when your daily commute is done in a 10 year old car with close to 250,000 miles on it, you have to make decisions about maintenance and usage. with this is mind, we decided that our 2002 Madza Protoge 5 would be an in town car and an road trips would involve a rental of some sort.
This weekend during trips to Cincinnati and Chattanooga we managed to put a little over 1,000 miles on a Chrysler 200. With that amount of time in the car, I thought it would be a good idea to document the experience.
I have to start of by saying I don’t like the car. There are some great features but overall I don’t think I’d rent this car again, much less purchase one. The car is marketed by Hertz as a standard vehicle, other vehicles that I’ve rented from them that fall into that class include the Nissan Altima and Madza 6. By this standard and looking at the exterior of the car, I expected a much roomier vehicle.
My primary disappointment with the car in the interior space. I spent the first 10 minutes in the car adjusting the seat and steering wheel finding a comfortable position far enough away from the looming dashboard. It seemed no matter how far back or how high or low I adjusted the steering column I could not find an ideal position that didn’t feel like the steering wheel was in your lap or uncomfortably on my knees. Eventually I settled for the seat about 80% of the way back. This presented another problem, with the seat that far back there was almost no room for an average height adult to fit behind me. The problem was the same on the passenger side. After three days of multiple hour trips and constant adjustment to the seat, I still found myself getting out the car with hip and ankle discomfort. Sadly, this is not a family road trip car.
If I could ever get comfortable, I would have really enjoyed the minimal car noise, the quality of the sound system, the clever placement of the volume, mode and channel buttons behind the steering wheel and the voluminous trunk space. There were two other things that were mildly disappointing in this experience. First, the lack of indication when the cruise control was engaged. The word ‘cruise’ lights up on the dash when you enable it but there is no other indication when you’ve set a speed and the ‘manual’ gear shift is sluggish and almost useless on any kind of elevation change.
In terms of fuel efficiency, I managed to do 1069 miles of interstate and stop and go driving on 35 gallons of gas which works out to be approximately 31 mpg. The pickup on the car is not bad on the flat but on inclines it’s best to remain in the slow lane.
Overall the car, looks OK from the outside but requires some fundamental changes to the interior, like trimming about six inches off the dash and back seat bench, to compete in the family sedan market.
it’s been a while since i posted and there have been a lot of things on my mind and hopefully i can manage to get them out in some cognoscent order here. in the last week, i enjoyed a child like glee as a number of things that i desired, fortuitously came together. on sunday i got my wii and friday night i got my iphone (for free, sometimes working retail pays off in interesting ways) and then the final harry potter book. which in itself was a conundrum, do i read, then activate my phone or activate my phone and then read. i chose the latter and less than 15 minutes after i got home my phone was activated and i was on my way with The Deathly Hollows. i really enjoyed the book and i think it was a tremendous ending to a fantastic series and i will be the first to admit that i got teary at the end. as for the iphone it’s beautiful piece of hardware, of all the features, i love the phone the most, it works better than any phone i’ve ever had. on to other things besides my retail obsessions.
we took a road trip in early july, just after the holiday to des moines to see friends and i was making the blog rounds on the 4th i came across a re-posting about ‘Why I love America’ and while i didn’t agree with some of the reasons, i had no real objections until i came across this paragraph:
“I love that America was one of the very first nations in the world to put an end to slavery. The story of slavery in America was no different than anywhere else except that we stopped a lot sooner. That needs to be mentioned whenever the topic comes up.”
this was so inaccurate and untrue i felt the need to post a comment and that’s where i began my slide down the rabbit hole. i learned three valuable lessons:
1. there’s a class of people that believe that factual information is untrue when it doesn’t agree with their point of view,
2. the same class of people have a scary sense of entitlement as evidenced by this quote
“… the US MUST act on what is in our countries interest at the time. The carribean is in our back yard, so it is fair game.”
3. the reason the country is in such a mess is the inability to have open discourse without rhetoric.
then there is this administrative order, which allows the administration to ‘block bank accounts and any other financial assets that might be found in this country belonging to people, companies or groups that the United States deems are working to threaten stability in Iraq.’
i don’t know about anyone else, but with the major betrayals of trust and power abuses from this administration, you begin to wonder if you’re paranoid enough.
