A Rough Relocation

The beast at Bowen

I have, gentle reader, posted about relocations before.

Generally, they're good fun - a cheap way of seeing a bit of country. There's always the exception that proves the rule. I lived it last week.

I bid for a relocation of a six berther from Cairns to Brisbane, and got the booking. My bride was supposed to accompany me, but a family crisis intervened, and she had to stay home, so I was on my own, rattling around in a very large vehicle.

 

I flew direct to Cairns (Air North) and collected the vehicle. It was a 2010 VW Crafter chassis with a coach built Talvor 6 berth setup. According to the odometer it had covered over 200000 kms, no doubt at the hands of a variety of grey nomads, overseas tourists, and innocent relocators like me. It was, to say the least, looking a bit ratty.

I discovered at the end of the journey that it was being returned to base in Brisbane in preparation for sale. In the light of what followed, probably a very sensible idea.

On the way out of Cairns I stopped at a large shopping centre to stock up with groceries for what was supposed to be a leisurely four day journey south. I planned to take the scenic route, over nighting at beachside parks to catch the sea breezes.

When I returned to the machine with my groceries, it refused to start. It wasn't a cranking over/no engine type refusal - it was sullen silence - not even a click. When I put the key in the ignition, and attempted to turn it, the vehicle locked itself, and went into sulk mode.

I phoned the assist line. The key fob, very conveniently, had the emergency number attached. The operator (in a sub continental accent that took some deciphering) told me to wait and they would call the RACQ. I didn't have much choice about the "wait" part. Call out time was between 90 minutes and two hours. And it was raining on and off. The humidity reminded me of Phouc Tuy during the monsoon.

Whilst sweating it out (I had to stay with the vehicle - couldn't retreat to the air conditioned shops), I idly tried to turn the key. It started. I had already been waiting about an hour, so decided to stay put to wait for the patrolman. When he turned up to find the vehicle idling contentedly, he explained that unless I could get it to fault, he had no hope of diagnosing the problem. 

This was the first of many times I was going to hear that.

I pressed on south, and stayed at Flying Fish Point near Innisfail. Next morning she started up. I swear it was playing games with me. All was good until I tried to book into a caravan park at Bowen that afternoon. After paying for my berth, I jumped in to park it, and the gremlin returned. The thing (all eight metres of it) was now blocking the entrance to the park. The caravan park owner was not pleased.

Flying fish point. My bride's parents met here in the 30s.

After using up all my swearing vocabulary without repeating any given word, I phoned the assist line, got the same character whose communication skills left much to be desired, and after going through the spiel he demanded (booking number; rego; name and address etc) he called the RACQ.

Forty minutes later, I got it going, and phoned them back. There was no point in waiting for the patrolman who was apparently on his way (one hour delay this time) as it was not now "faulting". This was becoming utterly predictable.

By now, I was beginning to hate the bloody thing and would have cheerfully driven it off a cliff. There weren't any cliffs at Bowen. Apart from the starting gremlin, there were numerous other issues. The locker containing the power cable would open only sometimes (chassis was flexing) and some of the window catches were broken which meant they would work their way open as you drove along. You'd hear it getting noisier and the air conditioning would begin to struggle.

I elected to keep the power cable on the floor of the cabin, and retrieved the other bits and pieces I needed daily from the locker so they were available with swearing.

Next morning at Bowen (day two) I set out to refuel. It faulted on the forecourt of a service station after I filled it with diesel. It was obviously selecting the most disruptive situation in which to throw its tanty. I've taught lots of kids who exhibited this behaviour.

Now this was Bowen where the fishing is good and it was Sunday morning. Every man and his blue heeler were "goin fishin" and they were all lining up at the diesel pump, now blocked by the %&$# motorhome which I had the misfortune of driving. They were not happy, especially when they had to back their boat and trailers out to get around. At one point there were three boat/trailer combos backed up.

Stalled at Bowen. Note the witches hats and the sign.

I borrowed some witches hats from the service station and set them up with a sign sticky-taped to the rear of the vehicle. Ol mate patrolman turned up. I thought that this was the goods, as the bloody thing was actually now in a "fault" state and he would be able to diagnose it. Not so. 

He said "It won't start".

I bit my lip, avoiding sarcasm. Skills I'd learned as a Nasho returned to save me. He didn't have the correct diagnostic kit, so set about trying to organise a tow or a tilt truck. This was not straightforward at Bowen on a Sunday morning when the vehicle weighs over three tonnes and is eight metres long.

By the time he'd organised a tow, the thing had sparked up again. I got in and set out for Mackay, resolving not to turn the engine off until I got there. I had relatives in Mackay, and had told them I'd drop in for coffee. The coffee break was pleasant, and I climbed into the beast to head for Rockhampton. It wouldn't start.....

