2013 Mercedes-Benz C350 (W204 facelift)

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The last 3 months I’ve had the privilege of driving a 2013 Mercedes-Benz C350 (3.5l V6 naturally aspirated engine putting out 225kW and 370Nm torque), and it’s been great. For the past 4 years I’ve been driving a ’96 Audi A4 1.8. It had power steering, aircon, leather seats and ample power to get by. It was comfortable on the long road and it’s treated me well. So what do I think of the C350?

c350

It’s a fun car. It’s a ‘yes’ car. No longer do you ask yourself, can I make that gap, the answer is always yes. Can I go faster than I’m currently going? Yes. That is until the electronic limiter kicks in at 250kmph. But such opportunities don’t exactly happen. But quite often when overtaking on the free-ways one has to be careful else you can be going considerably over the speed limit without realising it.

Mercedes-Benz has never been top of my list of favourite car brands. I don’t know if it’s just a societal thing, but I’ve always felt they were cars for an older generation. I’ve always been a fan of the BMWs and Audis. Not necessarily thinking they were better, but from a subjective view of the brand and the cars’ stylings, Mercs weren’t my favourite. It has obviously grown on me in recent months, but I’d still choose an Audi or a Beemer over the Merc. It is a good looking car though, especially with the Avantgarde styling, big 18″ mags and other marks.

Prince Albert 1

Inside the car is comfortable. Leather seats with some electronic adjustment controls. Sometimes the rear passenger could complain on space if I’m in front, but in most cases I could still sit comfortably and provide the person behind with enough space. I did several long trips in the car, both by myself and with passengers, and I rarely felt fatigued. The car is also much quieter. Even with that 3.5l V6 up front, inside the car remains quiet. Road noise is also noticeably less than my old ’96 Audi, and the new car obviously had less squeaks and rattles than my 17 year old sedan. 3 zone climate control means everyone can be kept happy, usually I left it set a nice 23deg and one rarely noticed any change due to outside weather conditions.

Also features, the Merc was full of them. Auto adjusting brights. Lights that shine to the sides as you go around corners. The media setup with bluetooth connection to your phone. Steering wheel controls to let you control your phone, the music, or view real time car data. Then there’s the tyre-pressure sensors (which I’ve made far more use of than in previous vehicles), parking distance sensors and many more that make life in the car more comfortable. While I liked the control of the headset using the ‘joystick’ near the gear lever, the amount of buttons around the radio frustrated me, as everything you could do with them you could do with the joystick too, and I felt all the buttons unnecessary. Hands free voice calls were crisp and clear, and one contact even commented on better quality than when I normally speak to them.

Sunroof, yay!

Sunroof, yay!

There’s also the automatic windscreen wipers, which always seem one speed to slow, or just behind how fast I want them to work. They also give petrol attendants a fright when you forget to turn the ignition off when they wash your windscreen :) I actually wasn’t fond of the auto-adjusting brights either, as when you drive around town, the brights never come on, and there’s no way to force them on, so that was one thing I did disable.

Then there’s the handling. First thing I noticed was the lack of body roll, compared to my old Audi. Even compared to my dad’s ’01 Alfa 156, which was markedly better than my Audi, the Merc had very little. And when driving through a tight corner, this helps leaps and bounds with confidence when the whole car is not leaning outwards; and a big part of driving well is confidence. Further to this, the large 215/40R18 tyres provide plenty of grip, and when the grip runs out the active Electronic Stability Program is always only split seconds away, and relatively easy to activate if one wants it. Floor the accelerator, traction control kicks in after a brief moment of wheel spin. Turn late in a corner, flashing light on the dashboard lets you know the car has better things to do with it’s time. Add a bit of rain and wet roads to the scenario and the light is sure to flash. I did a fair bit of distance on dirt roads too, and the car handled these with grace and poise. Even when the roads weren’t in the greatest condition the ride was comfortable at 60kmph and only the odd pothole resulting in a slight cringe. And to top it all off, nice big disc brakes let you slow down as fast as you sped up.

from the back

Another big change for me was the switch from a manual to an automatic. I’d never been particularly fond of automatics previously, and my opinion hasn’t changed that much, I still prefer a manual. Automatics certainly do have advantages, they are much easier to drive. In traffic, or even on the long road, it’s one less thing to think about. What I didn’t like is not being in the right gear at the right time. Both for overtaking, going through corners, and my least favourite, going over speed bumps. Even in sports mode I found the time delay between down shifts after I accelerate hard to be slower than I was comfortable with, once the car realised what I was intending to do then it got going, and got there fast, but the delay annoyed me. This can be alleviated by using the ‘manual’ gear selection option, but I didn’t find this as comfortable as I’d like. Going over speedbumps annoyed me, as in a manual I’m usually quite friendly with engine braking so that when I go over a speedbump the revs have climbed a bit and I can accelerate comfortably after the speedbump in the right gear and right speed. In the automatic I’d always brake arriving at the speedbump, but then never got the acceleration quite right after the speedbump and the car always felt like it was accelerating faster than necessary, I don’t know if this is specific to the automatic or if the engine power was maybe partly to blame as well.

