ABO                    Buying a new car

A few months ago I bought a car on the internet.  It was a Fiat Punto Automatic.  I had a Punto manual when I moved to Nottingham from West London, and it was a good little car.  I have since gone over to an automatic as I have two gammy feet and I find that driving is easier.  Also as the sideway of this house is only just wide enough to get a car in and allow my electric scooter past, I have to cane the clutch rather a lot in manoeuvring backwards through a very tight pair of gates.  A fluid clutch is much less likely to need replacing than a Ferrodo one.

This little car, like all Fiats, has good engineering, but has some weird features that amaze me.  The model is called a Punto Active 8V Variant BXA12 Version 25B 1242cc petrol.  (As an electrical man "8V" means "8 volt", but as its battery is a 12V one, I presume it means an 8 valve engine. But every petrol engine I have ever owned has eight valves  --  two per cylinder.  But it is the gearbox that is the weird part.  It's so complicated that it has its own separate handbook  It is semi-automatic and appears to be operated electrically.

I used to service my own bangers in the past, but I would not have a clue as to go about servicing this beast.  One old car I had in the 50s, knocked out a big-end bearing.  I stripped down the engine, removed the piston and con-rod and got my wife to take it to Kingston to have it re-metalled.  I needed to get from Hampton to Farnborough Hants. to work, so I bound up the crankshaft journal to maintain the oil pressure and drove the car on three cylinders.  The 1931 Morris 8 did not have a lot of oomph normally, and it had even less when it only had three pots running.  But it got me to work and back for three days until I was able to replace the piston et cetera.

But with this velocipede, I would be afraid to do anything more daring than top up the oil.  When the lad delivered the car here in Nottingham having driven it from Bristol, he said to me that I needed to use the footbrake to change gear.  I assumed he meant that the car would not start without my foot on the brake, as was the situation with my Renault Clio auto.  I had just got rid of that car as something odd had happened in the gearbox making the car sound more like a steam train that a car.  There was a very noticeable chuff chuff chuff that increased in rate as the car gained speed.  I asked the Telegraph motoring correspondent via email what he thought it might be.  He told me the worst that it was a fault in the gearbox.  Knowing automatic gearboxes are expensive things to repair, I was going to dispose of the car to the vendor of my new car.  But one of my wife's relatives asked me if he could have the car and get it repaired himself.  I was more than happy to let the fellow take it off my hands for nothing.

But back to the Fiat gearbox.  As I said, it is weird.  Just read the handbook!  There is in handbook circles a golden rule that was told me by my brother-in-law who ran a handbook section for IBM in Stockholm until he retired.  You always have the book written by a native-speaker of the language in which the book is written.  You will have met some of the gobblygook in pamphlets provided with Far Eastern electronic products.  They get stuck for a word in their own language and use a dictionary to get a word in English.  Do you remember when Kennedy gave a speech in Berlin and said "I love Berlin" in supposed German.  But that language, like English has various words for "love".  To love someone, to fall in love, to make love, et cetera.  It seems that he used the wrong word and ended up by saying "I want to screw Berlin".    Incredible"!

I have worked out that my handbook was written by a Serbo Croat who had Italian as his second language and English as his third.  Or some similar combination.  There is  bit in the book that uses the word "emotion".  Now for me, I don't fancy driving an emotional car.  I reckon that the engineers who designed the beast were good automotive men.  But the weirdo who wrote the book was as weird as the gearbox he was writing about.  It has a toggle lever that can be pressed into a number of slots.  You press it into a slot and it springs back out into the central area.  You just hope that it works.  When the car is stationary and the engine very quiet, you can hear clinking noises  And if I understand the book, the A/M slot means it automatically changes gear like a normal automatic.  This seems to work some of the time.  Press it into the + slot and it will change up.  Similarly press the lever into the minus slot and it will change down.

So I push the lever into the A/M slot to pull away from standstill. It works every time, except that on most occasions it will stay in first gear even when the engine is screaming.  But if I change up, as I generally do, it seems that it goes into the auto mode of its own accord.  Not always, but most times.  Weird !

And there is a further annoying feature.  The car whistles at the driver if he does something that it (the car) doesn't like.  If you manually change up when the car thinks that you should not, it gives a series of whistles.  If you use the handbrake to kill the last bit of roll before you finally stop, it goes berserk.  And if I stop the car, put the handbrake on. and switch off the engine, it objects to that, although the last bleep is chopped short as if it it has suddenly realised that it shouldn't have objected to that.

And finally, the gearbox totally ignores me when the car is stationary, unless I have my foot firmly on the footbrake.  I get the usual set of bleeps and whistles.

My dictionary omits the word "Fiat" although it has the word in the lower case initial.  It is:
a) an official sanction,
b) an arbitrary order or decree
c) any command or decision, or act of will that brings something about
I've always taken the meaning as a qualification on some otherwise definite statement.
I wonder what the connection is between those definitions and the motor company?  A lot of room for conspiracy theories

As I said    WEIRD