Post Your Car!

[patrick]

I know it’s been a while since I’ve come around and visited SG again but I thought I’d update y’all on my car. Recently I’ve been searching for a new car. I previously had a 2015 BMW 338i xDrive that I got around 10 months ago. I bought this car with 89k miles, and regret getting it at such high mileage. Ever since I started driving, there were problems after problems. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the BMW, but I just wanted to get something newer with less miles. Over the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been searching for a new car when I came across an Alfa Romeo Giulia. I fell in love with the cars look and details. I found a model that I liked and went to test drive it and loved the car so much that I decided to buy it that day. Yesterday I finalized the trade in on my BMW and picked up the car.

 

 

I ended up purchasing a 2018 Alfa Romeo Giulia TI LUSSO with 25k miles. I absolutely love the car so far and enjoy driving it. In my opinion I think Alfa has the luxurious interior design down spot on. I think the interior is 100% better than the BMW and my sisters old Benz. Now I do have to say that I prefer BMWs driving style over the Alfa. BMW has the performance aspect down for sure. In the end I like the balance that Alfa has between the two. I know Alfa isn’t known for reliability but I’m going to ride the car out and see what happens.

[Strayyz]

1 hour ago, patrick said:

I know it’s been a while since I’ve come around and visited SG again but I thought I’d update y’all on my car. Recently I’ve been searching for a new car. I previously had a 2015 BMW 338i xDrive that I got around 10 months ago. I bought this car with 89k miles, and regret getting it at such high mileage. Ever since I started driving, there were problems after problems. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the BMW, but I just wanted to get something newer with less miles. Over the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been searching for a new car when I came across an Alfa Romeo Giulia. I fell in love with the cars look and details. I found a model that I liked and went to test drive it and loved the car so much that I decided to buy it that day. Yesterday I finalized the trade in on my BMW and picked up the car.

 

 

I ended up purchasing a 2018 Alfa Romeo Giulia TI LUSSO with 25k miles. I absolutely love the car so far and enjoy driving it. In my opinion I think Alfa has the luxurious interior design down spot on. I think the interior is 100% better than the BMW and my sisters old Benz. Now I do have to say that I prefer BMWs driving style over the Alfa. BMW has the performance aspect down for sure. In the end I like the balance that Alfa has between the two. I know Alfa isn’t known for reliability but I’m going to ride the car out and see what happens.

GOOD FUCKING SHIT PATRICK I FUCKING LOVE ALPHA ROMEROS 

[delirium]

17 hours ago, patrick said:

I know it’s been a while since I’ve come around and visited SG again but I thought I’d update y’all on my car. Recently I’ve been searching for a new car. I previously had a 2015 BMW 338i xDrive that I got around 10 months ago. I bought this car with 89k miles, and regret getting it at such high mileage. Ever since I started driving, there were problems after problems. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the BMW, but I just wanted to get something newer with less miles. Over the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been searching for a new car when I came across an Alfa Romeo Giulia. I fell in love with the cars look and details. I found a model that I liked and went to test drive it and loved the car so much that I decided to buy it that day. Yesterday I finalized the trade in on my BMW and picked up the car.

 

 

I ended up purchasing a 2018 Alfa Romeo Giulia TI LUSSO with 25k miles. I absolutely love the car so far and enjoy driving it. In my opinion I think Alfa has the luxurious interior design down spot on. I think the interior is 100% better than the BMW and my sisters old Benz. Now I do have to say that I prefer BMWs driving style over the Alfa. BMW has the performance aspect down for sure. In the end I like the balance that Alfa has between the two. I know Alfa isn’t known for reliability but I’m going to ride the car out and see what happens.

Nice car but maintenance will be a bitch (you’re comfortable with that coming from a BMW) and they have a reputation for being pretty unreliable past 60-70k. Co worker has that exact same car though and hasn’t had any problems

[patrick]

8 minutes ago, delirium said:

Nice car but maintenance will be a bitch (you’re comfortable with that coming from a BMW) and they have a reputation for being pretty unreliable past 60-70k. Co worker has that exact same car though and hasn’t had any problems

Yeah, most European cars typically start hitting your wallet with issues past the 60-70k mile mark. I was aware of that with the BMW but just didn't think anything of it. It was also sort of a shitty model and not well taken care of so that factored into the issues I had. I know Alfa's are not known for reliability but I am taking on that responsibility because I've got faith lol. This is why I also decided to buy at lower milage, 25k. Itll be a blast modding the car and being able to drive it as a daily. We will see what happens. I assume similar issues that I had with the beamer will arise with the alfa too. Only thing I've noticed so far is that sharp steering under 10Mph makes a jittery scraping feeling. I think its fine though because I looked it up and every single resource has said that it's normal to happen on all Alfa's because of the Ackermann steering style.

