Just need to vent...

I'm more surprised that they still make the Malibu.

This sounds like a feature delete for limited chips. If you could only have anti-collision or adaptive cruise, which do you pick for a rental fleet?

 

Oh, the current Malibu puzzles me a few ways around. The old body style was a lot smaller, and the last car Chevrolet sold in this size was badged "Impala."

They did a great job with the 1.5L turbo 3-cylinder engine. It sounds a little weird, and it is predictably further up the tachometer than you'd expect for a 2023 car but it's got plenty of power.

On the other hand I notice it (or possibly the CVT it is mated to) isn't very smooth at lower speeds. Made me wonder if it was just too janky for adaptive cruise.

 

Took a look at the model's site. There are two levels of auto emergency braking. The enhanced is on a higher trim with ACC; it's cameras and radar. The standard version is camera only.

Maybe the CVT has fake shift points. Seems common these days. The Outback has them. Sometimes I notice it, sometimes I don't. Seems to be a function of how hard I accelerate.

 

Yeah I'm thinking that car is short at least a couple of chips. The anti-collision thing has already done 3 false positives. Carplay stopped working the other day, navigation was only updating once a minute. Today it just wouldn't connect at all.

That's more trouble in 7 days than our Toyota and Mazda (combined) have given us the whole time we've owned them.

 

Why is Batman one word, Spider-man a hyphenated word and Wonder Woman, two words???
Marvel-DC thing?

 

Maybe just a visual-perception thing? Batman, two syllables, short enough to just kinda see at a glance.

Spiderman might benefit from being broken up a bit. (Huh. Firefox even knows that's the wrong orthography for him.)

Wonderwoman all strung together starts to look like a doctor's writing on a prescription.

 

Air levels of PM2.5 can be reported as "air quality index" numbers (0–50 "green", 51–100 "yellow", 101–150 "orange", 151–200 "red", 201–300 "purple", >300 "maroon"), when you see them, for example, here:

https://www.airnow.gov/

or they can be reported as micrograms per cubic meter, when you see them, for example, on the display of the little air purifier I bought (which shows 0–12 µg/m³ in white, 13–35 in blue, 35–55 in yellow, or >55 in red).

Decoder ring on page 4 here:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-04/documents/2012_aqi_factsheet.pdf

That information should be less work to find.

 

The car rental place gave me a free upgrade. Grr.

I'd booked a "Camry or similar" and they wanted to give me a BMW 2-series. Considerably smaller and less comfortable. So I complained.

Now they've given me a BMW 3-series. At least it's about the right size. I was worried when I saw a charger plug in the trunk, but it turns out this one is a PHEV so I can just put gas in it. This is a relief since I won't be parking anywhere near power on this trip.

I don't like the car. It refers to me as Timothee (which isn't my name) and nags me to install apps on my phone and expand my driving profile or some such nonsense.

Like the Chevy last week, I was forced to do a wireless connection to get Carplay navigation working. I guess that's just going to be the way the future disappoints me.

I understand that there's a zillion little details to be customized and that there are owners who really want those features but that's very much the opposite of what I want from a rental car, I want more of a hop in and go experience.

The car drives kind of okay. Everything to do with turning is wonderful, the handling is great. Everything to do with accelerating and stopping feels wrong. It takes a substantial push on the gas pedal to get the car to move at all, and it doesn't coast well- feels like a Prius stuck in B mode.

I wish "Camry or similar" had been more available.

 

I'm surprised the rental outfit doesn't have a checklist to clear/reset those things when checking a car back in.

 

Man, sometimes American car drivers just push my buttons!

I work at a military base and, this morning, a SECOND driver failed to yield to me as I driving around a roundabout on base. (It's not even new, has been here for a couple of years.)
I checked, and on their side entering the thing, it has a Yield sign and even YIELD painted on the asphalt before you enter the roudabout.

This NEVER happens in Europe or Asia...MUCH better drivers, IMHO.

 

I'm more surprised that the car itself doesn't have a "fleet mode" that just locks out most of the finicky stuff or makes it reset with each ignition-on.

