Driving the company's Hyundai Elantra

As of November 1st, I will be using the Hyundai Elantra instead of my trusty (and fun-to-drive) Proton Satria. First of all, I was not very receptive to the idea of driving this car as the previous (original) owner gave the general impression that it was a gas guzzler and also expensive to maintain. However, orders are orders. How the car came to be, is not of importance because if I were to explain, it would only add fuel to the fire.

I have test driven this car before, on my last trip to Ipoh. And from that day, I drove it most of the time. And so, my reluctance to handle this car sort of faded as I came to realise that its not such a bad car after all, even though its Korean. Most importantly, it has air-conditioning, something which is a must for me because my Boss already sensed that it must be ME who go into customer premises full of sweat, catching cold and go into serious MC. (Ha ha)

Anyway, once set the tire pressure, the car's fuel consumption changed drastically. For RM50, it was giving me anything from 150 to 180KM, similar to the van. But just as of yesterday, I upped the pressure from 32 to 38PSI, I noticed the fuel gauge running quite well. Still, I will get the result in a few day's time, no thanks to the 17" low profile tires. I suppose yesterday's service of oil change and filter did help a bit. The foreman also have his own opinion about Korean cars, especially the Elantra which has a very big and heavy body: good and stable but the engine's not powerful enough. Anyway, on to the car....

Trust me when I say the car has not been properly maintained
for months. It has been parked under the Sun too.

You can see the dark streaks of dried water after I tried to clean
the mirror as I have not started toclean the car yet.

As you can see, the front part of the car looked as if it had
gone through a lot of high speed adventures. The lower
fron bumper lip (a fibre-glass add on) is badly scraped.
And then there is the heart-wrenching gash on the
side panel (near the lights) where an ex-staff had
problems with the brakes and hit a 4x4's bumper

Even the front plastic lens of the lights are in very bad condition

Most of the car's area have small spots of rusts and some of them
are like small pin pricks. But this one is the worst of all.

And this one is at the rear of the boot. Still, Boss promised me that
he will send the car for a new coat of paint and reconditon it too.
But until then, I hae to make sure no more rusts.

The internal cabin of the car boasts of modest creature comforts. There
is also the temperemental clock which shows you the time when you do
not drive the car over a hump. And the state of the art entertainment
system which has stealth capabilities. I cannot show you because we
still cannot locate and disable the "invisible mode" button. What I do
like about the dash here is the small slot for you to insert either a toll
or parking ticket. For bigger tickets, you jsut have to fold it in half
and hope they will still accept the ticket at the exit.

Here, the state of the art mylar (tranparent plastic) speakers can
be seen at the door. As it is connected to the audio system, it has
gone invisible too.

And at the boot, you can even see the 5-disc CD changer along with the
ultra powerful 6x9 speakers. Now, the only thing missing is the big
sub-woofer system. But in reality, the owner has taken all these away
during his "escape", "Can you let me have the car for a few days to
settle my things?" And this is the result. Although he promised to
brng back the original stereo, its more than a year and my Boss
does not know that the speakers are missing too. I will have to
tell him sooner or later. But this does tell a story of how
Honorable he is.

What he hit, I am not sure but this happened long ago.
To get it fixed, it would cost a bit and since its not
life-threatening or anything, I'll let it be for the moment

[Update: 04.11.2008]
My Boss knew about the missing head unit and the speakers. So, he is tasking me to do them up again. But I have to ask him for a budget. Most probably it would be a trip to the junkyard for the speakers, my techs would lay the cables and I would scout for a El cheapo DVD MP# player with USB and/or SD card interface. Muahahahahaah!