With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Too Many Rentals

2013 April 03 00:19

My wife and I took our first big trip in the airplane over the last couple of weeks. Yay! During the trip, the plane manifested two major problems. Boo!

I'll go into the plane problems some other time. Because of the delays, we ended up renting many more cars to get around than we expected to. Since I'm sitting a hotel room waiting for the airplane to be fixed, I might as well put phots of groovy instrument panels up.

The first car we rented was a Hundai Elantra. I seem to remember that I've rented these before, and this one was no exception. A nice driving, small, elegant car. I really really like the instrument panel. Partially "analog" gauges, partially digital bar meters. A nice mix; it's clear that they thought about it.

Here's the instrument cluster:

Top center has the gear indicator. To its left, temperature gauge as a bar graph, fuel on the right. Tach and speedo are "analog" needles. (I put analog in quotes because I'm sure they're being processed by the car computer and output as a digital-to-analog signal rather than being physically attached to anything in the car).



Here are some of the warning lights. Standard analog lights. This shows the temperature gauge just as the car is started. I took a photo with absolutely all of the engine lights, but my phone camera has been flaking out recently and apparently I lost a bunch of those photos.

And again, with the engine cold. The "ECO" light here puzzles me; there's a corresponding button on the left of the panel to turn it on and off. I'm not sure what it is for.

This panel was by far the best of the three cars that we drove. Renting the Hundai was on purpose; we wanted a car to get around the city. Flying home, weather was dodgy so we stopped at the big Lexington airport to check weather. It hadn't improved, so we rented a car and stayed the night. That car was a Honda Civic. It had weird space-age 3D things in the front of the main panel that didn't actually do anything. It was very weird.

The last one, which I'm still driving now, is odd. It's a Chrysler 200. It's as if the design hadn't been updated since about 1985. There are LEDs on the panel, but only a couple. There is an analog clock top center of the center stack. It's an odd car. It's nice to drive, but it's a very odd feature set.