I did find a button that makes the car stop and go normally, allowing coast and creep. It may seem minor, but once I hit that my comfort level went way up and I kind of like the car now. With the autoholder active it felt like taxiing an airplane with flat tires, always feeling I was risking too much throttle to get it going, and then it would just stop dead well short of my expectation.

With some of these rentals, I find 30 or 40 mobile phones paired to the stereo. Who knows what the data security picture is. I'm happy that my phone allows me to connect and utilize without synchronizing any contacts or personal info.

 

I guess you haven't been to the same countries I have visited. For three Asian places, any American who drove there should be put through a re-education camp and re-licensed before being allowed to resume driving here. A couple places in Europe weren't so good either, though not so bad as to require re-education.

 

Should 'better' drivers be defined by accident and mortality rates, maybe with some input from the "math and $cience industrial complex" to "mitigate" any differences in road quality, education requirements, geography, and affluence, and developing nations that do not know which side of the road that one should drive on?

I've driven on 5 continents, and in nations that drive both of the right side of the road and the wrong side......and it's not even close.

Americans are the least talented, most self-entitled and arrogant drivers on the planet outside of the Middle East.

In most nations, they require some demonstration of basic driving ability.
In America you just have to have the right number of candles on your birthday cake....AND IN TWO out of our 54 states that number is LESS THAN 15.

 

Science and data, to slice this up multiple ways. By each measure here, the U.S. nowhere near worst or best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/road-deaths-by-country
ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS DEATH RATE BY COUNTRY

 

That's true. When I once deployed to a naval base in Sicily, Italy (Sigonella Naval Air Station) they had just started a new driver's course for folks to learn how to drive safer in Italy.

Even after the course, we had grown guys who refused to drive off-base....too darn scary! (It really was something else....imagine driving VERY fast on very narrow roads and within inches of cars on either side of you.)

 

We drove across northern Italy and through the Dolomites, the opposite end of the country from your naval base. Or actually, the spouse drove while I navigated, which we commonly do because she is unable to get sufficient function from navigation devices (including paper maps) or communication devices (for bicycle event support). We would go there again, if there weren't so many other places that we haven't yet been too.

That just isn't one of the really bad or scary places I was thinking of. Places where we would have only an in-country driver take us around.

 

New vent: carplay quit working in the rent-a-beemer. Okay, that happens. Wireless carplay just doesn't seem to be a reliable thing. I had almost as much difficulty with it in a rented Chevy last week. Meanwhile it always just works when I'm in a slightly older car with a USB connection.

But that's not really the vent.

The vent is that I can't find an "OFF" switch for the giant display in that car. Okay, so I can't get the carplay navigation to work. A disappointment but not a dealbreaker.

But now that the car display is no longer gainfully employed, do I have to have the error message shining in my face the whole way home? I give Dodge credit here, it has been easy to find "display off" buttons in their cars.

--

And a spotter report:

I'm hoping to see some really pretty 5th generation Priuseses running around but haven't noticed any yet.

Now, I did see a shiny new Toyota Crown rolling up the 170 freeway near Roscoe Blvd on Friday, freshly printed paper license plate and all. Now that I've seen it in person, I think the Honda Accord Crosstour did better with that shape idea.

 

Today was a rough one.



That orange-yellow glob dumped an incredible amount of rain on our home today. Easily 3x as bad as the worst storm we'd previously seen in our 7 years at this address.

The forecast was never good, but early this afternoon we saw a downpour for the ages, followed by a power outage (ongoing, yay genny) and the basement started taking on water. Our sump pump could not keep up. We bailed about 100 gallons out, just trying to keep the level below the pump motor on its little pedestal.

That wasn't super fun, partly because hauling pails of water through the house to slosh on the lawn is never fun, but also because I threw out my back on Friday.

We barely made it, the pump motor was starting to go under, blowing little jets of water out the cooling vents. Not normally watercooled so I think I'll be replacing it this week.

 

Don't know if you are interested or aware of these products but thought I would mention them. We have a regular sump but this is my backup if it couldn't keep up or power goes out ,

540 FLEX™ | Water-Powered Backups | Zoeller Pump Company (zoellerpumps.com)

Basepump RB750-EZ Premium Water Powered Backup Sump Pump with Water Alarm - - Amazon.com

Glad things worked out for you and you avoided any damage.