Ooooh - speaking of automotive stuff: there’s a gas cover release lever on our car (a 2020 CRV). It’s down to the left of driver’s legs - roughly level with mid-calf. Almost impossible to reach, without opening the door and basically leaning awkwardly halfway out, to get to the correct angle. WTF???
It is similar in our older car (2006 CRV).
And they always seem to be RIGHT NEXT TO THE FRIGGING HOOD RELEASE. I have pulled the wrong one on numerous occasions.
One thing our Dodge Caravan did right (one of the few things, really) was there was an interlock between the left sliding door and the gas cover release; if the door was open, you could not pull the cover release. Makes sense - as it would have then hit the inside of the slid-back door, and likely damaged one or the other. I don’t know whether there was a way of preventing the door from being opened if the gas cover was already open.
At least we HAD the second sliding door; it was an option when we bought ours. The first few years minivans were available, there was a sliding door only on one side (nothing at all on the other). Clearly, the designers did not include women with small children in their planning - the target audience, yanno.
As long as we’re on automotive stuff, a bit of an annoyance on the Volvo XC40 Recharge, but quite possibly the hybrid and ICE ones, too. Perhaps all modern Volvos, and even other cars.
Shifting gears is performed with a button and a toggle lever on the center console. There is no mechanical linkage, it is all electronic.
The “P” button is used to put the car in park. The toggle lever completes the rest of the selection with “RND” (maybe “L” on the hybrid and ICE models?). Because park is controlled by the button, the toggle sits in the neutral position. It is then pushed forward to go into reverse, and pulled backwards to go into drive.
It is really easy to see what the logic is. A variant of the familiar PRNDL arrangement is maintained, but in my test sample of two non-automotive engineers, they both expected forward=drive and back=reverse.
I don’t understand the “women with small children” problem. We had a one-side door Caravan when the kids were little - we never experienced the slightest inconvenience with that.
You can certainly MANAGE, but it’s a whole lot easier to put a kid in a car seat behind the driver when you’re only leaning into one door, rather than into the one on the other side, and across the closer of the two or three seats.
Not the same issue at all, but a few years back, we had rented a large SUV for a long trip. It had 3 rows of seats (we only used the first 2, except for one very brief bit). There was basically no way to get to the back row of seats, short of folding down the back of the middle seat, and climbing over the entire thing. The middle row did not otherwise move out of the way in any fashion that we could discern.
Are you sure there wasn’t a release to move the middle row forward? In my 1994 Suburban the middle row is split into unequal parts, holding two on the left portion behind the driver and one on the right portion. At the back of the base was a release button that would let the seat roll forward and lock. Once the rearmost passengers had shimmied in – using the back of the short seat as necessary – you’d release the seat and push it back into place.
It was awkward but the passengers’ feet were at the regular floor level instead of having to crawl over a folded seat.
I would have said “people with small children” but I found the door on one side plenty inconvenient. In addition to the issue of car seats ( i had two kids in car seats at the same time - loads of fun to have to reach over one kid to buckle/unbuckle the other) there was exiting the vehicle. I live in a city and therefore I almost always park on the street. The single side door meant that sometimes (if I parked on a one way street) my choice was to have the kids get out on the side with traffic or I could unbuckle them, close the door, go around to the front passenger side and have them climb into the front seat to get out.
Yes, there was, on our Caravan, about a 1995 model, IIRC. If the gas cover was open, the driver’s side sliding door would not open. I’m not sure how the locking mechanism worked, but I know that it did.
I assume the single sliding door on early minivans was just because that’s how regular full size vans have been since as long as vans have existed, so Chrysler just stuck with the way it had always been done.
I don’t have any first hand experience, but from various car reviews I’ve watched on YouTube accessing the third row in an SUV usually works in a similar manner to accessing the back seat of a two-door car. In other words there’s usually some way to fold and or slide the middle seat forward. Often it’s only the passenger side seat that does this.
I hadn’t thought through the transformations that came with more stringent child-seating regulations. When my kids were small they only needed a carrier as infants, and that was dead easy to click into and out of its bracket. The two kids were 18 months apart and we never needed a carrier for both at the same time, but they generally did occupy the middle row together.
The next step up was handled by the kid seats built in to the Caravan middle row (of only two seats, there was a big space inside the door for easy access to the third row). Those were excellent (although presumably not as safe as the current full-monty pods) and very easy to use.
We probably didn’t park on one-way streets very often, so that’s another big difference and if you do, the doors on both sides make sense. Although I cringe at the thought of people using the traffic side doors when loading and off-loading kids because of the more convenient access to the seats.
See also those hit movies, “Bordt” and “My Big Fat Grssk Wedding”.
When I lived in Bozeman, the taxi company had a number that ended with five 9s. I heard from someone who once worked as a dispatcher for them that he often picked up the phone to hear a repeated tone of some drunk continually mashing the 9.
There are also all the suburbanites who park on a street once per year and park in a parking lot or in their driveway with two-sided access 5 times per day. Those folks want the doors on both sides to easily load / unload the little darlin’s.
There may well have been a way to do that; it was not obvious, and we only needed it the one time (where the same result was accomplished by having the kid climb over the seat). If we’d had the vehicle for more than 5 days, I’m sure we’d have tried harder to figure it out.
The Arizona Republic newspaper has the phone number 444-4444. Before we went to multiple area codes and 10-digit dialing in metro-Phoenix they had a radio jingle that included the line “Just dial 4 until somebody answers.”
There is/was a cafe chain in the Seattle area with the puzzling name “Zi Pani.” Puzzling, because I couldn’t understand where the name came from. I know a bit about languages but not this one.
There was a story in the local news that explained their name and the struggles they had trying to come up with a good one. Their first draft was apparently “Pin*zi.”
They did not see that coming…the backlash,I mean. So they rearranged the letters. I can’t recall why they needed to stick with just these few letters, but there you go. It still seems kind of stupid.
I had to go to this store for many years, to get the occasional item for my young son and for his friends’ birthday party gifts. I too always called the place “Toys Ya Us” as my own private joke.