Other things to note on the car… The stop-start feature where the engine turns off at robots and such is a bit offputting at first, but one gets used to it, and doesn’t really impact use of the vehicle. The front seatbelts try to ‘strangle’ you, as my girlfriend put it, whenever you get into the car, part of one of the safety features. The 18″ tyres in this car mean you don’t get a full-size spare, but a biscuit instead. This isn’t the end of the world, but in my 3 months I ended up with 5 punctures in the tyres. Only 1 of them resulted in a tyre change, the rest were all nice bolts (3 of which I picked up at work) which lodged themselves in the tyres. That was a bit frustrating. The foot activated hand brake was also a new experience, And I found it odd that no matter how hard I pushed it down, the car always had a slight roll before stopping.

Dirt roads

Dirt roads

One last thing I would like to mention is the fuel economy. I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be great. But before I got the car I looked it up in CAR magazine, and it gave mixed figures from their testing of 8.2l/100km. I was pretty shocked, and it raised my expectations a bit. But wrongly so. I did a fair amount of long road driving where I wasn’t pushing it, and I managed a best of 8.7l/100km, averaging about 10l/100km on the open road. Round town however was really not great. Take note that I also do 10-20km at work everyday, where I drive 2km at 30kmph, stop for a bit and then drive back, not exactly helping consumption, but still I was averaging 14l/100km. In total I tracked 8884km of driving, of which 6000km of it was ‘open road’ driving. My average consumption 10.4l/100km, a far cry from the claimed 8.2. This is just part of the deal of driving a high performance car, and not a complaint per se, I just don’t like the claimed values.

It’s difficult for me to say how good the car is. The only real comparison I have is to the 17 year old Audi I’ve been driving for the past 4 years, and isn’t really a comparison of other currently available cars. The 3.5l engine definitely had an impact on my enjoyment level of the car, I don’t think it would have been the same had I been given the 1.8 but that shouldn’t detract from the well built, comfortable and beautiful car that the W204 Mercedes-Benz C-Class is.

How could our calendar be better?

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We have a very set calendar. The whole world works on it. There’s not much we can do about this now, but what if we wanted to, what if we wanted to structure it better? I got into a conversation recently, and I noted how convenient it was discussing dates in March, while in February, ’cause February is a beautiful 28 days long this year, 28 days = 4 weeks, which means that if the 11th of February is a Tuesday, the 11th of March will be one too, this can be convenient. The conversation progressed and a new calendar was born.

Our current Gregorian calendar has pretty much been in place since the 1500s,  based on the rotation of the Earth around the sun and some historical factors. The Gregorian calendar had but a few minor alterations on the Julian calendar which had been in force since BC times. I would never suggest changing too much, start small, but don’t try break everything at once.

A year is 365 days long 3/4 times, roughly. We keep the leap system, it’s a great approximation, doesn’t need any messing with and the year numbering system won’t be of any concern for us for a very long time. Months however, that’s where things start getting annoying. They’re all different lengths. But why. Some people give offhand comments to the Lunar cycles, I don’t really care.

365 is an awkward number, however, take a day off and you get 364. Know what 364 factors into nicely? 7. That’s right. How convenient is that. So my proposition is  52 weeks of 7 days with an extra day. That’s not really at all different to how we currently function though. My first goal is to take that extra day, and instead of designating it Monday or Tuesday, it will be called New Years Day. Some people will recognise it as a holiday, others not, either way, it won’t be a day in the week, it will just be a day. That way you can have the start of each year starting on the same day. 31 December is a Sunday, then we have new years day, then we have 1 January which is a Monday.

But this doesn’t help that much; now we have 52 weeks. Know what 52 divides into nicely? That’s right, 4. Exactly 4 weeks per month. I propose 13 months of 4 weeks each. This means that every month, if the 1st is a Monday, the 1st of the next month will be one too. How cool is that. No more hassles about figuring out what the date of the weekend in May is, it’s the same date as the one in April. So this is easy enough, all you need is to think up the name of our new 13th month and chuck it in somewhere.

One thing I’ve neglected is our balancing leap years. To solve this problem without stuffing up our calendars, I propose a 2nd New Year’s day. It can either be placed directly after our current New Year’s day, or we can place it at an arbitrary point in the year, where ever we want.

