Our Cars
To travel around the United States easily you have two choices
1. Get a car
2. Don't travel around the United States easily
The 'car culture' is so prevelent here that in alot of cases, their roads don't have pavements/sidewalks so you really cannot walk anywhere. Even getting from a shopping mall on one side of a street to another can involve driving there as walking around 6 lanes on your side, 6 lanes on the other and waiting 2 minutes for the green man to appear can become quickly tiresome.
So, we landed at about 6pm on the 1st and at 9am on the 2nd, we went to pickup our first car. Its a Chrysler Sebring Convertible because a convertible was requirement of driving through the Florida keys (not legally or anything, just a requirement for us).
Now, American cars get a bad rap. American's think they are good, the rest of the world think they are rubbish. Well, I've had quite a few cars over the years. Some old and slow, some new and fast, some with toys and gadgets and others large and luxerious. In my view, a single word describes all American cars - cheap. We have some really good cars for sale in the UK and comparing even normal cars like a Vauxhall Astra to an American car its easy to label the American car as cheap.
The Plastics, the noise of the door closing, the seats, the whole feel of it is just cheap. Example? Jackie flips down the sunvisor, opens the mirror and it comes off in her hand. Ever had a car do that? Me neither and we are talking about a car which is no more than 2 years old.
We loved it though, good on fuel, electric roof and quite comfortable (seats wern't great). After just 2 days with it we had to give it up as we were driving to Orlando and dropping the car off and we were not allowed to take the convertable. I returned it on the 3rd and collected our next vehicle.
Here it is, the Dodge Nitro
Its a 4x4, or an SUV as the American's call them. Its quite fast and the interior has a chunky feel to it. However, with just over 30,000 miles on it, ours had a shudder when driving at speed. I tried to figure out exactly what was causing it but in the end just accepted that it was 'American' and these things were to be expected.
4 cup holders naturally and lots of storage space. But its amazing how some things get overlooked, like a remote tailgate where you press the button on the remote and the struts on the tailgate are so strong that it can break your jaw if you are standing too close. Closing it is a two handed job. We managed to get it to Orlando without it breaking down and dropped it off at the Hilton.
10 days later we collected another car for 26 days, a Chevolet Cobolt. I wasn't looking forward to getting this very cheap car but I was very pleasently surprised when I collected it. It had an onboard computer for mpg readings and was very quiet and easy to drive. With only 3,000 miles on it the brakes and tyres were original and there was no jerkyness associtated with older American automatics.
I didn't have time to take a picture of it (the one below is off of Google) as we found through a long and drawn out method that the cigarette lighter sockets/chargers (it had two which was useful) didn't work. It was probably something as simple as a fuse but since it was a hire car, I wasn't willing to do any diagnostics myself as fuses shouldn't blow on 3-4 moth old cars and I assume it did as it was 'American'. So we returned it to Avis who appologised and replaced the car for us. Now, Avis put each car into a type and increase the price as you work your way up the scale. The scale is as follows
Economy
Medium: Compact
Medium: Intermediate
Large: Standard
Large: People Carrier
Large: Luxury
Convertible
Large: Pickup
Large: 4x4
I thought they would give us another Economy and I'd have been happy with that but instead they gave us a Luxury car, a Lincoln Town car. This car really sums up American driving all in one.
Below I will list some of its features.
4.6L V8 with 239bhp (this kind of power is attainable from a 3.0 V6 in Europe and has been for the last 8 years)
4 speed Auto (I understand the newest Lexus comes with an 8 speed Auto)
No reach adjustment on the Steering wheel (available for 20 years or so on European cars of this level)
Leather everwhere
Electric boot (opens and raises itself and closes itself)
Electric brake pedal adjustment (the pedal can be adjusted away from or towards the floor for shorter or taller drivers (can you believe that? I'm sure its available on a 7 series or S-class but this car doesn't even have 5 speeds on its gearbox)
MPG? 30 at a push but normally around 20 and thats a UK gallon, its less in US gallons.
Only 5,000 miles on this car and it cost $50,000 new. Nothing broken on it so far, we will see if it lasts...