It Means 'To Launch' in French

Watch out folks, this post will not be about grad school. *Gasp*

You should also watch out because I will be hitting the road much more often in (Cue The Price is Right Voice:) my new car! It's been a week ago now since I got a brand new 2011 Mitsubishi Lancer. This thing was so new that I was literally the first one to drive it more than just a few feet. I turned the key and it had 000002 miles on it. Now it has more like 000050.


As you can see, the car is bright blue and currently has the tassels I wore for both my high school graduation 5 years ago and my college graduation 8 months ago. Also, once I get a real license plate and not the dinky piece of cardboard with the dealers name on it, I'm going to apply my BYU Alumni license plate frame as well.

There are a couple of reasons that I went with a car that has literally zero percent American content and was shipped whole over the Pacific from a factory in Japan. The first is that this car has very aggressive styling. Most compact cars have more feminine designs and when I see a man driving one, I can't help but think, "Oh my gosh! Somebody looks FABULOUS!!!!!" The Lancer is by far the most masculine-looking compact car that I could find. The second reason is that Mitsubishi is tremendously confident in their vehicles. They are so confident, in fact, that they offer a 5-year, 60,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty and a 10-year, 100,000-mile powertrain warranty. If this car ends up sucking, it's going to be Mitsubishi that foots the bill and not me.

This car has a 122-cubic-inch, variable valve timing inline-4 engine that's rated for 148 horsepower at 6,000 rpm. I'm certainly not going to be testing that rating any time soon because the redline is 6,500 rpm and engine isn't even close to being broken in yet. I test drove both the continuously variable transmission (CVT) that Mitsubishi offers and the manual transmission. When I drove the CVT, it seemed that, instead of making a true CVT, Mitsubishi went for a really unresponsive automatic. The tach on that car was bouncing around like a Jack Russell Terrier on meth. Needless to say, I did not like that experience and elected to get the manual transmission instead. The clutch on this car has a lot more pull than the ones I'm used to. Both my mom's and dad's cars had a fairly stiff clutch with about 1-2 inches of pull. This one is pretty loose with about 6 inches of pull. It was interesting to drive at first, but after I got used to it, it was dang smooth.

Now all that's left is to come up with a new excuse to not go on dates. ;D j/k