[patrick]

 

Last post, took this interior pic on the way home from the gym. Thought it looked great

[John]

hi guys. not much of an update. i just bought a little trunk lip i've been wanting. installed it this morning and i like the way it looks a lot. i also have some other pics i want to share but i'll share pics of the new lip first. i didn't take any pics this morning like a dumbass so i only have some night pics. hopefully they're good. i tried my best

 

i got a new job with a pretty signification pay raise ($$$$) so im thinking of buying a new car by summer time. i got my eyes on a veloster n, elantra n, or gr86. leaning towards the veloster n but it's hard because i want all three. the gr86 is beautiful and i would get it in red but the veloster n is just so damn great. sounds great, drives great, 275 horsepower, it makes amazing turbo noises haha. i have also been wanting one for a long time so maybe you guys will see a post this summer of me with my veloster n. maybe, maybe not. we'll see

 

 

here are some pics that dont have the lip but i took them recently and like them :3

 

 

 

[John]

Hi. I ordered a spare ECU tune from SXTH Element on April 17th. I wrote extensively about it in this thread. It finally came in on June 23rd and I spared no time installing it. I got home and instantly ripped the box apart, took my old ecu out, and put this one in. I christened the car with a fresh tank of 93 and drove around for about 70 miles that night. It was very very very fun I think simply because it made the car feel so much more alive. I loved my car before the tune and it had its quirks but it's so much better with the tune. Around 3,000-4,000 RPM in 4th gear with my foot to the floor, it's like the tune overboosts the car and it just launches. I gotta set up my phone and OBD scanner to log some diagnostics one day. I have been having way too much fun and I'm surprised I haven't blown the car up yet. There are people who have driven on cars with SXTH Element tunes for well over 30k miles with a lot more complicated upgrades than mine. Stuffed turbos, Veloster N turbo swaps, some sketchy shit and they've had no issues. So I have no fears for the time being. With the tune I had the option of going with pops and bangs, pops and gurgles, or none. My car pre tune already gurgled a decent amount but rarely popped. I opted for the pops and gurgles because pops and bangs is ignorant. Not saying pops isn't ignorant because it absolutely is. I hate pop tunes but this is slowly growing on me. What I like is that if I'm just driving normally the car won't pop. It only pops if I let off the gas high up in the RPMs. I really really despise people in BMWs who are popping and farting at like 15mph. At this point, I have a couple thousands of dollars in mods and the car is exactly where I want it to be. Not sure exactly how much horsepower I'm pushing now but if I were to base it off of other people with very similar mods I'd say around 230-240. I think I might be a bit generous with that number but my butt dyno tells me around 230. 200 to 230 reliably isn't bad. Oh one more thing, I spent a couple hours yesterday installing a new Pierburg wastegate solenoid that will help eliminate fluttering and surging. It has been working pretty good. I took a couple of videos but it's kinda hard to convey the difference. I also really need to get an external microphone for my gopro but it's a bit expensive. I'm also going to suction cup my gopro near the exhaust some day for a vid of that.

 

 

I think that's all I got to say about the tune. The next day after I put the new ECU in, I hit a gnarly pothole on the highway going around 70. I instantly knew I fucked something up because my steering wheel was cocked. I got to work and saw that my front left tire got a bubble in the sidewall. I got the tire replaced and an alignment but now it sounds like someone stuck a rubber duck in my suspension. I gotta get it fixed. Here's a list of what I've done to the car so far. 

