visiting with 'gram'
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Let me tell you about the rental car we have. It's a late model DaimlerChrysler Sebring. Like most rental cars, it's a no-frills product of one of North America's lacklustre auto manufacturers. And like most rental cars, it's crap.
Whereas your average sub-par auto will produce a whine while accelerating while the air conditioning is engaged, this specimen made that sound nearly all the time, only giving us a break at odd intervals (and never while the cruise control was on). It was perfectly pitched to make you think you might be having a bout of tinitis.
And whereas most rental vehicles have, to some degree, touchy pedals, this one had hair trigger brakes and acceleration pedals. Pedals that would leave you numb and neck-sore even if the seats weren't so bad that they cut off the circulation to your arms while simultaneously leaving your back and neck in a bizarre contorted shape. And when the brakes are used, the feedback to the driver is a worrying shimmy. The kind of shimmy that tells you it's time for a check-up and maybe a new set of brake pads. Certainly not the sort of thing you expect from a car that's yet to see 20,000 km.
And speaking of the seats, these don't have vertical height adjustment controls. While such features are common on much less expensive "imports" such as the Hyundai Accent (about the cheapest car on the market), their lack on the Sebring meant that my 5'2" girlfriend was forced to belly up to the steering wheel so she could touch the pedals. At 6'5", I was forced to sit way back and to lean in if I wanted to watch for a change in the stoplights or to read a sign above the highway.
And then there's the lousy air conditioning controls. No matter that the controls were presented as the normal range of subtle grades of heating and cooling: there were, in truth only two phases to the air conditioning. These were flat dead and hot air, and insidious cool draft. Both were an assault on the human senses.
Most worrying of the many defects in this vehicle was the way that the simple weight of your hand on the transmission shifter was enough to push it out of Drive and into Neutral. The controls on my camera require more force than this took. This accidental shift happened three times on my first driving spell. I had to learn to not place my hand on the shifter, which is where it naturally finds itself (I have long arms).
About the only thing that wasn't a disaster was the steering, which was relatively responsive (for a N. American built sedan).
Anyway, we got to Windsor in one piece, sore and exhausted from fighting the car, and turned in early. Tracey's 'gram' is a pleasure to visit with: she's got none of that 'granny' nonsense. Neither the bitterness or the daftness that so often seems to set in with age.