Now as great as my idea is, it does have some downfalls/drawbacks. The biggest of which is the honouring of birthdays or other significant dates. But this isn’t too much of an issue. For most events, it’s the date itself that is important, not where it falls in the year. various countries days’ of independence, the 27th of April is the date that is important, not that it falls 117 days into the year. Events where the time of year is important, such as Easter, are anyway calculated anew each year.

The only major impact comes in the form of dates which will no longer exist. The 29th of April for example. There best way to handle this in my opinion is to move all of these dates to the new month, as it will be bare and boring. So anything (this includes birthdays (may affect ID numbers)) occurring on 29-31 Jan will now occur on 1-3 <insert awesome new month name here>, 29-31 March will become 4-6 of the same month. Easy, besides some historically important dates, but if we have a look at the following xkcd, we can see that in general earlier dates are more interesting:

http://xkcd.com/1140/

http://xkcd.com/1140/

So to summarise.

  • Year begins on New Year’s Day, which is not part of the week.
  • After New Year’s Day is the 1st of January
  • The year is made up of 13 months of 28 days each.
  • During Leap years an additional ‘New Year’s Day’ is added to the calendar

I propose that we start this new calendar at the beginning of 2018. This will be a Monday, and although it’s the second day of the year, will follow on from Sunday 31 Dec 2017. This gives us plenty of time to sort out all the niggles, print the new calendars and start teaching our children the better way. It will make our lives easier I’m sure :)

Once we get this right maybe we can get a start on decimalising time.

EDIT: Apparently I’m not the first to consider this. Roman Mars of 99% Invisible did a podcast about the calendar recently discussing some of the early proposers of such a calender. Give it a listen here.

Driving Licence system in South Africa

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The driving licence system in South African went through an overhaul in 1998 from the old system to the new system. While there have been tweaks to the system over the years, for the majority it’s stayed the same. Here’s a quick summary of the current system, with equivalent codes from the old system.

When the new system was implemented, everyone who had an old licence of the form Code 8, Code 12 etc. was given an equivalent licence in the new letter format, eg. B, EC etc. To this day people still often refer to having a code 12 licence, although the system is not used in practice.

Learner’s Licence
There are three main categories of licences. Light Motor Vehicles, Heavy Motor Vehicles and Motor Cycles. Before you can get either one of these licences, you must first write a learner’s licence exam. This is a 1 hour theory exam, to test your knowledge of the rules of the road. There are three different learner’s licences available, each one applying to a different vehicle class. These licences are:

Code 1: Motorcycles
Code 2: Light Motor Vehicles
Code 3: Heavy Motor Vehicles

A Heavy motor vehicle is considered any vehicle with a GVM over 3,500kg (3.5 tons), and a light motor vehicle anything below. There was talk 2 years ago about combining learners licences so as not to require people who already have a licence to rewrite their learner’s licence, but this was never passed. Currently a Learner’s Licence is valid for 2 years. Once you have a learner’s licence for a vehicle, you are free to drive that vehicle as long as there is a driver licenced for that vehicle in the passenger seat with you. You may drive on freeways, and have additional passengers. If you want to get your Driver’s Licence, you must apply so that your test occurs before your learner’s licence expires. If you have a learner’s licence for a motorcycle, you may drive by yourself (I’ve also heard you’re not allowed passengers, unsure).

You may only apply for a Code 2 Learner’s Licence if you are over the age of 17. For a Code 1 licence you may apply when you are 16 (limited to 125cc). I have heard that you must be 18 before applying for a Code 3 learner’s licence.

images

Driver’s Licence
For motorcycles there are two licences available. An A, and a A1 licence. An A1 licence you may hold from the age of 17, and is limited to motorcycles with an engine capacity of 125cc or less. You may only get an A licence once you turn 18, and permits you to drive any motorcycle.

Light motor vehicles have two classes. Either a B (old code 7) or an EB (old code 8). The B licence is the standard driver’s licence that most people get. It allows you to drive any Light Motor Vehicle and tow a trailer with a GVM less than 750kg. An EB licence is for the same class of vehicles, but allows you to tow trailers in excess of GVM 750kg. Most people who did their driver’s licence before 1998 were automatically upgraded to an EB licence, whereas most new drivers have only a B licence. This limits one from towing certain caravans and boats which can have GVMs higher than 750kg. You must be 18 years old before you take the test for an LMV licence.

Heavy Motor vehicles have four classes. A code C1 (former code 10) which is for vehicles with a GVM between 3.5 and 16 tons and a code C which is for vehicles with a GVM over 16 tons. Drivers with a code C1 licence are permitted to drive vehicles of class B. Drivers with a code C may drive vehicles covered by both the C1 and B codes.
A code EC1 licence holds the same rights as a C1 licence, but with the inclusion of trailers with a GVM in excess of 750 kg. Likewise an EC licence permits the driver to drive vehicles covered by a C licence with a trailer of GVM in excess of 750kg. The holder of an EC licence, in addition to vehicles covered by a C licence, may also drive EC1 vehicles.

