Back when I worked it technical support cubicle hell, we had a new member of our team show up. He was a heavyset man with a buzz cut and a pencil thin-moustache, and he wore a shirt and tie to work when everyone else was in t-shirts and jeans. My first reaction about him was this: He's a used car salesman.

He had a framed photo of himself, his father, and his brother. The family resemblance was striking. My reaction: They're all used car salesmen.

In no time at all he was leading team meetings, which we had never had before, and he explained to us that as technical support slaves, our job was to take calls, and to remember (and this is a direct quote): Ka-ching, ka-ching, make those registers ring.

I promptly ignored everything else he had to say, except he did explain that he was working in technical support cube farm hell because his family used car sales business wasn't doing so good.

Yesterday we walked past one of the few bazillion car lots on 99E, and there was a nice Mazda Protégé, reasonably priced, clean, and we wanted to take a look at it. A salesman arrived, but with a small group who drove it off the lot. We decided to start our day at the same lot, where we found a 2003 Kia Optima with 107K miles.

The Kia Optima is one of those highly reliable cars, gets good reviews, good return on value, and frankly drives like it doesn't have a soul. It performs remarkably well. It's smooth, this was a 5-speed so we had some control over it. It was comfortable, practically the same interior as our Mazda 323 with a few quirks (no cover on the console storage, so no arm rest, and some of the button were missing).

It was $5500, which is more than we can afford, but we do have the bank of Mom and Dad. The BoMD also has a requirement: a third party mechanic must look at the car. Now this car lot offered a lifetime warranty of 50% off all parts and labor. They have faith in their mechanics and their cars. There was a very subtle hint that they are a Christian business. The phrase "with God's help" appears in their mission statement. We were pretty comfortable with the Kia.

So we took it to a mechanic. It turns out the car is in good condition, but the regular maintenance schedule means there's about one thousand in timing belts, overhauls, spark plugs, etc. They didn't have a Carfax report, but they had a competitive report, which told us the car had 70K miles put on it in 13 months. That's a lot of hard usage.

The BoMD told us to trust our judgment, and our feelings were souring on the Kia. Fine car, but it's really a $6500 car now.

So we decided to pull out of the deal. We took the car back, explained most of what we found, and walked away.

That surprised me. I suppose I walked faster than necessary when leaving the lot, but I wanted out. I told a salesman no when just a few hours earlier everything looked good. What we didn't tell them was a search through the Better Business Bureau pointed to four complaints in the past 36 months, with only two resolutions. The BBB advises against buying from this company.

So we didn't.

I learned that all of my old conceptions about used car salesmen are outdated. They are more clever, more subtle, and time their interactions by some psychological science designed to make the customer feel they are in control over a situation when they, in fact, are not.  The goal to push financing is the same. You offer them a set amount of cash, immediately, and they tell you it's better for your credit to only pay a down payment and get a loan that you know you can payoff anytime.

I learned that even though they are reluctant to let a third party mechanic look at, they will. They will warn you against all the little things mechanics "find" and the way they say it makes the quotation marks perfectly clear.  They do not trust mechanics, except the guys they've hired to do all the maintenance on vehicles, and to fulfill the warranty they offer. Still, it's not enough.

It's not enough that they feel good about the vehicle. Everyone has a vested interest in selling you things. I remembered the wisdom of Wesley in The Princess Bride: Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

So no new car yet, but there is a surprise ending, which I'm saving until tomorrow.

Tags: cars

Let's see, where was I? Oh yes, living in the hopelessness of car trouble. The Infiniti is totaled by the insurance company. We get our payoff tomorrow, but it won't be much. We do have some savings for a new car, but not enough, really, to match what we had.
But we have the 92 Mazda, the backup car, the moldy speedbump on wheels, right? Well, no.
After I lost the truck and took over the Mazda, we spent the payout on the Isuzu to get the Mazda up an running, and we had about $200 left over to seed the new car fund. We swore an oath to not spend more money on the Mazda. Gas, oil, that sort of routine stuff is fine. A $670 clutch is not, but that's what the mechanic said we needed. So, pretty soon Mazda go bye-bye.
In the meantime, we get to go car shopping.
Joy.
You can fill in whatever emoticon you want, I'm not thrilled.
Thinking on all of this, and stepping onto a bus to find my dear friend Becky (a.k.a. Toots the Fairy) driving the thing, and catching her up on life such as it is, I realized what I'm really not happy about is the change all of this requires. Yes, I found driving the Mazda an absolute dream compared to the rental Joke. Yes, I'll take a sixteen-year-old-no-power-steering-and-no-stereo manual over that thing. I will miss the Infiniti, I will miss the Mazda. I miss my truck. But things change. We can't keep the same routine as much as I find comfort in it. I don't want to move because of the hassle, but I'm sick of this one-step-up-from-a-slum. I'm tired of driving 25 miles to work (or spending two hours on the bus) to get to work. But I like the routine, and I'm trying to break the constant bitch-fest lifestyle that I enjoy so much.
In other words, I'm conflicted, numb, and not sure I'll fall in love with a car again.
But time will tell.

Tags: cars

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

I killed another battery this weekend. We couldn't even jump the thing, so we took it to Les Schwab on Tuesday to have them look at it. The battery, at only four months old, was dead. Luckily this is Les Schwab we're dealing with, and they handed us a new battery, no charge.
In the meantime I had to take public transportation. Stephanie dropped me off downtown and  I took the MAX train out to Gresham, where I sat backwards and listened to a couple of podcasts I'd been meaning to listen to. This was difficult because one guy three rows ahead of me was playing his music so loud, I couldn't hear my own without turning up the volume to dangerous levels. Stephanie came to get me on Tuesday, and then we took the battery in.
Wednesday I had the same trip out, but without the "music" from other people.  The ticket validators weren't working, so I rode out to Gresham hoping the fare inspectors didn't come along. I put in my All-Zone ticket after the transfer for a nine-minute ride.

I had to ride home on my own.
Now I remember why I don't like the bus. For some reason, Tri-Met's ride finder is inefficient. Instead of finding a way to get me to the train to go across town, it recommended I take the bus all the way in, transfer to another bus for a couple of blocks, then get on another bus that passes my home. I skipped the middle bus, went one stop further on the first bus, walked two blocks, and caught the bus home on an earlier route than their trip planner gave me.
That's when the "joy" started.
When you get on the bus they give you a transfer. There is a day code that looks fairly random (I'm sure to make it harder to save transfers and ride for free) but the day code on my morning ticket was the same as the day code on my return ticket, until I transferred to the last bus, where the driver insisted the day code on my ticket was wrong, and that I only got it an hour before didn't matter. He trusted me, though, and gave me a good ticket.
So I have no idea if I broke a TriMet rule or not.
The ride home was too loud to listen to anything but the ex-prisoner behind me talk about his plans to repay back taxes. Why do people on cell phones talk louder than everyone else? The seats are small, designed for maximum butt-pain, and squeezing people together you have no choice but to become engaged to them to make the lack of privacy easier.

Thankfully, the car started with the new battery.

Tags: cars