Our new ride

[Sox]

Well, we've just decided to let our beloved BMW go because of the mileage.
So we needed to replace it with something cheapish at the moment as we haven't enough folding stuff for a TE50 or a Beemer 330 coupe.
An interim car was needed, and in steps an AU3 XR8.

Didn't have many to choose from within 500k's of where we live, 3 in fact, so made a few phone calls, discussed price, looked at one, and bought it.
It's Narooma blue, pretty standard, and in excellent condition.
Cloth trim, standard brakes.

The modifications it does have is -
Lowered springs.
A crappy dual 2.5" and then onto single 3" exhaust.
Tow hitch.
And save the best till last, lovely blue colour coding of the the smaller items on the dashboard. YUK!
Oh, and it had reasonable sized Alpine subwoofer system (which I promptly ripped out).

The engine performance is pretty disappointing, well, at least compared to my P250. By comparison, it's utterly gutless. In isolation, it's adequate and not even too bad across the midrange. Low end power is fairly weak, midrange is good, top end is adequate. It desperately needs the fancy exhaust which the yoot has.

The gearbox feel is typical T5, in that the shifter is all over the show, and bashing the gears in is sometimes needed.
Gearing is decent as is, with the ratios spaced well for it's power delivery.

Handling is quite good, a reasonable amount over and above the P250, particularly on poor surfaces. The yoot will bounce, jiggle and rattle ya teeth out on the wrong roads, whereas the sedan is still reasonably supple, without any wallowing. Body roll is higher, though the yoot has some pretty big bars underneath. A 27mm front bar should fix that.
Over the smooth stuff, there ain't much in it, with the yoot holding on better, but given it's big rubber, that's understandable.
Steering precision/directness is better with the sedan, obviously due to it's shorter wheelbase.

Brakes are worse than I have felt the standard setup feel. I suspect a decent set of pads will sort this out as they feel pretty wooden at normal speeds. Haven't experienced fade, however I know they can work better.

We paid $13200 for this unit with 82000k's, and we're so far pretty happy with it. It's no Beemer, but it's not bad.

Modifications I'd like to do in the near future is really only the exhaust, with the same magical hand made tri-y's from my mate in Blacktown.
Maybe throw some 18's on too, though I don't mind the standard Tickford rims.

Oh and getting rid of all the blue crap from within.