fungoolie

Of course you would! The ONLY way you can have an accident when traveling below the speed limit is because you weren't paying attention. Because your speed can't possibly still contribute to an accident once you're below the speed limit. The authorities say so so it must be true.... You're so quick to take the blame too. I like that. You never ever considered that the other party could be partly or fully at fault. Forget Easte's charity work, you sir, really are a saint...

What would you expect someone who wasn't speeding who ran over or killed someone to say to the grieving family? Stiff shit people, I was traveling at the limit. If you have a problem with that take it up with the authorities who make the rules? I can't get over this black and white-ism that people seem to have about speed limits as a result of the brainwashing by the governments to help justify their actions. Speed limits are NOT binary accident switches as much as the police would like you to believe otherwise to help them justify their enforcement policies!! There is a non linear but continuous relationship between the speed you travel and the risk and consequence of an accident. The speed limits are set as a compromise between expedient traffic flow and an accident rate. God forbid there is an "acceptable" accident rate, but there is... Some might say cynically that limits are set at a speed that the average person is likely to exceed by a small amount in order to help raise revenue. Whatever your view on this, ultimately the speed you travel should be based on the prevailing conditions and the abilities of you and your car, to bring risk down to an "acceptable" level. Many forget, or don't even understand this, and so the danger from this constant barrage that even 1KPH over makes you a murderer is that we find people traveling at a speed too high for the conditions far too often but because they have been pummeled with the "speed limit message" they believe that they are safe because they are at the speed limit. Ultimately, we will always need a one size fits all set of rules so that we can control behaviour on our roads but please stop getting all sanctimonious by pretending that a GTR travelling somewhat over the limit is anywhere near as dangerous as a 1974 Kombi (I've owned one), driven 5 KPH below the limit on a wet day by an 80 year old on the same stretch of road. Yet he's well within the law in practice and probably won't even feel any remorse if he did kill someone because of this conditioning. The performance car gets there faster, but also gets back down faster and can negotiate a corner at twice the speed as well. This has to account for something. I had a loaner brand spanker Murano the other day when my car was in for it's POS. I drove it back to the dealership in the rain. Seriously, if all our legislators were given a GTR to drive for a week and then allowed to go back to their Muranos, if they were in any way altruistically minded they would probably ban the Murano or anything else that has similar dynamics.....Here's another way of looking at it, after two years of getting very used to my car's abilities, I genuinely felt unsafe if I tried to approach even a fraction of the speeds I could negotiate the world in the GTR. And yet they are allowed to travel at the same speeds as me? If that photo posted by the OP portrayed my Kombi in the left lane instead of that commodore and it was traveling at 80, I'd issue the ticket to the Kombi....

Must be because traffic offences can't be attributed to abusive parents, underprivileged upbringing, substance abuse, psychological disturbances or anything else that shifts the blame away from the perpetrator. I shook my head in amazement when watching one of those highway patrol shows a guy got pulled over on the Hume in his modern safe car for doing, I don't know, say 0.5 KPH over the arbitrarily set for the lowest common denominator speed limit and after 3 mins of the police officer's time he politely copped the standard ~$300 fine and loss of points and straight after the following ad break we then watch a woman get pulled over for a similar offence in a rustbucket old laser and because of the serious lip she gave the policeman he searched her car, found a trafficable quantity of pills, called in "reinforcements" and promptly forgot about the actual traffic offence he pulled her over for as he had bigger fish to fry. After court and her sob story she drove into the sunset with a suspended sentence and a $70 good behaviour bond and I imagine would still be able to continue to obtain insurance for her Laser! There's a moral to this story I think........Anyone prepared to give it a try?

Novating a lease would be beneficial for you. Previously you would have been levied with FBT on 26% of your vehicle's value. Now it's 20%. If your car has running expenses greater than 20% of it's purchase value. (This includes interest and depreciation, maitenance and petrol) then you will be better off leasing than purchasing outright "privately".

No you're one of the few people that the change advantaged.

My Nissan Nomad van full of band PA gear is faster than that.....What was wrong with it?