By now, I was well and truly over it. The intermittent fault meant that the whole deal had become a nightmare. I'd been advised to avoid turning it off, and to leave it running with the key in the ignition. Now I have faith in my fellow man, but there are those out there who would see a motorhome idling with the key in the ignition as an invitation.

Buying food, refueling and meeting the call of nature now became very complicated in the will she/won't she lottery. I've never been much of a gambler. I phoned the assist line and told them I would take this heap of %&$# no further until it was repaired. This carry-on was not what I had signed up for.

They got the message.

I was told to stay in Mackay and they would book the vehicle into the VW dealer first thing Monday. My rellies and I had a lot of catching up to do. We talked for hours, and went out for an excellent Malaysian meal. They had a car (Subaru Forester) which actually started. I slept in the luxury of air-conditioning. It was an ill wind....

Things were looking up.

At the Rockhampton dealer.

Then I got an early morning call from the assist line to break the bad news that the Mackay workshop was booked out, but they had set up an arrangement with the VW dealer in Rockhampton for Tuesday.  That meant a non-stop journey of 385 kms, hoping that I could get it refueled in Mackay without it stalling. You simply cannot refuel with the engine running. Apart from the fact that a vehicle this large, idling in a forecourt whilst the driver refuels, sticks out like the proverbial, it is not a safe practice.

I left my groceries in my rellies fridge (the gas had run out) and went to refuel. It started, so I returned, retrieved my groceries, and headed for Rockhampton. I made sure I went to the toilet first whilst my rellies watched the idling vehicle.

By now I had developed the technique of phoning ahead to find a caravan park which would let me drive straight into a powered site before turning the engine off. Explaining the reason was always problematical. Some people are suspicious of any deviation from the normal check-in procedure. Explaining what had happened in Bowen, and that I might end up blocking their entrance (not good for business) usually did the trick.

On to Rockhampton - and the dealer. In the meantime I had to negotiate an extra day past my original deadline to return the thing. They came to the party. I guess they didn't have much option. We had something in common. We were all at the mercy of the recalcitrant machine.  

The service manager in Rockhampton (a pleasant Irishman) tried very hard to diagnose, but he eventually (after four hours) reported that there was something wrong with the ignition sensor. Apparently the vehicle was failing (intermittently) to recognise the key. He suspected that it may have had something o do with wear in the ignition barrel caused by the weight of the six different keys for all the lockers and whatnot on the key fob. Over 200000kms of the dangling weight of these keys was not good for the mechanism.

It could not be fixed without new parts which could take days to get there. On to Brisbane...

Now Murphy is also Irish, and one of the mechanics, unaccustomed to the size of the motorhome, had a problem with reversing it and wiped off a heater outlet cover and scratched the panel it was mounted on. I left the dealer to sort this out with the assist line, and they repaired it remarkably quickly. Even so, I was still in Rockhampton at 2 pm.

 My rellies phoned up to see how I was getting on. My uncle (of Chinese heritage) said, when I told him about the mechanic pranging the thing, "You must have killed a Chinaman". Now that was funny. At that moment, any form of light relief was appreciated.

Morning at Childers

By now it was obvious that I wasn't going to make the extended deadline, as under the rules of the relocation, you are not allowed to drive these things at night. A further deadline extension was necessary and negotiated.

I made Childers just before sunset, and Brisbane and the depot at 10.30 am the next day.

I was never so glad to get out of a vehicle. The moral of the story? Life is full of surprises, but avoid dodgy motorhomes and deadlines.

They are incompatible. 

It hasn't put me off relocations....

Mercedes Benz Motorhome Review

It's long

I haven’t done a road test for some time, gentle reader, so I’ll remedy that omission right here.

Last week my bride and I drove a Mercedes Benz Motorhome from Brisbane to Melbourne on a relocation for a hire company. These opportunities are routine. The upside is that it makes for a cheap way to see some country (nominal day fee of either $5 or $1 daily).
The downside is that you don’t have time to stop and smell the roses.

We had four days.

The sliding door is heavy.

The vehicle’s full name is Mercedes Benz Ultima 3 berth Motorhome. It is on the MB Sprinter chassis, and has a 2.2 litre turbocharged diesel and a seven-speed auto transmission.

It’s not small (6961 mm long, with a 4325 mm wheelbase and a 1614 mm rear overhang), but the biggest concern for me, a novice driver of such a large vehicle, was the height of 2650 mm.

I did lots of looking up.

Despite its size, it is a very easy vehicle to drive with light steering and great visibility. It has the best rear view mirror setup I’ve ever come across, with views at driving height and kerb. I managed a three-point park at one stage, although I did notice the bloke in the vehicle parked in front looking nervous.