In 2010 reports were issued that drivers who obtained a Heavy Duty Vehicle Licence after January 2011 would not be permitted to drive light motor vehicles. This law was never passed.

To obtain a driver’s licence, you must hold the appropriate learner’s licence and do a practical test for driving that vehicle. The test comprises of a yard test (inclined start and alley docking. Additional three point turn and parallel parking for LMV and additional straight reverse for HMVs). As well as an on the road test, generally along preset routes in general traffic. For each of these you must follow practices specified by the K53 defensive driving system, which has many critics. It is advised that anyone attempting to pass a driving test in South Africa first go for driving lessons with an accredited driving school.

A South African Driver’s Licence must be renewed every 5 years.

SA Driver's Licence

SA Driver’s Licence
Rear and Front

Professional Driver’s Licence
Anyone who wants to drive a motor vehicle for reward (taxi, deliveryman etc.) or anyone driving a Goods Vehicle, or Vehicle able to transport more than 11 people must hold a Professional Driver’s Permit. See my article here for more information. A standard PrDP licence is valid for 2 years.

Other things to note
It is possible to hold a licence which is valid for both an LMV or HMV as well as a motorcycle. You will be issued with one card which displays the separate restrictions, dates etc. for each.
Whatever vehicle you do your licence in will be the vehicle that you are given a licence for. If you drive an automatic vehicle, you will not be permitted to drive manual vehicles.
Whenever you renew your driver’s licence you will be required to do an eye test, this test will dictate whether you are required to drive a vehicle with or without glasses.
A South African Driver’s licence is in the shape of a credit card. Pre-1998, driver’s licences were included in your ID book.
Go here to view a table comparing the old and the current driver’s licence codes.

Most of the information here I posted from memory. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, if uncertain, please contact your local Traffic Department for assistance.
Source: General Knowledge and the National Road Traffic Act.

Samsung Galaxy S4 Woes and FNB

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Earlier this year I switched to FNB as my main bank. Transition was fairly uneventful. When the Galaxy S4 was released a month or two later, the bank offered it in tandem with a CellC 100 package at a discounted rate, and I decided to try it out.

The major issue for me in these dealings was the lack of store. FNB mobile services are all handled over the phone/internet and devices are delivered. This is a particular hassle as I had to be there in person to collect the package when it arrived at work. Not easy due to where I work and the type of work I do. Anyway.

Received the phone 3 days after scheduled delivery and two phone calls, due to a variety of issues mainly, in my opinion, a lazy delivery man. In any case, Success!

geek.com

geek.com

Get home, start up, all good. Connect to wifi, start fiddling. Wifi disconnects… try reconnect, can’t see any APs. Minute later phone reconnects, only to disconnect 10s later… Try everything to get it to work properly, no luck, google issue. People mention certain routers have been known to cause this issue, try out suggested tips. No luck. Go to friend’s house, another friend’s house, Cell-C shop. All WiFi APs result in same problem.

Cell-C won’t take the phone as it came from FNB, phone Samsung SA, they tell me I can take it to service shop where I live. Take it to them, they won’t take it cause it’s still within 7 day return period. Phone FNB, they say no problem they’ll come and collect it. Again, it’s a hassle for me trying to organise collection when I’m available. Anyway, few days later, phone gets collected, probably a week or so after I got the phone.

Another issue was that The CellC simcard I got with the phone wasn’t registering on the network. CellC said that I must speak to FNB, FNB people I contacted (apparently not the correct ones) said I should phone CellC customer care, who were equally helpless. In any case I decided to leave this until I got my phone back. A week after I first received my phone I received an email which told me the sim card would automatically register after 2 days.

So another week later I get a phonecall to say my new phone is going to be delivered to me. Cue another hassle of trying to get phone delivered when I’m available. New phone works 100%, sim-card is registered, everything’s going well.

Two months down the line and my battery life seems to be suffering, lasting me from 06h00 – 20h00 with moderate use, used to be go in excess of 24 hours without requiring a charge. One day my phone was on 70% battery, drops to 0%, restarts itself a couple times, stays off. Open case and take out battery, battery looks swollen :x

Think to myself what a schlep this is going to be going through FNB again, taking my phone etc. Will be without a phone that can take a micro-SIM. Anyway, decide to go straight to local Samsung support shop, walk in, they go in to the back come out with a brand new battery, slot it in and I’m good to go again.

Although I haven’t heard of other people with the same Wi-Fi problem as me, many people are starting to complain about the battery swelling. The battery has a 6 month guarantee, so I’m hoping my next battery lasts. No idea if this is a phone or battery issue. Time will tell.