An earnest effort, an engineering marvel, a truly adult car for adults. A new direction for Gryphon Gear!
Over the past few months, we put our heads together and thought to ourselves, what does the world want in a car? The budget car market is becoming increasingly competitive, with increasingly more for less, with better efficiency, better drivability. Bells and whistles are now standard, and you’d be hard pressed to find a real market contender in the family car market that doesn’t have six airbags, TC, ABS, Bluetooth, digital file format compatibility, climate control, cruise control, reverse sensors or cameras, and so on and so forth. In addition, with generally higher gas prices the world around, a guzzler really hits the hip pocket, hence the demise of the large family sedans favoured by, in Australia, such manufacturers as Holden and Ford.
The world of Automation has several contenders in every single market, but if I were to highlight one particular well-known Automation company that embraced the philosophy of more for less, of sensibility, reliability and practicality rolled into one, it would be Žnoprešk Avto. While cheap, a Žnoprešk is unmistakable with its classic European lashings and authoritative square lines, its corporate image.
You see, I live in Australia. Here, not all of us spring for that kind of thing. So while we greatly admire the Žnoprešk way, we figured a car more relevant to our market would be something that could take the fight to, say, the real-life contributions from Korea, namely the ever facelifting Hyundai and Kia. They, too, have had the European treatment in the sharpness of their trim and styling, but retained a certain sleekness that has captured the local market, if the sales figures are anything to go by. Where the big ships Camry, Falcon, Commodore and Magna used to be the go to cars, now we have the compact to mid-size Optima and i40. Those are the kind of cars we should be competing with, if we want to carve ourselves a foothold in the car market of the future.
Therefore, it is our pleasure to present to you the Tømtæ, a Reasonably Priced Mid-Size Family Sedan with all the things you would expect as standard, with superior economy, reliability and safety, for less! Also comes with Superfluous Characters You Don’t Know How To Pronounce (or really, because this is an international community, you do, but you have no idea what they’re doing in this context), because all the trendy new models come with all kinds of syntax errors like what?
http://i1207.photobucket.com/albums/bb476/stropmd/Tomte%20-%20S-1_zps796n8p3g.png http://i1207.photobucket.com/albums/bb476/stropmd/Tomte%20-%20S-2_zps3kma9xl6.png
[size=85]Sharp! Sexy! Sensible and Generic![/size]
You can tell when a car has been Europeaned Up when the grilles and the fixtures start evoking a flow of line, yet attaining a sharpness of detail where an exhaust outlet ceases to be a mere pipe and becomes instead of work of Sculpted Art. At least, that is what one might have said if they looked at this car with its Cheap and Cheerful price tag. They would argue: What would the point of fancy exhausts be, with a market-standard aluminium 2.4L i4 DOHC 16v VTEC? Even one that puts out a grunty 205Nm at 3500rpm over a perfectly smooth torque curve that culminates in a hearty 149hp @ 6000rpm? Well, such is our attention to detail, that we followed Mazda’s lead, with their engineering marvel 4-2-1 exhaust manifold to maximise the potential of resonance (and I’m not even going to pretend I understand any of that so let’s just move on before I embarrass myself)… the upshot of that is that the fancy exhaust outlets aren’t just salad dressing, they’re integral to the car’s function and excellent economy! It’s also the ONLY component in which I adjusted the quality slider at all (to +2), so I thought I had better highlight this fact for all you Quality Slider Police
Laden as it is with all the gear a lazy human who doesn’t particularly enjoy driving for driving’s sake demands in this day and age, with a nice robust all steel chassis and more safety than locking your toddler in a plastic bubble and not exposing them to germs ever, the standard trim, the Tømtæ S (S stands for Sexy, you understand), weighs in at 1440kg (about as much as an Ascension Mephisto), yet returns a frugal 6.3L/100km on regular pump gas 91RON. All this, from our faithful i4 (which we affectionately named Pudding), mated to a 5 speed automatic driving the front wheels for maximum excitement and supple road feel, has the Tømtæ rocketing from 0-100km/h in just 10.4 seconds (plenty fast enough for fighting peak hour gridlock, I assure you). You’ll be blasting past the mid-city traffic in style, and probably on the Wrong Side of the Road!
[size=85]Have you ever wondered why all those flashy pictures of cars in brochures don’t have any traffic in them? Let’s just say, the ones that do don’t have much to offer in the Go department…[/size]
Cars like the Optima and the i40 have a recommended sale price of about 34,000AUD. Our Tømtæ, ever equivalent and we would like to claim Rather A Bit Superior, could go for as little as 29,999AUD! How could we manage such a feat, you ask!? Feast your eyes on these statistics!
Also, with a whopping 786L of cargo volume, this car is more than capable of fitting an Adult Human Sized* object in the trunk, if you want to do your wet work Discreetly and Anonymously!**
[size=85]*Of Reasonable Proportions
**Not part of our official advertising campaign[/size]
All this said, we turned the car over to our tame racing driver, Kai Kristensen, for a real shakedown. With his help, we tuned the car’s track credentials up a notch, achieving a fine balance between Drivability and Not Being Boring As Shit because Your Mom/Wifey/Significant Other Pressured You into buying a Nice and Sensible car instead of that boy racer you wanted but your wallet couldn’t afford because you Have A Mortgage/Are Renting Forever. Did I not say at the very start that this was a truly Adult Car for Adults? But for the little kid in you that likes leaning into the corners, we’ve eked as much as can be gotten out of the Macpherson front Torsion Bear rear setup (if Honda can do it, we can too!) and provided you the very best balance possible between drivability, sportiness and comfort, and none of that Spine Chilling Ear Grinding Scrapage you get in so many so-called production cars these days! Kai was so ecstatic with the road feel that he somehow managed to roll the car and turned the Tømtæ into a Toasty wreck… after which testing was of course aborted… anyway, trust me, the car handles real good. Just right for a family car for adults, and not kids who like putting cars on two wheels…
Anyway! You’ve heard the spiel, now experience it for yourself! The new standard of Mass Produced Family Sedan, Gryphon Gear’s vision of the future! The Tømtæ, all yours for just 29,999AUD [size=85]plus stamp duty and on-road costs and window tinting will cost you 550 extra and do you want the chrome trim pack so you can see where the dials are? That’s another 975[/size].
CALL TODAY!
[size=85]With apologies to Kia for shamelessly ganking most of their poster featuring the 2015 Cerato…[/size]