Shifting paradigm

Good morning, friends.  I’m in central Indiana this morning for business, but, wow, was there a hellacious display of severe weather here last night!  I met with someone around 2:45 and within an hour or more the skies had darkened, the wind had increased and there were suddenly severe thunderstorm and high wind warnings.

I made a beeline for my hotel and walked into the building minutes before it started.  My fourth floor room offered quite a view of the rain and wind, bending trees sideways and causing a total loss of visibility!  There are tens of thousands of people in the region who are without power!

If you had severe weather yesterday and last night, as did residents of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, hope you came through it OK.

That wasn’t my main reason for posting this morning, but weather did play a role in this.

I was in an accident several weeks ago and will be picking up my car tomorrow, with repairs on the accident damage now completed.  But I’ve had an interesting experience over the past three weeks with rental cars.

As regular readers know, I travel a lot, and for longer trips I generally opt for a rental, to keep excess miles off of my car.  But lately I’ve noticed something in these rental vehicles that I have found interesting.

Let’s go back to when I bought my current car, in 2021.  At that time my wife and I owned two well-used Honda vehicles.  We still have my wife’s 2005 Honda Accord (runs like a top!) and I traded in my 2007 Honda Pilot on my current vehicle.  Both of our cars then had traditional mechanical gear selectors.  The Accord is on the floor and the Pilot’s was on the steering column.

The car I now own is a Honda Passport, a little smaller but still a mid-size SUV.  But it has something I had never had—a push button transmission!  These transmissions have long been electronic (the car people call that “drive by wire”) so the shifters have been mostly for motorists’ familiarity than function.

Anyway, I never thought much about that until buying my car in 2021.  But now…

In three weeks I’ve had three different rental cars.  Well, technically, four, but that fourth one had a problem and I returned it to the rental agency to exchange it for one that did not have the same problem.

Anyway, the first was a Nissan Sentra, a compact sedan with decent interior space.  It had something close to the traditional gear selector, with a couple of minor variations.  Took a couple of days to become completely accustomed to that but didn’t accidentally drive into anything in the week that I had it!

The next week I was issued a GMC Terrain, a smallish SUV that I took on a trip to the St. Louis area.  Its gear selector was essentially a row of buttons, but instead of pushing them, you put your finger on the one you wanted and pulled back on it.  The PARK button was a button, thank goodness.

Again, I adjusted relatively quickly, but found it strange all week.

This week, my rental car was a nice upgrade, a Cadillac XT6 SUV.  And, you guessed it, this car has a different method of choosing the drive mode the driver wants.  It had what looks like a traditional gearshift lever, but with a couple of twists.  To back up, you press the side button on the lever and push forward, and you are then in reverse.  To go forward, it’s the exact opposite, press that side button and pull BACK and you’re moving forward in drive.  The button on top of the lever is the PARK button.

I’m really glad to be getting MY car back, as I know how to drive it!

Hope you select the right gears to have a good day!