Driving the Renault Koleos

Australia Travelog #45
SYD Airport - Sun, 31 Dec 2023, 11am

We're back at Sydney Airport now, awaiting our flight home this afternoon. The drive here was fairly uneventful. So was the process of returning our rental car— which I drove now a total of over 700km in the wrong-side-of-the-road driving environment of Australia. As I noted previously (see linked blog) driving on the wrong side wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. But how was our rental car, the Renault Koleos? Well, after several days and 700km here are my/our thoughts:



I will start with the negatives. There are a lot of things we disliked about this car.

1. Apple CarPlay integration was buggy. It refused to connect for ~45 minutes on the first day as the whole infotainment got ridiculously unresponsive and ultimately rebooted itself.


2. Continuously variable transmission is very loud. At highway speed it drones like a jet engine. On the first day I worried the car had some mechanical problem and would break down on us. Unclear if this is terrible design or just a maintenance issue.


3. Poor acceleration.


4. Irritating nav system voice warnings that cannot be turned off without also disabling Apple CarPlay voice instructions.


5. Fake SUV (no AWD/4wd). This is especially weird in Australia where we noticed lots of other SUVs with not just 4x4 drivetrains but also factory-installed snorkels. (You only see these on extreme after-market modified rigs in the US.)


6. Four small cup holders. Even a slender, Australian-sized drink can doesn't fit in two of them. Why not offer 2 reasonably sized slots instead of 4 undersized ones?


7. Worst implementation of cruise control I've seen in a car manufactured since 1983. It has a major hysteresis problem. It would fail to maintain speed on any kind of uphill, dropping 5 km/h below the target, then "downshift" aggressively and overshoot the target speed by 5 km/h. Repeatedly.


8. Poor gas mileage considering how weeny the powertrain is. It got the US equivalent of 22 mpg in mostly highway driving. A Jeep Grand Cherokee we rented in the US a few months ago did better.

Things we liked about the car:

1. The SUV body style (even without the SUV traction of AWD) gave us a comfortable seating position and ease of stowing bags in the back.


2. It has heated seats.

Yeah, a much shorter list of positives than negatives. Good riddance to this French piece of crap.

Airport Shopping Mall. Brunch in the SilverKris Club

Australia Travelog #46
SYD Airport - Sun, 31 Dec 2023, 1pm

We arrived at Sydney Airport just fine this morning. Days before starting the trip we rebooked our return from a noon flight to 2pm, which gave us an extra 2 hours. (Yes, United Airlines runs two flights a day each way between SF and Sydney!) Strictly speaking we didn't need those extra 2 hours, but it sure has made today more relaxing. We were unrushed packing our bags this morning, unrushed driving back to Sydney, unrushed returning the car, and unrushed navigating through the airport— which is nice, because SYD airport is basically a huge high-end shopping mall with all the gates hidden at the far ends. We had to basically walk through 5 stores and a mile of corridors to get to our gate.

Except we didn't go directly to our gate. We went to... the flyer lounge above it. It's one of the benefits of my Million Mile status with United Airlines that I get to use the lounge when flying internationally. The other benefit is getting to select United's Economy Plus seats when flying. They provide a few extra inches of leg room. (Man, ten years later Million Mile is still paying dividends!)

Now, there isn't a United lounge here at SYD, but there are two partner lounges I could use, Singapore Airlines and Thai. I asked the gate agent at check-in which she thinks is nicer.

The agent paused as she made a pained look. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe try asking at each one to take a look inside before you commit."

Oookay.... Well, that sounded like too much work, so I picked Singapore based on its sterling reputation for premium class service.

So. Much. Wine.

I'm not sure that the service here today is what I'd call sterling, though at this point I've had so many glasses of complimentary wine I'm getting a bit fuzzy on what that would mean anyway. 🤣

The wine's pretty good. And there are several choices. I started off with a glass of prosecco. It seemed like a good brunch-y wine to sip while I decided what I wanted to eat for brunch around 10:30 when we arrived. It turned out to go really well with the steamed dumplings. I had a few dumplings... and a few more glasses of wine. 😋

Then I noticed there was sausage. I'm not a huge fan of breakfast sausage, especially when there are fresh dumplings— a common enough Asian breakfast/brunch thing. But the tag said these were lamb dumplings. Hmm, I haven't had lamb sausage before, I thought. I tried one. And I knew I'd have to drink a different wine with it. I mean, prosecco... with red meat?! Uncultured. 🤣 So I poured half glasses of both an Australian Merlot and Shiraz.

It turned out the lamb sausage was amazing. I went back for a few more pieces of it. I also went back for another glass or two of the Shiraz, the better of the two red wines I tried.

Later they replaced the brunch spread with a lunch spread. I got a little more food there. I don't even remember what it was now. I've had too many glasses of wine! And now it's time to head to our gate.

Pre-gaming the flight... the only way to fly!

Earning Six Figures and Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Last week I posted about The $500 Challenge, the report from a recent study that 63% of US workers can't afford a $500 emergency expense. That 63% figure wasn't the only thing the study said. It also found that more than one-third, 35%, of people earning $100,000 or more said they are still living paycheck to paycheck.

I am totally not surprised by the statistic about six-figure strugglers. It's basically the same thing as HENRYs (High Earners Not Rich Yet) from several years ago, but today more people are facing the conundrum. Here are three reasons why:

1) Traditional benchmarks of wealth don't mean what they used to. Once upon a time "millionaire" indicated a person who didn't need to work, owned a mansion, and led a life of wealth and leisure. That popular cultural notion is based on the economy of 70-100 years ago, though. Nowadays, after decades of inflation, almost 9% of US adults are millionaires, and where I live, a million bucks buys barely half a modest, 3-bedroom family home. Similarly, the notion of a "six figure salary" denoting an affluent person is about 25 years old and it, too, doesn't mean as much as it used to. In the most expensive US cities a salary of only $100,000 leaves you pretty skint if you're supporting a family on it.

2) A few years of high inflation has taken a bite. Real inflation the past few years has been serious. Overall inflation rates are not-bad seeming figures like 5% a year. The thing is some categories of goods and services have seen way higher inflation. And those are the things the working class spends a lot of their income on. Groceries are way up, for example. Just based on the things I regularly shop— and I shop Safeway, not places like Whole Foods, BTW— I've seen increases of 30%, 50%, even 100% over the past 3 years. Insurance has been rising more than 10% a year. Car insurance, home insurance, health insurance.

3) Lifestyle inflation is what opinion makers usually blame for people spending too much. The old green-eyed monster, envy, has always been around. Previous generations called it "Keeping up with the Joneses". Now it's about keeping up with the seemingly better-off people on Facebook, Instagram, and other sites. I agree lifestyle inflation is a real thing, and that social media has turbo charged it compared to how much it impacted previous generations— but I'd put it as the #3 cause, not #1.