The next step in these lengthy car repairs is to rent a car. With the Infiniti out of order, and the Mazda starting to act up, we felt it safest to use the car rental part of our policy. Stephanie walked to Enterprise (yes, they deliver, but it's two blocks away) and got a 2008 Pontiac Grand Prix. Red. It's sporty. It's new. It smells of shampoo and that New Car Smell refresher. I don't think I've ever driven a car with only 9000 miles on it. It is not the treat it is meant to be.

The windows are narrow, so I feel like I'm driving from the inside of a cylon helmet. The seats force me to lean back, because proper posture in this car would press my forehead against the sun visor. The central console is tilted towards the driver, which helps with reach, but it makes it harder for a second person in the car to change the stereo, put in a CD, or anything a driver may ask a passenger to do.

There is a logical place for the clock: a small screen in the center of the dashboard that's easy to read with bright red letters. It will tell me the miles driven, the date, the incessant need for oil, but not the time. The clock is part of the stereo in the middle of the central console. It is not as bright, but not as easy to read as my forearm, when I am holding the steering wheel, is directly between my eyes and the clock.

The steering wheel has two hand grips at roughly 2:45 and 9:15. These aren't the two points I am comfortable holding the wheel at, but the bulges of the hand grips forces my hands to the top of the wheel or elsewhere because my natural wheel hold is half on and half off the grips. The steering wheel also has metal supports, which is distracting.

And all of this is just sitting in the car. Adjusting the seat is easy. There's a nice four-way lever that moves the seat back and forth, up and down, and tilts. Then there is a lever to adjust the recline. Half electronic, half manual.

And I might as well mention it now, with the narrow band of windows, I can turn to look to my right-hand blind spot just fine, but my left-hand blind spot? I turn. I see the headrest.

This does not make me feel safe, which is strange because the experience of the driver's seat is one of safety and cocooning. Okay, that's extreme. It's slightly claustrophobic and not helped by the main overhead light sitting on a bump that juts away from the roof, or having to lean in and look out from under the windshield to see the lights at about a third of the intersections I drive in.

A safe driver also wants to see their blind spots, and since I can't see one of them at all, at least I have the luxury of large side mirrors that make the blind spots open range. In fact, the mirrors are so large the sporty feel of the car is ruined by Alfred E. Neuman side mirrors.

Let's take this thing for a spin. I drive on the highway and streets equally in my weekly travels, so I think I get a good feel for the car.

Driving is a full-body activity for me. It requires a hand on the wheel, a hand on the shifter, a foot on the gas, and a foot on the clutch, and twists and turns of the torso to scan blind spots. The Grand Prix is an automatic. I need one foot, one hand, and spend more energy trying to not clutch the brake or shift gears, for I have none to control. Take away the need to turn my head much and I am no longer connected to the vehicle.

As a science fiction writer, I put characters in self-directed mini cars that don't require anything from the driver. Cars in my future tend to act like personal buses that you can take anywhere. The Grand Prix takes me half way there, but instead of giving me a little bit of control, I feel like I'm being teased: I'm almost really driving myself.

This car is red. It has a spoiler on the back that's so low I can't see it out of the sliver of rear window. A car like this, one would think, would roar to life and run wild. This car revs nicely, although the sound is a bit muted so I'm not sure it's behaving properly, but the power station takes half a second to put that power into the wheels, so the car behaves as if it's playing catch-

-up to the driver's will.  It emphasizes the car's attitude of "neener-neener-neener."

On a scary note, the brakes seem to behave in the same way.

As I learned to drive, every car I had kept to a simple rule: red lights on the dashboard were bad. See a red light, pay attention because something is wrong. This car has a handy red light in the speedometer that causes repeated panics (as I was trained) only to find the "problem" is "MPH." I could change this to "KPH" if I felt like going metric (or to Canada).

When it gets dark enough, the dash lights up automatically. All in red. Where's the green I'm used to?

According to my sister-in-law, the back seat is rather boring. She's not a small child, but she cannot see out the windows.

So are there any advantages to driving this beast? Well, the boot is rather big, and the black interior is always warm but at least it's clean, but it is a rental car.

But this car has given me a clue about driving: We're becoming worse drivers because our cars are worse: they take away the experience of driving. I remember an ad for a luxury car that bragged that driving the car made you forget you were driving. This is a problem. We are a nation of distracted, cranky people anyway, too busy to drive because we're on the phone, and quick to temper because all those other jackholes get in our way and play their music so loud we can't hear our own. We don't need cars that take care of things for us. We need cars that demand our attention and deserve our love. We need cars that make us pay attention to the road. We don't need extra cup holders.

The Grand Prix has a problem I've seen with several cars lately: when driving, it's hard to tell where the car ends, because the aerodynamic styling of the hood hides the actual boundaries of the car, and the back end is a mystery. I would not want to parallel park this thing, because I can't see where it is. Instead of designing cars that give us this knowledge (and thus control) we waste our time and energy not in making cars efficient or lighter, but in rear-cameras and cars that can park themselves.

We're wasting our time with these gas-guzzling automatics.

On the geek side of things, cars are slowly learning to park themselves, steer themselves, turn lights into turns, and control the interior lights without human intervention. This is all very cool, but I'm finding the twilight time of real driving frustrating.

Tags: cars, driving