Rental Beast

I had a business trip last week to Seattle and due to my route cutting through the mountains in winter, I asked for an all-wheel drive rental car.  What I got was a beast.



Aside from needing to get over the mountains, this was exactly the wrong car to drive in a dense urban area, park in a garage with narrow spots, and try to make get back home through rush hour traffic.

But this is not a story about the mismatch between large vehicles and Seattle. This is a story about buttons.





I have never been a car with so many buttons. Quick, think of a feature a "fancy" car might have.

I'm not talking about things like powered seats, sunroof, and Sirrus/XM radio. Or even things like heated leather seats, built in GPS, back-up camera, push-button start or triple-zone climate control.

I'm talking about dynamic cylinder shut-down to increase fuel economy (we got over 19 MPG on the highway), cooled leather seats, and automatic windshield wipers that figured out how often they needed to swipe on their own.

And a vault hide your phone and connect to the media system while your in the store? It had that too.