I didn't say the markets double every 5.5 years. I said that shares and real estate markets have "earnings" around 13% per annum on average. This is the sum total of dividends/rents PLUS capital growth. So for example if the gross rental yield/dividend is 8% then the balance of the 13% is made up of 5% capital growth. Applying the rule of 72 as you have done means the market capitalisation values double every 14 years. Does that seem more reasonable? Agreed everyone's circumstances are different. All I'm saying is this, if you are buying a car or any other asset (depreciating or appreciating, this is irrelevant) then you WILL be better off if you can claim some of the expenses/costs of owning it against your tax compared with if you dont. This is true whatever your circumstances are. And pretty much anyone who works or runs a business either through a novated or chattel lease can do so. If you don't you are only kidding yourself that you are better off. The seed of this whole discussion was the completely misguided view that you can pay "cash" for a car and this is the cheapest way of owning said car. Owning a car completely for private use will cost you more than if you lease it and get the tax benefit afforded to you by using a lease. And any employee can use salary sacrifice to novate the lease on their car and get this benefit. The ONLY people who cannot obtain this benefit are people who are not employed or own a business. If you do not come under this category best get off your bum and learn what alternative options are available to you for owning a vehicle and making it cheaper to own than if you just go out and buy it without considering these options.... I sense theres a lot of people out there who haven't looked at these alternative methods of owning their car and are trying their darndest to justify that decision by lumping themselves into the "I can't use this because of (insert reason here)" category. And finally, when did anyone ever even remotely imply that owning appreciating investments isn't better than buying a car when it comes to making money? Yet somehow we seem to have people stating the bleeding obvious like this fact was ever in dispute! Trust me on this, it's not just you that believes this. Were talking about buying GT-Rs here people. And when you're buying one it WILL cost you money. Not make you money....

funny

It really isn't that hard to find investments that earn more than the cost of capital generally speaking. If it was, there would be no viable businesses and there would be no growth in the economy. Shares and real estate historically had compound earnings around the 13% per annum mark since records have been kept. Lets face it, how could a secured mortgage earn more than an equity investment given that it's risk is significantly less than ownership of property or a business. I'm quite sure that the house you live in has appreciated more than what the funds to purchase it have cost you even if the loan isn't deductible. Why would you borrow to buy a house if this wasn't the case? You would just save up for one instead. What's most important is the judicious use of gearing to maintain your risk at a manageable level and to ensure that your cashflow's can be maintained even when interest rates and asset vales fluctuate. As far as the tax deductibility of a car lease goes. There is no dodginess to it and you don't have to lie about anything. In fact until 7:30PM last Tuesday night, if you novated a lease on a vehicle, the only tax anyone travelling more than 25000 kms per annum paid on their car was levied at their own marginal rate on 11% of the purchase value of their vehicle. So in a nutshell if the cost of running your car (including lease payments, petrol, rego etc) was more than 11% of the purchase price of the vehicle then you were effectively getting the running costs over that 11% fully tax deductible no matter how many of those kms were for travelling to or from work or private purposes. Mr Swan or Brown or whoever is running this government has now decided to make that figure 20% no matter how far you travel which is the same as if you travelled between 15000 and 25000 kms annually before the budget. You'll find it's still better to lease than own privately because I've yet to find a car that costs less than 20% of its value to run but it's clearly not as good a wicket as it was before last Tuesday night if you travel more than 25,000 per annum. And the context of that reference to making sure your interest is deductible was not specifically directed just at a car lease's payments. It was in reference to all of your borrowings. What I was trying to impart was the concept that your financial life is a balance sheet. You have assets on one side and liabilities on the other. Whatever your assets may be whether they be cars, boats, real estate, shares or combinations thereof, there will be liabilities on the other side and all I was saying was that if you have loans in your life you need to ensure you maximise the amount of those liabilities that are tax deductible over the non deductible ones...

Clearly in 2WD only and clearly at the end of the event! Very cool

Dont read too much into that. Unleaded cars running at stoichiometry or leaner even after a long country trip still show black exhaust tips. Gone are the days of nice grey or powder white exhaust tips after an open road run.... Rich or not, you shouldn't be smelling it inside the car. My solution? Give it to the NHPC and say fix it! After all, thats what the warranty's for. So you dont have to worry about such things...

It's surprising the vehicle cabin leaks so much that any gas in your engine bay is getting in at all even if the exhaust was leaking. Modern cars have cabin sealing tighter than a frogs backside. This might be clutching at straws but has anyone ever changed a pollen filter and noticed if incorrectly fitting the new one could have comprimised the ventilation system sealing? Other than that or a disconnected PCV valve I'm also at a loss as to what the NHPC may have done during a routine service to cause this problem.