The other pleasant surprise was the fuel consumption of around 11 litres per 100 km. When you consider that you’re driving around one double bed, one single, a refrigerator, a kitchen, a bathroom and toilet and a full set of cupboards, it’s remarkable. The travel was mostly open road cruising, but it didn’t vary much in give and take country.

Pretty user-friendly

Controls are well arranged around the cabin, and there is heaps of accessible storage. The delivery van heritage is an advantage, as it was obviously designed with the welfare of a working driver in mind. I’ve never seen a vehicle with so many handles.

The cruise control, once you’ve read the handbook, is very easy to use, and the brakes light and progressive. It handles well, in a ship at sea fashion, which reminded me of Toyota Coasters I have driven, but the steering was less wandery than what I remember of the Coaster.

The only downside here was the susceptibility to side winds. It was never dangerous, but your concentration level had to be consistently high if it was blowy. We struck some gale force winds on day two.

So much for the vehicle – let’s look at the motorhome side of things.

Dusk in Goondiwindi

It was air conditioned, which was a godsend on the first night with day time temperatures of 40 plus in Goondiwindi, our first stop. Once your gear is stored away in the cupboards, there is plenty of swinging room, although you need to be organised when cooking or getting dressed.

The shower toilet is OK, but for skinny people only, and the bed quite comfortable. You can opt for a double, which creates issues when one person has to get up during the night, or two singles. The third single bed folds out crossways at the front.

Handy overhead storage

Stove (three burner) and fridge are reasonably accessible, and there is a second swing out barbecue on the passenger side rear.  A range hood pretty successfully sends cooking odours and heat outside, although the inbuilt fire alarm went off when my bride was searing some delicious pork chops.

It can be used independently (without hooking up to mains power) but you wouldn’t want to do this for more than a day or two – you’d run out of gas and battery after that time.

In its natural habitat, but you have to watch the tree branches.

It’s a machine I’d happily drive anywhere. It’s big enough for two.

Anything larger would be a bit of an overindulgence, and would become troublesome when it came to parking anywhere in a built up area.

Electric Dreams

There was an electric vehicle expo held locally a few days ago.

The Tesla was the star of the show.

 I wandered along for a look driving a decidedly old tech non-electric Suzuki Alto, probably in itself the most likely antidote to uptake of electric vehicles in urban centres any time soon.

Mitsubishi's offering.

The Suzi runs on the smell of an oily rag, and is small enough to be very useful in town.

Not a sparkie, but it doesn't look out of place in this company.

 The technology on show was impressive.

From the most basic (Nissan Leaf) to the most exotic (Tesla) there was a decent selection.

The most remarkable thing about the expo was the unremarkedness (new word) of the vehicles. They pretty much looked like anything else on the road, and the controls and fit out were run of the mill.

Baby electric Bimmer

The only exception to this visual ordinariness was the Tesla. It does stand out. I guess when you pay $125000 for a set of wheels, you'd expect it to stand out.

As I was leaving, an elderly woman (older than me, so she was indeed elderly) approached me and asked - "Excuse me. Where are the trains?"

Nissan Leaf

This confused me somewhat until the penny dropped. She had misunderstood the expo to be a demonstration of miniature electric trains - not full size electric cars.

Another Mitsubishi (PHEV)

No wonder she was confused. the two small children who were with her were OK with the cars, even though Grandma had promised them a slightly different experience.

Commodore SV6 Sportwagon

In Adelaide last week for our unit reunion, I hired a car.

To be precise, I hired two cars - one after the other. The first was an Hyundai i30, the second a Commodore SV6 Sportwagon.

The car hire was to get me around beyond the Adelaide CBD where we were staying. One of my sons who lives in the burbs was having a birthday, and I wanted to spend time with him. The public transport is good, but I wasn't familiar enough with Adelaide to use it to commute between suburbs.

In addition, for health reasons I was having a non-alcoholic reunion (a contradiction in terms perhaps) and this meant I could chauffeur my digger mates around. Staying cold sober when everyone else isn't is indeed a strange and wonderful experience.

When it became clear that the i30 wasn't really big enough for five aging and largish sexagenarians with buggered knees (we're ex-infantry), and people were happy to chuck in a few extra dollars, I swapped it for a Commodore SV6 which happened to be a Sportwagon.

So here, gentle reader, is a road test.

I didn't spend enough time in the thing to test some of the more exotic features (the self-parking for example) but did a fair bit of driving in the rough and tumble of the city commute. Two issues made that same commute challenging. One was transitory - the fact that most of the roads seemed to be in the throes of reconstruction - and one was a constant - the madness of allowing parking in the kerbside lane of the clearways out of peak hour.

