On Driving a Car That Turns Itself Off
Almost a month after our passenger door got crunched by a driver making an incautious right-on-red, we finally got our little Toyota SUV back today. Most of the last month we were in a rental: a Honda CRV.
My review: a good car with one disqualifying feature: the engine shuts off every time you come to a full stop, then it rumbles back to life as you take your foot off the brake pedal. The idea is to reduce the time the engine spends idling. But it’s terrible! At stop signs one must communicate with other drivers through the subtle lurching of your car, but with this vehicle you put your foot on the gas, and nothing happens. A half-second later, the engine comes to life and you lurch forward. But by that point the other driver has already taken your indecision as permission to enter the intersection themself. It’s annoying and potentially dangerous. And it’s also just a lazy way to squeeze a drop of efficiency out of that absolutely inefficient thing, the internal combustion engine.
Driving the lurching thing really made clear that a car is a tool, and like an unbalanced electric saw, a clumsy car can be dangerous. I truly believe that our society must become far less car dependent, but as much as today we continue to rely on cars, I also think they should be excellent machines.
I was happy to retake possession of our RAV4 hybrid, which also turns its engine off at stoplights, but thankfully is never without the highly-responsive power of its electric motors, available at the first flick of your foot