Or demonstrating to Nissan that some mods CAN actually make the car go faster contrary to the line they constantly push that there is no point in modding it....

Oh so the injectors as well as the pumps arent direct replacements either? Thanks for the info Slip. Does anyone knopw of any injectors that just drop in? Or is there always going to be some mechanical or wiring adapter mods required?

Why would you pay that much for E85? If the percentage of ethanol is important (for competition purposes) I'm pretty sure you can get 100% ethanol (4%? denatured) for just around a buck a litre and make your own E85 up yourself.

I'd go the Deutschwerks pumps instead of the HKS. http://www.speedfors...1.html?cPath=96 $338 vs $740 for the HKS and supposedly a drop in replacement as well. No happy about that bit with the HKS's about either having to grind the pump body or pump housing to make them fit . Would be interesting to see if you have to do the same with the DWs. As far as Ethanol percentage goes I guess as long as you know what you've got in your tank whether it be 60% in winter or 80%+ in summer then I'm sure you can have a couple "intermediate" maps set up with your Cobb AP so you can select based on the mixture of your ethanol/petrol blend. It wouldn't be hard to knock up a simple dash meter to convert and display the PCM signal from a COTS flex fuel sensor to tell you what you've just pumped into your tank and select your map accordingly...If only the ECU could accept this input and do it for you! Or are you just better off just watching your fuel trims and selecting maps based on this? That's good about the ECU reporting the correct flow rates as well Martin. I like the idea that the conversion doesn't leave you with small compromises such as losing some of the factory niceties such as accurate displays. Once the warranty is over I think this is a must do conversion!

Martin and/or others, When you tune for E85, assuming that the new injector flow and latency parameters are all input without any fudging any other tables does the fuel consumption computer still read true flow and therefore still provide accurate fuel consumption readings? And assuming no other mods other than say a midpipe what would be the smallest injector you would get away with? I imagine all you achieve by going excessively big is less fine/accurate control at low flow rates possibly making your fuel economy slightly worse?

And the afternoon runs. Afternoon Run Afternoon Rerun

Videos of the morning drag race demos on the Thursday. First run didn't quite illustrate what Nissan wanted illustrated so there was a rerun. Morning Run Rerun

Again, if you're happy to walk in and pay sticker anyway then this is a serious saving......However if you had any intention of actually haggling down to a price then I GUARANTEE that Mercedes will ask you if you wish to use their finance company before they finalise any negotiation. And guess what, Mr Interest free will walk out with a higher price than the guy who found his money elsewhere. How on earth does the finance department break even? They've just lent you 50% of the value of a new Merc for no interest? Did they source this money from the magical interest free fairy? I'm telling you straight out that Mercedes will use this strategy to lure people into the showrooms just as Mr Harvey Norman does with his interest free periods. They work out that interest free on 50% of the car over two years equates to 3.5% needed to be added onto the purchase price to break even. Well it doesnt take much imagination to see that it wouldn't be hard for MB to fail to come down that last 3.5% on the negotiation when hes already established that you're using his finance. Even if he did, he breaks even and hes sold a car that perhaps he wouldn't have if he didnt attract you in with his "too good to be true" offer of zero% finance because interest is this terrible little troll that will make you broke. And it's good to see you admit that you would use 50% of the value of the car to keep invested. Why not 100% and lease the full amount? I'm sure the fully deductible 7% you pay in interest would be more than compensated by the 20% or 30% an astute investor should get on an investment...surely.....

