Outside of being lit on fire, there are few things I enjoy less than purchasing a new car. Having said that, when faced with a lit match, I have three requirements when purchasing an automobile. First, it needs to be reliable. Someone could give me a rocket ship of a Lamborghini, but if I’m constantly bringing it in for repairs, it’s a non-starter.
Second, the vehicle needs to get decent mileage and or a refueling time of less than 10 minutes. I’m sorry, but I don’t plan well and dovetailing nicely with that characteristic, I have no patience. People tell me I’m a joy to be with.
Lastly, and this requirement trumps the first two: I’m extremely vain; I have to be able to look at the vehicle and not get violently ill. If it makes me sick to look at a car, it wouldn’t matter if it ran on air like a flying carpet; I can’t pull the purchase trigger. Now add to these three requirements, I need a car that can fit into a small garage slot…for the purpose of thwarting the hooligans who run the transcontinental car theft ring. One might say I need a mini car.
One of the new baffling car design flaws that I wanted to avoid started being implemented about two years ago. They replaced the time honored and very logical PRNDL gearshift layout. For over 50 years, at the top has always been Park, then Reverse, then Neutral, followed by Drive and then Low, the slow cousin to Drive. I had the misfortune of encountering the new layout while renting a car in Florida…like I needed any more driving challenges. The new layout is: RND, with a P located in a rural hamlet outside of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It’s like the car designers were bored out of their minds, went out for a liquid lunch, came back to work and decided to break things. With this new design, when you pull into a busy mall parking space and throw the gearshift up to the top, you erroneously think you’re in park. Then you take your foot off the break and find out, holy crap, you’re actually in reverse. At this point of horrific disbelief, you’re backing up over baby carriages and senior citizens as they try to get their walkers out of 2nd gear. Seriously, it’s dangerous. That design decision is akin to saying, we’re changing the color schema on traffic lights, and we’re not going to tell anyone. Green still means go and yellow still means slow down, or speed up to avoid red depending on your political affiliation. But to stop, we decided to make that color…invisible. If you really want to stop, you’re going to have to work for it. We replaced the blaring red light with a minuscule, inch square black light that 98% of the population will never see – Safe Travels!
So I do my homework reviewing the Consumer Reports CAR issue and find a vehicle that when it first came out years ago, people were burning through their warranty mileage due to the number of trips they were making to the repair shop. But now, this vehicle has the number one rating for reliability. And when I got to the picture of this particular car, I had no problem keeping my lunch down.
I decided to head to a local dealership and get a first hand look at this vehicle. One thing I forgot was that the car I was looking at in the magazine was the old car model. What’s on the lot are the new models, and it’s been completely redesigned - Rut-Roh! But it’s too late; I’m already under the ether.
The new model looks up to snuff and my intestinal fortitude is intact. It has tons of features that I’ll never use, except its 30 airbags. You could drive this car off a cliff into the Grand Canyon, and bounce your way down to the Colorado River with nary a scratch. The car actually performs well and has decent pickup. But here’s the problem: You need a degree from MIT to be able to operate the car. For starters, you’re required to have an iPhone to be able to run this computer, I mean car. (You’ll have a new reason to keep iOS updated.) And instead of a reasonably sized square management/entertainment screen, there is a two foot circular disc mounted off the center of the dashboard. I’m sorry, but I’m a square guy, and now that I’ve just said that… There are more options per screen than a DJ has working the console at a rave.
And if you don’t like a particular screen, just swipe left or right, or up or down. There are an infinite number of screens with an infinite number of options of things you can do per screen. Can you spell DISTRACTED.
They also have their own emergency phone home capability. The only problem is there are seven different ways to access it. I’m pretty sure if I find myself upside down in a ditch and I need to execute this function, I won’t be able to remember one of the seven. That’s if I can fight my way through the mountain of airbags. It seems that the car designers with their wealth of driving and technical knowledge, didn’t have a good handle on what might work best for people. Instead, they decided to let the user pick and choose among a plethora of options. The net effect is that it now takes five touches to accomplish something where as in my old car it only took two. As much as I appreciate the army of airbags, these car companies need to remember, for now, we’re actively driving these vehicles, not playing a video game. I’m told this is progress.
And the best, on the ride home from the dealership I was finally able to maneuver to a screen, without driving into a tree, and play some Beatles music. I get home, pull into my claustrophobic garage space, and then had to go into the house and get my wife, the technologist of the family. I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the radio. As fate would have it, the radio “off” function is one of three items on the car that is not controlled by the circular screen of death. It actually has a mechanical button you push in. Hallelujah, I’m sold!
