Objective function changed

My civic had served me well for the past 6 years but it was time for a change, when I bought this car I wanted something high performance and sporty. I have always wondered what my next car would be, I didn't really fancy any of the new cars on the market that I could afford. The civic still runs fine but I am very weary of such an old car that has been through so much. Seeing as I had a young one around now I wanted to shift away from a fast car to one of more utility.. I was also tired of driving such a low car and had to be mindful of how close I park up to the curb, I recently ripped off the front lip after it got hooked on the curb.. *sigh* I wasn't  really a fan of much SUVs apart from the Land Rover 60 since they guzzled gas and most of them were really just SUV body shells on a car chassis *cough* CRV.

Enter: Jimny


I had eyes for this car since I saw how rugged the Suzuki Samurais(Jimny predecessor) were. Picking this car was a very controversial move as everyone hates it(with a capital H). I didn't care much though it just means that it will less likely to be stolen. It also ment that finding one would prove to be very difficult, I searched the usual Sunday classified ads in the Gleaner week after week and nobody had any listed for sale. Some quick research revealed that these rugged cars often had owners that will not part ways with their vehicles, one is either a Jimny lover or a Jimny hater, there was no one in between. After 6 weeks of searching I only saw maybe 3 old Jimnys  that did not meet my criteria listed for sale in the classifieds and I figured this would be a waiting game as the used car dealers did not carry them and the local owners were not letting go of any.

I eventually found a dealer that had 2 that met my standards and my mechanic gave them the green light so I dropped a stack and got a '06 manual transmission Jimny. Surprisingly I could draw from my knowledge of 11 years ago when I was learning to drive and the transition back to manual transmission was relatively smooth. Can I say I love this tiny car? I have gotten a bit adventurous and even dusted off my gps reciever and power inverter and captured some data.

This is data from my trip as I left work one afternoon around 4:30pm and traveled from my downtown office to home. The top graph shows the speed(traffic was horrible! look at all of the dead spots) and the bottom graph shows the height above sea level. For those of you who haven't gone metric yet it starts at around 50 feet and goes up to 450. I have done a little bit of off roading so far and it has been great, I'll post more on that later. This last image is a plot on a map of the captured gps coordinates, I cropped off the last bit that detailed the final turns to my apartment.. the gps is surprisingly accurate, don't want any unwanted visitors.