Took the family out the other day and, seeing as the kiddie seats were already in it (as good a place as any to store them), I took everyone in the Merc family wagon, a grand’s worth of meh. That said, I have sung its praises before and will again: nothing that doesn’t need a commercial licence to use the local tip can carry more.
Anyway, it was during our little jaunt that I noticed some of the reasons that I don’t enjoy living with modern cars.
Most of these problems come down to trust, more precisely my distrust of technology. I know that makes me a Luddite, but I am so embedded in classics that I find it hard to comprehend (or see the point of) many of the gimmicks that come as standard on modern cars. In fact, they just ruin what little bit of the soulless experience is positive enough to be ruined in the first place.
Small, irritating things on the whole. A bit like me!
For instance, I noticed that I never lock the Merc (if you know where I live be warned that it is wired to the national grid, or something). This is simply because I don’t trust flidgers (I expect they have a real name like remote key activation or something). And I don’t trust alarms , either, because they are forever going off when you don’t want them to and never going off when you do want them to. In fact, last time I went away for a couple of days I left the spare keys with a neighbour on the assumption that the alarm would go tonto in the middle of the night.