One feature, the blind side proximity warning integral with the external mirrors, came into its own in dealing with the latter.

On the other hand, the interminable beeping from both front and rear proximity warnings nearly drove me bonkers in the rather squeezy garage at our lodgings.

It's a Commodore, so it handles and rides very well. The interior fit-out is leaps and bounds ahead of my VE, although it felt much the same to drive. I didn't find the Bluetooth easy to connect - but that seems to be an issue with my Sony Xperia phone rather than the audio in the car.

The 3.6 litre donk is torquey and gets a nice howl going when it kicks down. I needed to accelerate a bit sharpish from time to time to get into the correct lane, which is an absolute necessity in Adelaide.

The Sportwagon body is practical and doesn't increase the size of the vehicle footprint, unlike Holden wagons of yore which always inherited the long wheelbase from the Senator or Brougham. At no time did the car feel unwieldy, although this may have more to do with my familiarity with the Commodore ute than anything else.

This experience has made me consider swapping the VE for a VF ute when the time comes.

It's a great shame that these things will disappear when local production ceases. They're a very accomplished machine, and although I didn't get the chance to use it as a long distance tourer, should always be the weapon of choice for interstate travel in this wide brown land.

The negatives?

I didn't like the electronic park brake.

And the fuel consumption was a bit profligate - in the high thirteens.

But it was carrying five large individuals in urban conditions most of the time, and I wasn't driving for economy.

Electric Dreams

 This is one for the petrol heads - except that one of these vehicls doesn't actually use any petrol.

The future is already here.

You can now drive a Tesla from Sydney to Melbourne.

The White Marshmallow

Most of my driving is urban.

This is not much of an issue when driving our Focus but manoeuvring the long wheel based ute in and out of shopping centre car parks is a pain in the proverbial.

The size of the vehicle, together with the limited rear three-quarter vision, makes the use of covered car parks pretty irritating. A recently-installed reversing camera helps a bit.

One of my daughters is beginning the learning-to-drive exercise, and a Commodore ute is not the best vehicle for this process.

These are two rationalisations for my purchase of the White Marshmallow.

There's also a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in this. I still have a soft spot for basic trimmed-down motoring, fondly recalling my first car, a 1956 Volkswagen beetle.

Anyhow, we have a Suzuki Alto. It's a 2010 GL Auto with 43000 kms on the clock, and is pretty much as-new.

Perhaps I'm weird, but I enjoy driving the thing. It's very easy to get in and out of, simple to park, and runs on the smell of an oily rag.

It's also roomy, in the front, at least, and vision out is good. The driver's eye height is actually a little taller than our Focus, due to the fairly upright architecture.

My bride took it for a run the other day, and returning with a big smile on her face.

I may have to compete with her for the keys.

iX35

For all you petrol heads out there, it's time for another road test.

The vehicle is an Hyundai ("an" necessary because of the aspirant "h") ix35, which has just been superseded by the weirdly named Tucson.

She That Must Be Obeyed (the fleet manager) had originally allocated me a Focus, but its transmission started hiccuping, so the ix35 was hurriedly substituted. This one was bright red, and was the two-wheel drive 2000cc version. They come in 4WD with a 2.4 litre motor as well, but this one pulled well and overtaking was a breeze. It averaged (according to the digital readout) 7.6lit/100km mostly cruising at 100kph on the flat.

I've driven plenty of Hyundais, from the Santa Fe diesel to the i30 and the i45, but this was the first time I've been on board the small SUV. It was, as befits a fleet car, the poverty pack version, called "Active". It had cloth upholstery, steel wheels, and no reversing camera or GPS.

It did, however, have a reasonable sound system together with reliable Bluetooth. Having said that the connection was reliable, I still have no idea how to set it up. I got it working, but have no idea how.

Apparently local Hyundais have a locally inspired suspension tuning. It certainly handled sweetly, but I found the ride a bit jittery. This seems to be an Hyundai characteristic, as it reminded me of the i45, which exhibited the same issues.

There was plenty of room, and the driving position was about right for me. The seats weren't wonderful (a bit hard), but I experienced no aches and pains after a couple of three hour stints. I do take a break every one and a half hours, however.

These things are well screwed together, but they smell like nothing I've ever encountered before. This particular example had less than 5000kms on the clock, so still smelt new, but it was not an agreeable pong. I think it was the glue used in interior trim.

If I owned one, I'd be putting a couple of saucers of kitty litter on the floor, and parking it in the sun for a while. This usually removes objectionable pongs.

So apart from the smell, it was an entirely pleasant machine. Hyundais are always good value for money, and there are some great runout deals around on this superseded model. If you're in the market for a handy and easy to drive SUV, check it out.

.