I’m always fascinated what hides behind some of the doors you see every day. And most of the time you wouldn’t expect anything special behind a random barn-door.
That’s exactly what happened when i bought a microfiche reader for my old Datsun fiches from a Lady online. I went to pick it up last saturday and already was impressed by the nice, old toyota pickup in the entrance. Then the lady opened the gates to her garage and boy – i didn’t expect that! She used to work at a toyota dealership and had around 10-12 Vintage toyotas in various states, but most of them looked pretty serious and the selection of cars were excellent too!  She also had a nice range of toyota memorabilia and workshop tools and from what i understand she’s fixing those old cars all herself!

I was a bit in a hurry so i didn’t really have time to talk and look at the cars, but i promised to come back. What a collection. there was an office full of old Manuals and parts catalogues and she told me there’s a big spare-parts stock somewhere too. wow!

When i returned home, today i had to fix the two microfiche readers first and give them a proper clean, Had to glue back the mirrors and optical system and replace one of the bulbs.

And then finally both of them came back to life. Not that i really need them. i have the digital copy of the parts manuals too, but what’s the point of owning all thos old microfiches if you can’t even show them to someone, right? 🙂

They also came with a free set of various old Daihatsu microfiches. I don’t really have a useage for them, so i will go through them and put them for sale soon. I’m pretty sure somewhere in the world, someone is looking for exactly these old Daihatsu microfiches 🙂

My wife wants to buy a “faster” car, since her current mazda3 is a bit slower compared to her previous seat Leon Cupra. With the new house with photovoltaic system and everything we also thought about smart electric solutions, and mazda just came up with the fully electric MX-30 recently we thought we should have a look at it. So we went for a test drive at our local Mazda dealer today and had two hours to thoroughly test it…

In my opinion Mazda is currently the only car maker that not only makes vehicles and / or “sports cars”, but manages to make the standard car to a lifestlye-object. something wich many other automakers fail in my opinion. Sportscars aside, it’s not cool to drive any average daily Nissan / Toyota / Honda in my opinion. They look shit or boring, they’re nothing special and theres nothing about them which makes you want to have them.

Mazda however has beautifully designed cars with smart features. The MX-30 has a beautifully different interieur made out of recycled PET bottles and cork, reminding of Mazdays history when they where a Cork factory in the very beginning.

The acceleration is great, as usual with electric cars. But compared to teslas and others, the motors  have been kept small to have a better daily useability and to save battery power. In my opinion it is leaning more towards smart and daily useage over the crazy number which others often have. With my wives current driving we would need to charge it approximately once a week. so we’re not even sure if we need the additional photovoltaic system battery wall package to really get a smart use from it. Over all i was surprised how smooth everything works and i have to admit it definitely is a great car with nice and comfortable handling. We have to rethink and calculate everything first and let everything sink for a while before we decide. But even if i’m a petrolhead and like the oldschool rattling mechanics of an fuel powered engine, i work with electric motors in daily life since many years and i’m not afraid to have a fully electric car in the garage too and the idea has definitely been growing on me since a few months so we’ll see what the future brings…