New Car!

Last week we bought a new car! It has been on the cards for a while. The old one was such a wreck. The roof liner had fallen down everywhere to the point that it looked like a bedouin tent inside. The door on Kate's side sometimes didn't shut, which meant that it could never be opened, in case the door didn't shut while we were out. The fix was whacking the locking mechanism with a large wrench and only Jeff knew how to do it. So we duct-taped over the door button so the kids couldn't open the door by mistake. I didn't fancy driving home from anywhere with a door hanging open. For a couple of months now it has been reeking of petrol when it gets turned on, so rather than breathe in fumes we put ourselves on a no-air-conditioner rule. That was fun. And on the way to the dealership to trade it in the power steering started to make a funny noise. It was beyond time to get rid of it!

The old car was built in 2002 and came with a video player and a tape deck - I kid you not. When we bought it off some friends in 2008 I remember being quite shocked that there wasn't even a CD player in there!

The new car is a 2013 Chrysler Town and Country. It has a CD player, DVD player, multiple USB ports, even a 115 volt outlet for chargers, GPS, and a touch screen. It has doors that open by themselves. It has a back-up camera (which I love already!). Jeff's phone is synced in to the car so that the car can make and answer phone calls. He can play his Pandora stations through the car sound system via his phone, wirelessly. The other day we were driving to lunch in Costa Mesa and he had live BBC news streaming through the car radio, and the traffic news mentioned a flooding on the A338 and a diversion on the A31 near Ringwood... right near my parents' house. I had a weird moment of total disconnect. For a moment my brain was unable to process the difference between what I was seeing and what I was hearing, half a world away!

In all truth, I am quite astonished at the difference in the available technology in just ten years. And at the pace that things change, it makes me wonder what our next new car (c. 2022) will be like. It will probably come equipped with a flux capacitor as standard.