Just to show how prevalent the crazies are now, this is three days after the last post, which also happens to be the next time I left the house…
And people ask why I never leave the house…
The best bet these days is to assume everyone around you will simply drive into you if given the chance. This is why I tend to leave huge distances between me and the car in front of me so that when they ‘have an episode’ and drive into something I’m clear of the carnage (and get good footage).
A while back I wrote about the dash-cam I installed and the reasons why – because it’s kind of a daily thing where someone does something boneheaded in the 5 miles between the house and the office.
I figure’d I’d post one from this morning, as an example…
Pay attention to the lights…
People ask why I head to work at 0600; because there’s only one or two of these people on the road at that hour. 🙂
(I got a note that the video wasn’t playing for someone. I’m guessing it’s because I exported the video as HEVC (h.265), which tends to only work with new(er) hardware. I’ve re-uploaded the clip as h.264, which is bigger but should be more compatible)
The final piece of my vehicular mod-list was completed today; I think I’m done for the foreseeable future now.
Looks: Limousine-grade tint all the way around.
Performance: Unlocking the computers in the car to enable the SRT stuff.
Sound: the stock exhaust is designed for people who don’t want to know the car is running.
Today that last item was completed.
Yes, that really is an engine the size of a large doghouse…
I took the car over to the local speed shop and had the four ultra-silent mufflers cut off of it, everything replaced with 2.5″ stainless steel, and added a couple of Flowmaster 40’s.
See, I’m old – so I come from a time where a ‘hot rod’ at idle tended to sound like a large boat – and if you got on the throttle they were loud enough that any discussion was reserved for the next stoplight. Fast cars were a total sensory package that included the smell of high-test exhaust, acres of brilliantly painted steel to look at, the feel of gravity moving from under you to behind you, and an incredible soundtrack powered by literal explosions.
Cars nowadays tend to have one or two of the listed items, but never the full package… Well, unless you spend six figures on something rare, exotic, and a pain in the butt to work on.
So, with the 300 I wanted to get as much 80’s teenager petrolhead-ness as possible out of it while still being a responsible adult… The car is extremely quick and has a 160MPH speedo for a reason, but never gets outside of the safety envelope for public streets where other people are being road hazards. The tint is pretty dark, but still has excellent visibility so it’s safe to drive even at night. And now it’s rumblier and louder, but (probably) won’t wake up the neighborhood when I leave for work at 6am.
There are a few more things I’d like to do to the car, such as lowering springs to take an inch out of the stance and some 305’s for the rear… But the roads are generally bad for being lowered and pulling into the average parking-lot is already as close to the front air-dam as is practical, and I think I’ll burn the tread off of the current (new) tires first before investing in newer ones.
I’m pondering taking some time off from work and driving back to New London Connecticut to do some site-seeing and reminiscing. It’s a mere 2000 miles, each way; easy if you stop a few times along the way to smell the proverbial roses.
See, the most formative years of my youth happened in and around New London; when I was in the Navy and ‘on my own’ for the first time… This is where I met some really amazing people, lived in my first apartment, got my first new car, met my first girlfriend – and ultimately married her.
It was 1986 when I arrived on the base in Groton. I was 17, and the world was a limitless adventure just waiting to be discovered… And the place kind of encapsulates the best parts of my teenage years.
This is where I came to the realization that I could eat as much ice-cream as I wanted from the container in the freezer, because I bought it, and that a salad at a restaurant wasn’t all that bad. Where I learned that if you stay up all night partying, the next day’s PT sucked ass. And where I got my first taste of adult responsibility because I had someone other than myself to support and take care of.
Groton / New London is old enough that it is pretty much a time capsule; the place is essentially the same as it was when I lived there… The apartment I lived in is still there, the arboretum where I played Lazer Tag is still there, the Crystal Mall is still there… Hell, even the pizza joint, “Pizzarama”, that I used to hang out at with my ex is still there (on Broad St., across the street from the cemetery…)
Thank you Google street-view
From New London I made dozens of road trips to various parts of Massachusetts, and even drove as far as Maine a couple of times. I knew every twisty back road in the area intimately from putting countless miles on the several cars I owned while I lived there, and this is where I got my early education in the school of hard knocks.
I had my first vehicular accident at this intersection when I was heading over to pick up my ex at Pete’s mom’s apartment (the red brick places on the left)…
Google street-view again
It’s a blind curve to the left and as I inched out to see if anyone was coming, a parts delivery truck going waaaaay too fast appeared in front of my LeBaron and took the license plate off the front bumper… Everyone was fine and all I had to do was screw the license plate back on, but you always remember your first. 🙂
Good times.
But I’m approaching my mid-50’s and it’s been over thirty-five years since those heady teenage years, and I can feel the threads of my past tugging a bit.
“You can never go back”, and I know this, but like the skeleton in The Last Unicorn; “I remember…”
Back in the 80’s cars were very analog; carburetors and chokes and points and manual steering and mechanical everything including the windows. Back then the Lamborghini Countach, the space-age dream car that festooned the walls of every red-blooded teenaged boy, had a whopping 370 horsepower from twelve cylinders of high-tech supercar engine…
In the 80’s, while the Lambo ruled hearts and minds, I was playing a lot of Cyberpunk with friends…
As far as Cyberpunk was concerned though, to make the science fiction setting of Cyberpunk more science fiction the cars were electro-mechanical marvels of electronics and computers. You could even ‘hack’ a car to do things to it like steal it or increase performance.
It was all very futuristic.
Last night I got to relive those late 80’s vibes by hacking the computers in my 300 to enable a lot of locked features.
See, the car I bought is essentially an SRT (Street and Racing Technology) without the SRT badging. It’s an “executive saloon” and not a “race car” according to Chrysler… Even though it’s the “S” model so it has all of the sporty bits, and I got it with the big hemi V8 instead of the V6.
But, in the interest of propping up the actual race cars like the Hellcats and whatnot, what Chrysler does is simply set all of the sporty bits to “automatic” in the computers, and then disables the owner’s access to the controls to make the car a not-SRT. So the stuff is in there, and the computers know how to interface with all of the stuff on the car, I just needed to get access to the controls.
It turns out that the user interface system in the car runs JAVA and all of the UX is handled through .jar applications, and all of the SRT .jar files were in the system but not in the boot-loader.
So I put on my hackerman pants and got to work…
I’ll not bore you with the details, but it’s a car full of computers and I’m kind of a car guy who has been into computers since the literal dawn of time.
SRT dash bootupSRT UConnect bootupThe SRT gauge package on the UConnect screenAll of the SRT toys are accessible and work just fine
The up-side is the car even more fun to drive now; it holds gears longer, the throttle response is better, and the drivetrain has been de-civilized which really livens up the “executive saloon”. And I can turn it back into a cushy highway cruiser with the press of a few buttons, so I didn’t really loose anything.
The down-side is I can’t really take the car to the dealership now as I’m sure they wouldn’t be impressed with my hackery. And while I can back out all of my changes, I’m not sure if I left footprints in the system…
That’s not too big of a deal as I get my oil changed at a local mechanic’s shop and, in theory, the car won’t need dealership attention until after the warranty is up.
