the Toyota Aristo. I would love to have a JZX100 Chaser but my wif thinks that they are too boxy and masculine. The Aristo, of course in the V specification has the same 3.0L twin turbo 6 cylinder motor as the famous JZA80 Supra. If I was to get a Soarer I think I would like it to be later than a 1996 model so that it had the single turbo VVTi motor. Again we differ on opinions with the transmission, where I prefer a manual cogswapper and my wife prefers the auto slushbox.

Ultimately I think she will win out, simply because whe will be driving it every day and I will only drive it occasionally. The only problenm so far is that VVTi Soarers are not nearly as common as the dime-a-dozen TT Soarers. I may have to import one myself if I cannot find one locally. Any one know of a nice low km VVTi turbo Soarer up for sale??

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

More Google ravings

I have delved further into the world of Google and found that I have become a thorough Googlian (googlophile?, googlogian? or whatever). Anyhow I have created a Gmail account and personalised my own google page. If you have not done this then it is definitely worth it as you can add and customised literally thousands of items perfectly suited to your taste and interest.

I have set up three columns. One for Home which has all of the general stuff like time.date, weather, gmail preview, Today in history, bible verse of the day, and word of the day and the Australian Stock exchange numbers. The second one is for all news items and the third one is for business related items. I must say I can see myself using this quite a bit.

Another thing that I have done is to set up Google Analytics on my http://www.ghostweb.com.au website. It has only recorded one day so far but the capabilities that I can see for this component is phenomenal. I have just spent about 20 mins analysing statistic for the last days traffic and I dont think I even viewed half of it. It has much more information than I know what to do with, but I can see that once I get some more historical data and begin to understand how to read it properly, it will be an amazing tool from a webmasters point of view and from a marketing point of view.
Among the features, it can show me geo map overlays of traffic and their sources, ISP's page visits, entrance and exit pages, comparisons between 2 periods, keyword conversions from searchs, with reports on even details like user browsers, OS's, screen resolution and color depth and much much more. I cannot stress how awesome this analytical tool is.
What is even more incredible is that this powerful tool is free. Google rocks!

How cool is google?

Well I have been playing around with Google lately and discovered that there is absolutely tons of different ways that Google can be used. There is Google Adsense to help generate income from your website, Google Webmaster tools, Google Video, Google Maps, GMail, Picasa, etc etc.
It seems that Google has also now taken over Blogger.

In attempting to promote my Toyota TourerV Website I came across Google Adsense and decided to give it a go and see if I could create some income through my website. Well it has only been a few hours and nothing has happened yet, so I can't be too anxious, but hopefully in the next few days I might get to see some results.

I am not expecting to make a million dollars in my first year of course, but I do have hopes for a reasonable income. I have already hooked up with Clix galore so I will see how that goes over time. It is slowly generating income, only a few dollars after a week or so, but my website still doesn't get a lot of traffic. Hopefully I will be able to figure out how to get lots more hits on the site.

Anyhow, I have recently updated the website and added some new pages. You can read about and see my new turbo page which so far has information about my turbo and manifold and wastegate and soon there will be a second page outlining how I went about installing it.
I also added a page about restoring my headlights to near new. The problem with plastic headlights is that they discolour and become very foggy. This little tip that I discovered, brings them back to looking new again. No more foggy headlights and visibility is restored for night driving.