Cruzing With Ted

For those of you who were wondering, the trusty Honda made it back from the body shop and is again serving as my primary means of transportation.

I’ll give you a moment to breathe a huge sigh of relief. There we go.

So far, the car is showing no ill-effects from having gone under the welder, and for that I’m incredibly happy, especially since I’ve recently realized that I just may have to drive it for the rest of my life.

I made this decision during the time it was being worked on, when I was renting a newer model Chevy Cruze. (Nickname: Ted) Driving this car opened my eyes to the technology that is being jammed into today’s automobiles. When I sat behind the wheel, I felt like I was at the helm of the Enterprise, as I was surrounded by a sea of buttons and screens and digital readouts, none of which made much sense to me. Based on the sheer volume of buttons, I initially thought I had only to find the right one, press it, and then let the car do the rest. However, technology has only gotten so far, and there was no “Drive to Work” button, and most certainly no “Pretend To Go To Kwik-Trip For Gas When You’re Really Going For Cookies” button.

Still, there was more than enough to attract my attention, and I quickly found that driving Ted was, in one word, distracting.

Ted was even more complicated than KITT

Let’s start with the giant touchscreen on the dash, whose job it is to keep you up to date by displaying a never-ending stream of car metrics, none of which is very helpful and/or interesting. For example, when I adjusted the heat, a number would pop up to tell me that it’d been changed from, say, “5” to “7”, which I found to be sort of insulting, like the manufacturers didn’t trust me to know which way to turn the dial to make the heat go up, and which way to scale it back, and so they had to spell it out to me in large numbers.

Not that there’s only one setting for heat, mind you. I’m pretty sure the car featured enough individual options for there to be roughly 47 individual climates going on at the same time. (“Let’s see, I’ll set the temperature for the driver-side head to ‘8’, but crank it up to ‘10’ for the feet. I’ll also set left butt-cheek to ‘5’ and right butt-cheek to ‘6’. And since I don’t like the jerk sitting next to me, I’ll set everything over there to ‘Blizzard’.”)

The touchscreen also gave me way more information than I needed about whatever radio station I was listening to. Instead of a simple call sign (I.E. “102.1”), it would instead say something like: “K102: Today’s Bro Country: Now Playing - Some Terrible Sam Hunt Song That Will Seriously Make You Consider Driving Into The Ditch Just To Try And Make It Stop.”

I have to admit, however, that the touchscreen wasn’t all bad, as I liked that it would switch over to the back-up camera as soon as I put it into reverse. However, even this was over-engineered, as whenever I turned the wheel while backing up, the car would calculate where it thought it was going and then overlay that course on the touchscreen via a series of colored, curving lines. However, instead of helping, all it did was make it feel like I was playing a video game, and I kept catching myself looking for extra lives and power-ups.

Moving beyond the touchscreen, I'd like to talk about the rear-view mirror, which for some reason sported three buttons. Now perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what they were for, and while I wanted to test them out, I was afraid of what would happen if I did. (“Oh, so that’s the ‘Mirror Fall Off’ button!”) And so, despite the near-universal guy urge to randomly press buttons, I decided to just leave it as a mystery.

Another source of stress for me was that along with the traditional needle speedometer, Ted also featured a digital readout. Upon seeing it, I couldn’t help but question why I had to be notified by multiple sources how fast I was going, and I soon began to wonder if the car could somehow violate the laws of physics: “I’m going both 57 and 59 miles-per-hour! How it that even possible?! AAIIEEE!!!!!” After a while, I started to ignore them both, which made things a whole lot easier, all while getting me to where I was going in record time.

Ted was even stressful after I was done driving him. I’d put him into park, turn off the lights, and then shut off the engine. Except the lights wouldn’t turn off. Instead, they’d stay illuminated for roughly an additional minute before finally going dim. Now, you might assume that once a person realizes this is how the car works, they’d simply ignore the still-glowing lights and walk away. However, that’s not how I operate. No matter how bad the weather was, I still had to stand outside of Ted each and every time just to make sure the lights would eventually flip off, because if I didn’t, I’d slowly go insane over the next hour wondering if they were still on, slowly draining the battery.

While there’s more I could say about Ted, at some point I’d cross over the line from criticizing to whining (assuming I haven’t done so already), and so I think it's best if I channel my inner Kenny Rogers and know when to fold ‘em. In closing, I’d like to say thank you for reading this, and also if you need me, you can find me in the garage, giving the trusty Honda a hug.