AUTO DETAILING

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-10-23)

 

     These days you can read user reviews on just about anything before you it, and see what normal people think. When I say normal, I mean people like you and me. Okay, maybe just people like you. It's been six months since I bought my new car, and I discovered that there's a learning curve with finally getting a new car after 10 years.

     One drawback of owning a performance car is that speed limits seem much more archaic than they used to. When I get behind someone going 30 miles an hour I feel like a garden slug on union golden time.
     My turn signal doesn't turn itself off unless I make a 90-degree turn, so I either have to veer into the other lane to tighten up the angle, or turn it off manually and end up signaling in the other direction by mistake. So if you're behind me I apologize for my lack of direction. I blame my parents.

     Luckily there are many more safety features than there used to be. At first this was comforting. An alarm sounds when you're too close to something, and it sounds when you're too far away from something. If I'm equidistant from everything, it's pretty quiet, but that doesn't happen very often. An alarm such as that would come in handy when you're dating so that you know where you stand, and specifically, where TO stand. But when I hear a beep as I'm driving and I don't know what it's for, I'll need to consult the instruction manual while I'm either too close or too far away from something to figure out what it's for. 

     I was overjoyed to find that there WAS an instruction manual, and it was only in English. Just about every instruction book I've ever seen has four or five different languages in the back, and if you turn to the wrong one, you can learn less about your car than before you started. I could turn the car upside down trying to find the écran du tableau de bord, only to realize that I was in the wrong language section. I learned some French curse words and it did make me feel better.

     The most interesting alarm goes off if you don't put on your seatbelt right away. It sounds exactly like the first 8 chords of a Guess Who song, in the correct key. And it's pushy, as if I should have fastened my seatbelt while I was still in the shower. If you don't act IMMEDIATELY it gets louder and louder, and I wish they'd get on with the rest of the Guess Who song. 

     I suppose most people love scrolling around all touch screens on a dashboard to find the right station on the sound system, or adjust the perfect temperature for the cockpit. I'm not sure when car companies started calling the inside of the car the "cockpit," but if my car does suddenly start to take flight I'll have to figure out which menu has the altimeter. Anyway, I scroll through the different screens to find the "air recirculate" button, because somebody ran over a skunk. Once I finally find it, dead-skunk-air has already finished filling my cockpit and I recirculate it for the next five miles. If I go through that many menus there had better be dessert at the end and not a dead skunk.

     I had to wait two years during the pandemic for computer chips to start turning up again for this scrolling opportunity. My last car was 10 years old and just had a bunch of knobs and dials. If you turned the dial towards red, it got warmer, blue it got colder. The system was a relic of its time and not very high-tech, but I could adjust the temperature perfectly without having to look at it.

     All this assumes that there is nothing particularly interesting going on in the road that I should be paying attention to. If I have my phone assistance app on, I can ask it questions about navigation, song playlists and the weather. And now that there is AI involved, having a normal conversation with your car is something that will be happening very soon. "Hey," I ask my car, "these are all-season radials you got under you, correct?" My car says, "Yes, it's baseball season right now, and I  think they'll do better in football season than the Giants will." "I don't want to sound insulting," I continue, "but white was not my first choice for a car color." "Well," my car replies, "the first time it snows no one will notice that you have a white car." "Hey- how fast are we going? I've had three speeding tickets." "Well at least you have the courage of your convictions." By the time there is enough artificial intelligence for my car to have a normal conversation with me, it will be smart enough to know that there is no such thing.