I’ve always been a huge car enthusiast. My grandfather was a mechanic who eventually became a part-owner of a Ford dealership. I went there EVERY DAY after school starting in 1st grade and spent every Saturday there also. My family jokes (I think) that I could identify the make and model of any car that passed by before I could even recite the alphabet! =)
Growing up in the 80s, I remember being mesmerized by cars with electronic instruments (aka- digital dash) and some of them could even talk! For didn’t put fancy electronics into many of their cars. But by 1986 or 1987, my pop’s dealership was taking in countless Chyrsler/Dodge models with these over-the-top, already-outdated features. Various GM models also had some of similar ‘high-tech features’ and even featured touch screens in a handful of high-end models (Buick Riviera & Reatta and Olds Toronado Trofeo).
The Japanese seemed to do the best job of designing and implementing electronic instruments and often paired automatic climate control and other features with them. Nissan was one probably the largest purveyor among the Japanese brands, but a few Mitsubishi, Toyota and even Mazda models also offered some of these features, often as extra-cost options.
I remember when my mom first started teaching me how to drive a stick shift when I was 14. We used my sister’s 1985 Nissan 300ZX and I thought that the way-over-the-top digital instrument display was the coolest thing I had ever saw! The tachometer displayed both as a number and on a wave-type graph that took up half of the instrument panel. The graph bars would climb higher and move from left to right rising higher…no one really knew why, but it looked hella-cool! In true mid-80s fashion, the Z was White with Blood Red velour interior and the vaste expanse of that awful RED still shocks me when I see it in pics or once in a while at a car show.
IT also had the other requisite feature necessary to be cooler than cool in the mid-80s- smoked glass t-tops! They were very heavy, hard to remove and then you had to fight to get them into their storage bags in the trunk to keep them from getting broken. The Z was four years old by the time my sister got it and the t-top latching mechanisms and weather sealant were already showing signs of wear and potential premature failure! They leaked in a hard rain and rattled every time you ran over a tiny pebble…but we thought they were awesome back in the day…
My best friend got his first car around the same time and he was six months older than me, so he got his license that much sooner than me! It was 1990 and his first car was a 1984 Chrysler Laser XE Turbo (upscale/luxury version of the Dodge Daytona). It was shit-brown (called something ridiculous like Moroccan Bronze Metallic) and his was the first year they made the Laster/Daytona! It was also the first year they made a digital instrument panel standard on several top-level Chrysler models. The XE was the top-of-the-line Laser and it had the standard electro-nightmare instruments. It also came with another brand-new feature that Chrysler called EVA (Electronic Voice Alert). It could (and would) speak a number of common warnings if it detected a problem. The most annoying yet amazing thing was that it used the same old chip developed for the “Speak and Spell” toy six years earlier! And the voice was identical to the Speak and Spell!
My personal favorite was after he had the car for a few months and drove the hell out of it. It had over 160k miles on he quickly blew the head gasket. From that point on, every 30 seconds you would hear the muffled, robotic voice announce, “Engine Overheating! Engine Damage May Occur!” and eventually “Cooling system malfunctioning, seek immediate assistance from the nearest Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge reapir facility to avoid further damage…Engine Damage May Occur!” We still laugh about it sometimes…
Over the last five or six years, I’ve started noticing digital instruments slowly creeping back into cars. Since 2006, the Honda Civic has featured a weird two-tier instrument panel with a big round tachometer on the bottom and digital speedo on the tier above it! I’m not a fan of that setup. I’m told that the Prius has digital gauges, but haven’t verified because I loathe the Prius with every fiber of my being…and the new, subcompact Chevy Sonic also has a mixed digital speedo, analog tach similar to the Civic in concept if not in design…
Thankfully, the only part of the car that usually talks is the NAV system! I usually keep my NAV muted and just keep an eye out for turns, etc. But I had a scary/hilarious experience last August when I went to visit my cousin in Los Angeles. Her 9-yr old daughter was having brain surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles on Sunset Blvd. I went out for two weeks because I seem to be the only person who can control her two boys 9 (twin to the daughter) and 13 when she is away. She says it’s because they’re a little bit scared of me- unlike their other babysitters, their dad or any of the teachers, I WILL WHIP THEIR ASS if necessary! And they know that…
My cuz stayed at the hospital 24/7 for over a week with her daughter, but I went ever other day to visit and try to give her a break for a few minutes. I had no idea how to get from her house in Woodland Hills to the hospital on Sunset Blvd, so I was t the mercy of the navigation system in her Lexus GX470 SUV…and it had never been updated in the five years that she had owned the car!
It did a perfect job of taking me to the exit for Sunset. I forgot to gas up before I left Woodland Hills, so I pulled into a gas station on Sunset and started filling up. It was well into the dusky part of the evening and, only after a few minutes of looking around did I realize that I was NOT in a good neighborhood! I was the only white person for as far as I could see, but there were at least a dozen or more young latino and black guys (with gang tattos) looking at the white boy in the big Lexus SUV with chrome wheels who was crazy enough to stop in their ‘hood! They were looking at me the same way Carnie Wilson looks at 2oz of grilled chicken!!!
As soon as I realized my situation, I quickly hung up the pump with the tank just over half full and didn’t hang around for a receipt! I hopped in and somehow managed to turn the key, shift into Drive and floor the gas simultaneously (and shifting to Drive automatically locked all the doors)…I didn’t really mean to make a spectacle, but I didn’t’ realize that the big Toyota V8 under the hood would roast all four tires if you take off in the manner that I did…but it also got me out of range for most handguns that much faster also…
So I continued down Sunset and the NAV display showed the hospital located a few more miles away. As I closed in and the display changed from miles away to feet away from destination, I was still looking down the Blvd and didn’t see it yet. But as I slowed to a stop at a Red Light, the NAV system announced, “Your destination is located immediately to your right. Route Guidance is now ending, Goodbye! and the display went black…
I looked to my left and it was the MAIN/HUGE Church of Scientology…It was more than just a little freaky…and I decided to run the Red light rather than risk being molested while sitting in traffic if John Travolta suddenly showed up!!! The hospital was a few blocks away and my cousin and I have had many laughs about it since then!
She gets a kick out of sending me into gang territory or other crime-ridden ares without any warning…and she loves to hear all about the near-death experiences and how I barely escaped being mugged, raped or both! But when I get really mad and start to ‘lose it’ on her, she tells me that my quick reflexes and instincts are what kept me from harm and she was just trying to show me that! She even laughed when I was making a hasty exit after running an errand for her that involved me going into Downtown LA! Even with a backup camera and revere distance sensors, I still managed to back right out of my parking spot and into a brick wall!!!
And I am still convinced that the Scientologists have the ability to take over the GPS Nav in cars and on phones if they want to…just like they tried to lure me in!!!