These views show a serious amount of naivety. All interest is is the fee you pay for the privelege of using someone else's money instead of yours. If you choose to use your "own" savings instead, guess what? It's still costing you because that money could be in the bank or invested doing something more productive such as EARNING you money! It's called opportunity cost and whether you like it or not its as high (usually higher when you invest) than the interest you pay when you borrow. What's is most important is that your interest is tax deductible! It doesn't matter one bit if the money is used for depreciating or appreciating assets. The interest (or opportunity cost as the case may be), is just that, a cost....! If you have any loans at all and you buy a car using "cash" (loosely coined term here), that money could have been used to pay off that loan. Therefore you have effectively BORROWED to buy that car however you like to look at it to make yourself feel better. If you do not have any loans at all and just have cash sitting in the bank, good luck to you but again as you've already indicated it more prudent to borrow money to make yourself money. It's called gearing and EVERY significant corporation in Australia has borrowings. If the loan is undeductible such as a home loan then you would be better off using that cash to pay off that loan and take out a deductible car lease instead. And as for the "you get a better price when you use cash" comment, since when does your dealer care where you're sourcing your money from when you sign a contract? Long as you arrive on the day of delivery with a shiny new cheque they don't give a toss! Unless of course you're at Sam's klassic used kars and you've asked him to find you some Custom Credit or GE finance at 35% because no bank will touch you......Then he may just jack up the price a bit because he knows you're never gonna make the repayments because you are just a loser anyway and wants to get what he can out of you ASAP. Forget all those stupid old adages that many a dad has passed on such as he who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing. So if any of you have any form of borrowing AT ALL for real estate or whatever and you purchase a car and use money to pay for it that alternatively could have been used to pay off that loan, guess what... you've borrowed to buy that car... or that holiday you took, or those groceries you bought...... If your loan is not deductible and you've used savings to buy that car, what the hell did you have savings for anyway when you had an undeductible loan? You're just plain dumb. See an accountant. If it is a deductible loan for some real estate say....... again, what the hell did you have savings for when you had a loan of any sort? When EVER does a bank pay more on a term deposit than what you pay in interest on a loan? That's why interest offset and flexible lines of credit were invented! Even so, a properly structured lease will allow you to pay off some PRINCIPAL with pre tax dollars and recoup it tax free when you sell that car. These leases have an effective NEGATIVE interest rate. Better than what you would get with that investment loan for the same real estate. Seriously if anyone "saves up" and then has $200K sitting in the bank (or under the bed) just as savings (especially when they have a loan of any type), just waiting for the new GT-R to arrive then they are either a drug trafficker or they seriously need to see someone that actually understands something about money to help then readjust their financial strategies. It is naive in the extreme to think that using "savings" to buy a car is the cheapest way to own one. And please get off your high horse about asserting that if someone endeavours to make their purchase as cost effective as possible then they are in some way unable to afford that purchase. They are not financing their car "To afford it" as you so plainly put it. Again that shows a complete arrogance that somehow people with money should just blow it because they have it......

Not at all. Works in all sorts of combinations. Never tried with VDC off though for obvious reasons. In fact Steve Pizzati mentioned that the new model even launches better in comfort mode when traction is limited.

There was not even a hint of wheelspin with mine. Not even a chirp. Just hooked up and went. Try it on comfort mode. On a cold road the extra weight transfer may reduce some of the rear wheel spin and avoid having the diff do all that power shuffling which I'm sure would slow things down.

Yes but at the expense of this: " When using this oil, LSD efficiency will be greatly increased (with especially good high-speed performance), but there will also be greater wear on the LSD's internal clutch plates. Please be aware of this before purchase." and this: This oil was developed for high-intensity competition driving. Please note the following two points before using this oil: 1. Except in the case of the Nissan GT-R (R35), this product is not covered by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. warrantees. 2. When this oil is used, it should be changed every 3,000 kilometers. So pretty much track use only? And has Nissan confirmed these warranty claims?

For what it's worth, just out of interest I tried my LC2 again for the first time in 30,000 kms. (Last time was when the car was under 10K and now it's done over 40K). When it was new I had to try all the tricks to get it to 3000 rpm such as stomping the pedal twice etc. Even when it got to 3000 RPM the best I could manage was a 3.76 0-100 kph. Today with the trans shifting itself and the switches set in Normal, Comfort and R I did a Racechrono 5 Hz GPS logged run. 3/4 full fuel tank. 50% brake pressure, stomp on the throttle and it shot up to 3200 before I released the brake. To be honest I think it was still climbing so perhaps it could have gone a tad higher. After I released the brake there was no lag or dead spot as previous and it literally shot off the line. I knew even before the time flashed up that it was going to be good. I recorded a 3.44 0-100 and a 3.24 0-60MPH. 60 foot was around 1.8 seconds. (I didn't bring the phone that I used into the office so don't remember exactly). It was 12 degrees outside. Bit annoyed i didn't keep going for the quarter mile and also set the trans into R mode as well now. I suspect the launch had a lot to do with it as my 60 foot was way better than the previous but now I also have got lighter lower profile tyres on it. Hankook Ventus V12s. 285/30/20 and 255/35/20s which are significantly lighter than the run flats reducing my rotational inertia and also around 4% lower geared.