All this nazi / notsee stuff is mystifying news to clueless old me.
that … and cost!
an additional 2nd door is def. more expensive than no door
This seemed like an appropriate thread. Fords latest recall. Install a drain tube for leaking fuel injectors so the gas doesn’t get on the hot engine and catch fire.
I am a masochist for rental cars, I get a sick satisfaction when traveling of experimenting with the most ridiculous of make/models that I can find and nitpick their shortcomings endlessly, to the woe of any of my passengers.
My latest was the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Being an all-electric, they thoughtfully tried to keep the same P/N/D automatic transmission philosophy, though they moved it to a little extra stem lever on the wheel column. Not too bad, and I was able to get going on the road with only minor head scratching. Hoever, ending the drive proved quite a challenge. You see, P, was nowhere to be found, despite trying to turn off the car and having the dash display condescendingly insist that it must be put in P to stop the vehicle.
The steering wheel is such that direct view from the drivers seat makes it impossible to see or discover the P. While D and N are set with a twisty knob on the column lever, P is set with a concave recessed button on the end of the lever, labeled with a larger letter P which is clearly visible from the passenger seat but not at all from the driver. Luckily, after both me and my passenger craned our heads all about and poked into every dash menu we could find, my passenger finally saw the P button. I never would have seen it and to this day there would still be an Ioniq 5 parked somewhere, left fully on in Neutral, with a makeshift travel cup wheel chock to keep it from rolling away.
Ummm… So you might die, but here’s a band-aid instead of a proper fix.
I wonder what the EPA has to say about that.
The Reuters article I posted doesn’t mention WHERE they’re draining it. But this one confirms it’s on the ground. The EPA might be interested. Besides, who doesn’t want to pay $3.50/gal for gas and drain it on the road.
Anybody recall, say 40-50 years ago, there was a dark stripe down the middle of a roadway? Oil leaking from cars/trucks.
You could see darker spots after a bump in the road, making the drip fall.
That’s improved immensely.
Also, prior to equipping engines with PCV ( positive crankcase ventilation ) systems, they were equipped with road draft tubes to vent the crankcase gases/vapor ( “blow by” ) to the atmosphere. The end of the tube was beveled in such a way that the movement of the vehicle tended to suck the gases as in a venturi effect. What you got was a fog of oily vapor that dispersed itself from underneath the car all over the road ( and the bottom of the car aft of the engine compartment ). Free rust-proofing? 
Today that would be an additional monthly fee.
Ha! During our vacation to visit friends in Belize, that’s exactly what they do - spray the undercarriage with used motor oil. Apparently brake lines and other tender steel stuff under there rust out in a couple of years if you don’t.
This annoys me so much - When you zip up a jacket all the way or almost all the way, the top part is stiff and hits right under your chin. I have a couple of jackets like this. I have a heavy winter jacket I wear when I walk the dogs that has that “great” feature. I had to take an old neck gaiter from COVID times and fold it over the top of the collar.
A few weeks ago I bought a “planter” (basically just a big flower pot) from Lowe’s. I filled it with potting soil and planted a basil plant in it. Then this past Saturday it rained all day. After a while I noticed a large puddle was forming in the planter. Upon further inspection, this planter has no holes in the bottom to allow excess water to drain out the bottom. It’s basically just a giant plastic cup. Has I noticed that before I planted something in it, I would have drilled some in the bottom, but I didn’t even think to check because I just assumed anything designed to hold plants would already have them. I can’t really drill them in the bottom now that there’s already a plant in it; I guess I’ll drill some in the side. In the meantime the soil in this planter is now oversaturated with water.
Drill holes in the bottom. Just tip the pot onto its side at the edge of a table or low wall. I’ve done it many times, and for the same reason.
I encountered a iPhone user interface human race condition just yesterday:
- called someone from the call list in the phone app
- after finishing the call, set my finger in motion to touch the hangup button
- only, the other party had hung up a few milliseconds before me
- which led to my finger hitting not the hangup button (that had disappeared) but an entry in the call list (that had reappeared), dialing that number.
That’s one of a class of user interface mishaps that are the result of the screen content changing on me while my finger is on final approach to the screen, too late to flinch back.
Hah - we wound up with the same model, Ford Expedition Max (newer model year, obviously) on our trip for the eclipse. The kids figured out the move-the-seat-forward step.
That same car has a dial in the console area, to change gears. I guess I’d get used to it in time but it was definitely strange. AND, it did NOT automatically engage the parking brake when the engine is turned off, which was annoying.
It’s a rear wheel drive vehicle. which proved to be a real problem; our rental’s driveway had not been plowed, so we instantly got stuck in the snow attempting to get into the driveway. Yes, 6-8 inches of snow on the ground, and it got stuck. A 4WD version might have handled better.
Furthermore, there are not one, but TWO storage areas in the “glove box” area. One low, that opens as you’d expect (with a visible latch). The other, up in the dashboard area, looked like it should open by pressing then releasing the door, but we could not figure it out. Finally, on the drive back, I noticed a button an inch or so to the left of it; I’d thought it was part of the trim or something. I pressed it - and SPROING the door opened.
Another piece of user interface idiocy: I was a member of a gym and often made use of the heart rate monitoring functionality of the treadmills. I have an interestingly anomalous heart rate (not a reason for concern, according to the cardiologists that I consulted) that is low at rest (~ 50/min) and quickly goes high even for a level of exercise that I can sustain for long (I once ran a half marathon with heart rates 150-195).
So the treadmill’s heart rate montor sometimes freaked out with the text HIGH HEART RATE looping over the display. That message displaced the display of the heart rate, so I could not know how high that was.
Which wouldn’t be half as annoying if there were some way to prevent that accidental call from showing up on the recipient’s phone.
I have a similar issue with some websites:
- I set my finger in motion to click on something on the website.
- Elsewhere on the site, an ad finishes loading.
- The ad loading causes the thing I intended to click on to move to another spot on the page.
- I end up unintentionally clicking on the ad rather than the thing I wanted to click.
Based on what I’ve seen in Doug DiMuro’s car reviews on YouTube, there seems to be a trend of late of car companies trying to reinvent the gearshift. Lots of new cars have replaced the old fashioned lever with dials, or buttons, or joystick thingys. I’m not sure what, if any, problem they’re trying to solve here. I suppose there is an argument that a traditional lever takes up more space on the console; replacing it with a dial or button frees up space for built in phone chargers and other tech.
But contrast that with the 2005 Prius, which Toyota gave a traditional gear lever even though it didn’t technically need one, because they wanted the controls to feel familiar to drivers who had probably never driven a hybrid before.
I rented a Nissan Rogue recently, and the gearshift was something like a joystick. Took me a bit to figure out how to put it in reverse.
I think that’s actually intentional on the part of the website / adware designers.
“Scummy” and “stupid” are, sadly, not synonyms. This qualifies as scummy. Gets the ads more clicks.