After a bit more mucking around last week, we did end up taking possession of the car we couldn’t get the lease on, mostly because the dealership was sufficiently apologetic and the maths on buying it was sufficiently similar (assuming the usual gambles of our continued existence in the US, employment, etcetera, but those are not bad gambles at this point unless we encounter a really crazy immigration officer on our way back at the end of July, and we have about as much control over that as we do over meteor strikes.)
The new car, making Bob the Camry look as old as it actually is, despite being - up until this point - the newest car we'd ever owned by most of a decade.
Because at the point we both left home our parents were driving cars about a decade older than this one – and as students we had the fond aim of one day owning a car made in the same decade we bought it – there are a bunch of features on this car that are extremely new to both of us. I am somewhat embarrassed by how long it took us to figure out how to open all the doors with the remote-open key, for starters. (Admittedly, all this stuff is laid out in the manual, but that would be cheating.) We did get taken through a lot of the features at the dealer, but it’s things like that which have been standard on new cars for the better part of a decade that trip us up.
The new car – which I have made the executive decision is going to be called Tyrion, because it’s red and a Subaru Impreza and I’m an unreformed geek, basically – goes a bit beyond the marvel of technology that is the remote open, though. Tyrion talks to our phones. I still occasionally get all gooey-eyed over Bob’s central locking, to put you in context of my car expectations. The trick, however, is getting Tyrion (and the phones) to understand us. I already ditched Siri, on the iPhone, after discovering that it will not let you use the “Australian” voice setting and search for things in America at the same time, apparently on the grounds that no-one ever leaves their home country in any way requiring the legitimate use of an iPhone. Tyrion’s Bluetooth phone integration system requires that you talk to it. I was doing OK up until the part where I had to enter a phone number.
ME: “One two three four five six seven eight nine.”
BLUETOOTH: “Please confirm this is the number you entered: one two three three five five seven nine eight.”
ME: “One two three four five six seven eight nine.”
BLUETOOTH: “One three five nine apple question mark.”
ME: “One, Two. Three. Faw-r. Faahv. Seex. Say-vuhn. Eight. Nine.”
BLUETOOTH: “Your accent sucks.”
ME: “Wahn. Toow. Thray-uh. Faw-r. Faahv. Seex. Say-vuhn. Ay-ut. Naaahn.”
BLUETOOTH: “Ahahahahahahahah. No.”
ME: “One. Two. Three.Four.FiveSeexSayvuhnAyutNaahn.”
BLUETOOTH: “One two three four five six seven eight nine. Why was that so hard?”
ME: *Decorous dance of victory*
Meanwhile the dealer, who’s showing us how to use this, was sitting next to me clearly trying to not laugh his ass off (for which I do not blame him.) Mike wasn’t even bothering to not laugh. For which I had my revenge about half an hour later when we got home and his (Android) phone simply refused to talk to the car.
Here, the Bluetooth program explains that's not the Droid it was looking for.
It started working as soon as we gave up trying to get it to work, naturally.
The thing is, though, that the biggest difference between the Subarus I saw back home and our new car is in cultural perception. In New Zealand, Subarus regularly feature on the list of most stolen cars and are commonly associated with boy racers (stolen because they’re easy to modify and race.) Here, they’re marketed as sedate family vehicles for the snow belt – the kind of thing you buy if you have to commute a long way in the snow and want something that can handle three inches of slush safely without being a traditional 4WD/SUV-style car. (The reason we bought it, essentially: long-distance drives in winter are not fun up here in older cars, and the odds are Mike will be doing them for most of our time here.) They’re not even close to being boy-racer cars. When I mentioned this stereotype to the Subaru dealer, they couldn’t get their head around it – they sold perfectly good sports cars, they protested, if you were going to steal a Subaru and drag-race it, why on earth would you steal the family sedan? (Answer, of course: because they’re common, whereas the Subaru sportscars start at prices guaranteed to ensure there are so few in New Zealand they’d be recovered about a day after getting nicked.)
The most stolen cars in America are a mix of practical utes/pick-up trucks, and, well, family sedans, as well as a couple of sportier models, but Subarus don’t feature anywhere on there. Presumably because if you’re going to steal something for parts they’re not optimal, and if you’re going to steal something to race, your choices are much wider. Or, who knows? Maybe it’s cultural. After all, apparently people over here bother to steal Toyota Corollas. That, I never would have guessed.
Well, at least ONE of our cars is now from the 21st century, if not this decade of it! I hope you didn’t cause further cultural misunderstandings by asking for a “Su-BAH-roo”, as opposed to a “SOO-ba-ROO”. Is this car new, new, or barely used? It looks a lot flasher even than our newish Corolla, Brutus.
It’s a 2012 model, and not technically perfectly new, as one of the managers at the dealership was using it, but it only had 700 miles on it. I will admit one of the driving factors in getting a new-new car is that we are highly unlikely to ever be in a position again where that’s actually, if not the cheapest option, economically competitive with the others, mostly because new cars are so much more expensive in NZ.
Belly laugh! never thought about the cultural differences between boy racers!. I can relate – I have a new smart phone that you can talk the text into. Only it doesn’t want to recognise what I say. So its quicker to key in the text.
Mike tries to use the speak-to-text function on his phone sometimes. I can tell because that’s when I get sent sentences that start out OK and then end in gibberish (or at least a string of unconnected words.) I’ve tried to use mine a couple of times, but I spend more time correcting its misapprehensions than I would typing…in fact, even assuming the iPhone could understand me it’s usually quicker to do anything manually than it is to wait for it to parse my question and come up with an answer!