We’ve dropped off the hire car so just writing down some thoughts.
It was an SUV in spite of Simon’s protestations, but in the end, having a big car wasn’t the handicap I was expecting. Certainly a manual car would have added a level of difficulty that we really didn’t need. So that’s one to Simon.
Apart from the frozen screen, the car had a couple of extra “safety” features it’s worth noting.
Simon was annoyed by the alarm that went off whenever he strayed out of his lane. This was sold as ensuring that the driver was awake which I think he took as an affront. When I said it was like a rumble strip he stopped complaining. I must say he did have a tendency to push my side of the car out into the shoulder of the road which was unnerving at times. Not as bad as that time I was in a car in Scotland being driven by an American medical student many years ago. She took the wing mirrors off an entire lane of parked cars one time, a most impressive feat. No damage to our car at all.
The last feature which did annoy was the speed alarm. The car was so clever it could detect the speed limit wherever we were, and would begin alarming as soon as we exceeded it. This is all well and good except the speed limit varies widely and often in Italy – on one stretch of road it will change from 30 to 50 to 70, 90, 110, and up to 130. Sometimes this will be at sensible times, such as being lower through towns, but often it’s for no reason you could fathom. Plus, the speed limits were treated with disdain by everyone else on the road. If we’d kept to the posted limits it would have caused chaos. Even so, I wouldn’t complain except that the super clever mechanism for working out the speed limits on the roads we were driving on would often get confused with the tiny country roads we crossed over or were near to. This meant you could be happily pootling along at 130 and suddenly the car would think you were in a 30 kph speed zone and start alarming wildly. This is not good for the blood pressure or stress levels generally.
We found the submenu where you could disable the alarms but this would get reset every time the engine stopped. This led to the comical situation of both of us sighing deeply every time we got back in the car and the alarm started going off again.
One of the first cars I ever owned was a white Honda Prelude that I inherited from Simon when he upgraded to a car he got handed down from his parents. It was fabulous but as a Japanese import, not only was it putting out exhaust fumes that we didn’t know to worry about in those days, but it also had an inbuilt alarm that would start dinging as soon as the speed got over 110. We both drove a lot faster in those days so it ended up being a bit of a target for us so we knew we were going fast enough. It did fluster some passengers though.