ALL M&I – Page 545 – M&I / GBMINI

Working on the car

Posted on July 23, 2009February 22, 2017 by Ian C.

Today was a “working outside at JLG” day, with Fog, Rain, Sun, high humidity … I set up the computer in the back of the Q5, which worked out as quite a good “office space” 🙂
July 23 - Working On The Car.jpg

We spent the morning setting up and testing function speeds, then in the afternoon confirmed the same settings worked fine on the other machines; at various points other Engineers visited to do their own checking (here Pat is testing the machine):

Tomorrow morning will be more “show & tell” time, then I’ll likely start the drive home after lunch – not sure if I’ll get all the way home though; Friday evening traffic is always worse than Wednesday daytime!

516 miles in 8 hours

Posted on July 22, 2009February 22, 2017 by Ian C.

Driving in America often requires covering long distances – for example our trip up from Florida in the MINI last month totalled 2,500 miles (including MINIsOnTop)! Today I left home a little before 9am (any earlier and I’d have just sat in traffic near Boston), and headed southwest down to Pennsylvania, to work at JLG for the rest of the week. I took the Audi Q5, it’s first long trip since I bought it:

(this pic is early in the trip, I’ve still got over 400 miles to go)

In total, I drove 516 miles today – but apart from awful traffic near Scranton (that prompted the car navigation to take me on a short but successful detour) – I was able to travel comfortably at 70-75 for most of the trip; so I spent 8 hours driving (plus 3/4 hour for stops to fuel, twice, and grab lunch). Averaged 24mpg (US Gallons, equivalent to 29mpg UK) at average 64mph – no way could you drive for 500 miles in England, and average over 60mph, there’s just too much traffic there!

As I said, there was lots of traffic at one point – this was just before the car updated it’s (radio-received) traffic data, and changed the route to bypass the jam:

(two lanes merged down to one in roadworks, and I think there might have been an accident as well!)

One other event slowed me down for a couple of miles, a sudden and severe cloudburst! I could see the dark clouds ahead, coming closer, then a few spattered raindrops rapidly turned in to “invisibility”!