A Car Falsely Maligned Teaches Me Important Lessons About Driving Forward

By Elissa Caterfino-Mandel

I love my new grey hybrid car, but for the first three months I drove it, it died in the garage almost every week. That’s because it came off the lot with a defective battery.  I called it a lemon.

It is not a lemon.

It just behaved like one until the dealer got the big guns from Michigan to come in and test out the battery on some kind of super-duper machine that proved what my husband had suspected all along.

Isn’t it obvious that a hybrid car that could only run for about a week at a time without needing a jumper cable to start was battery-impaired?  (For all other things that the car could have been see here.)  Hint:  I am not tech-savvy enough to figure how how to post a link , so until I call my computer support person to help me, read on. 

The battery on a hybrid car must cost a lot.  Before the dealer replaced the battery, the service people tried telling me that there was something wrong with the radio controls, the lights, and the core system that operated the electric, whatever that means.

Each time I brought the car in – three times – they fixed these things and sent me home.  Insert sad face here.

They even accused me of leaving the car in “drive” in my garage.  (Clearly, this should be filed under “preposterous suggestion”.) The service people clearly don’t know who taught me to drive.  My father does not leave cars in the garage unlocked without the emergency brake on.  No way was I leaving this car in “drive,” and going into my house.

While I have come late to the environmental table, I do love driving, or saying that I drive, a hybrid vehicle.  (If you drive hybrid, for some reason, you stop using words like car and start using words like vehicle.  It sounds more efficient to say you operate a hybrid vehicle than to drive a car, particularly the way I do it.)

With my hybrid, I can pretend I do good things for the environment, and can ignore the fact that many of the disagreements my husband and I have are over my putting the saran wrap (erroneously) into the recycling bin.

So now I can say I am a driver of a hybrid.  The car demands a tremendous amount from me, however.  The car is smart.  About cars, I am not. I cannot operate it with the traditional dials.  If the dials are there, they’re too complicated for me to figure out.

So, I have to issue it voice commands.  It’s tougher than talking to my children. The voice commands it wants to hear from me are quite specific.  And  “you idiot car,” is unfortunately not one of them.  To program a street into its GPS system, I must speak with the precision of a grammarian from the Oxford English Dictionary:  “destination street address.”   These three words are not the most comfortable sequence of words to have roll from the tongue, particularly when one is lost. Hybrid car ownership has turned me into someone I do not necessarily like or even admire.  After the battery was changed, the car started to reek, like something bad had died inside it.

“I think that the new battery may be giving off some  weird chemical smell,” I said when I brought it back to the dealer.  “It may be a health hazard.  If this car wasn’t going to kill me from aggravation, it certainly was proving itself fairly gross to ride in.  Well, the dealership took me seriously this time, quickly shepherding the car to the back of the shop.  Five minutes later, the man, who was very nice, came back with a container of garlic from the local market that he’d discovered under my back seat.  “I think we’ve found your problem,” was all he said.