 

SXTH Element Short Ram Intake
SXTH Element Intercooler Resonator Delete Pipe
SXTH Element Axleback Exhaust
SXTH Element Oil Catch Can
SXTH Element Tune
Pierburg Wastegate Solenoid
HKS M45XL

 

As much as I love this car and after everything I've just said praising it, I'm already looking for my next. I always have been and I always will. I plan to keep this car for another year or two. I don't think I'll get bored of it any time soon but I would like to own a variety of cars. I'm still considering an Elantra N or Veloster N but I also have been looking at the new GR86 for the last couple of months. Besides the shit gas mileage it gets, I would love to own one. Especially in the red color that Toyota offers. Other than that I've been considering Golf GTIs or maybe a Golf R. At the top of my list currently is a 2018 WRX. The WRX is a car that I've always loves since a child up until now and I will definitely want to own one at some point. I like the look of the 2018 WRX and they're priced pretty fairly right now. I can go buy a base WRX for 25k right now. Maybe my mind will change in a year or two from now or maybe I'll hit it big with my business and I'll be able to just get a new car without replacing my current one

[John]

Got off my ass and set up my gopro and suction mount.

 

 

I put timestamps in the description but I'll just copy and paste them here:

 

0:00 Coldstart
0:39 Heard a loud clunk when putting it into reverse. Normal driving with gurgles
2:58 Short acceleration
3:19 Short acceleration with gurgles
3:46 Pull with pops and gurgles
4:23 Harder pull with louder pops and gurgles
4:51 Tunnel pull with pops and gurgles
5:05 Small pull with pops and gurgles
5:36 Downshifts with harder pull and louder pops
6:11 Normal driving and turbo spooling noises

 

Some pictures I took after washing it today.

 

[Gator]

Traded in the golf and picked up this bad boy.

 

[John]

hiiiiiiii. I've been wanting to make a post in here for a while but I kept forgetting. I'm bored and I would like to write a little so I have some words and a lot of pictures to share. I've done quite a bit since my last update. Most notably: ordered and installed a new big FMIC on my ES and upgraded my tune.

 

The 2017-2018 Elantra Sports are held back a bit by their small intercoolers which causes the engine to heatsoak rather quickly, more so when you're pretty deep into mods. I could probably enjoy the car for thirty minutes before it would start heatsoaking and then it would kind of fall off its face for a bit. I had my eyes on the SXTH Element FMIC kit for a while so I went ahead and ordered it. It comes with a hot pipe upgrade which I wanted to do anyways. I decided to also upgrade my tune by 1 stage to match with my new FMIC. Tune "stages" are silly to me because they differ for every car. With the stage 2 tune, they advanced the timing a bit more and brought my target boost up to 22 PSI. I don't remember exactly what else. The car was fun before but it is a lot more fun now with the FMIC, upgraded hot pipe, and new tune. Haven't heatsoaked since and the car rips for hours. The new FMIC is MASSIVE compared to the old one. I was really happy with the quality. It felt super weird and I hated taking the front bumper off lol. I'll share some exhaust clips and pictures of the intercooler install. 

 

 

I tried searching for a 2nd car to buy for a couple weeks but gave up after not being able to find much or getting bad luck with sellers. I tried to buy the following:

 

2000 Civic Hatchback w/ B20 swap - Owner kept on ghosting me even though I was waving money in his face.

1990 Civic Hatchback w/ D16Z6 swap - Someone else got to it literally minutes before me. Would have been great to buy.

1999 Acura Integra w/ B20 swap - Talked to this guy for a week. Pretty much agreed to buy this thing sight unseen. It was the day before I was going to drive an hour and a half to buy it when I noticed the listing was marked as sold. He sold it to someone the day before for the same price I was going to pay. Really didn't understand that.

2006 Saab 9-3 Turbo - Idk what it was that attracted me but I really liked it and I wanted to buy it but when I went to check it out, it was in much rougher shape than the pictures showed. Passed on it.

2002-2004 Ford Focus SVT - I wanted to buy one of these and I still do but I decided to put it to the side for now.

 

I'm just going to save that money I was going to spend instead of buying a 2nd car. I did end up buying coilovers for my Elantra Sport literally like 30 minutes ago. I can't wait to put them in. Oh, one of my good friends ended up also buying a 2018 Elantra Sport because he loved mine so much. It has been fun driving around with him. Here are some pics from the last couple of months that I want to share. There's a lot:

 

 

As for the Foxbody. I bought my dad a nice Hurst short throw shifter kit for Christmas and I installed it back in January. It sucks working on a car from 1993 that has lived on the East Coast its entire life haha. The new shifter feels much better and actually makes driving the car enjoyable. 

 

 

I'll make another post when I install the coilovers. Thanks for reading