Nice car

Mercedes E350 Hertz Rental

Friday, November 6, 2009 

Hertz gave me a lovely Mercedes E350 as a free upgrade in LA this trip: definitely the best upgrade so far.IMG00025-20091106-1001.jpg

It is quite a nice car, with plenty of trunk space, and extremely quiet interior, a powerful engine, and excellent handling. The interior is clean and well designed with a nice dash that’s easy to read. In fact the entire system was fairly intuitive. I had my phone paired with the in-car audio system, the voice recognition system figured out, the nav system programmed, climate set, and my favorite Sirius classical station on the radio in the 20 minute drive from LAX to Santa Monica. It was probably the first time I’ve made that trip and arrived a little disappointed it was so brief.

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Most of the interaction with the Car’s computer is through voice prompts and the system is very effective: it never made a mistake in my use. One can also navigate the cars computer options with a fairly nice click wheel, which is reminiscent of the BMW system, but without the force feedback (alas).

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The Nav system in the car is excellent. It works far better than the Hertz NeverLost system (which was, inexplicably, also installed). The Mercedes version is a lot easier to read and understand and is integrated with the audio system in the car (though the announcements were painfully loud and the one thing I didn’t figure out was how to turn them down).

The computer’s visual interface also serves as the backup camera. It seems a bit superfluous on a normal sized car, but it has a good down-view, so one can see if one is about to backup over a child’s favorite toy or limb, which I suppose has merit for people who haven’t realized that most children are the free byproduct of an otherwise pleasurable activity.

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I was very impressed with the iPod integration. The in-glove-box cabling includes an analog headset port (female, for reasons I do not comprehend – it should be male) and an iPod connector.

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The on-screen interface is a nice integration with basic iPod functionality and the click wheel emulates the iPod’s navigation mode in a very intuitive way, unlike the Audi interface.

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Mercedes even manages to push their own logo to the iPod, which is pretty impressive.

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All in all, an excellent rental I’d be glad to get again.

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Posted at 17:09:55 GMT-0700

Category: GeopostphotoPositiveRental carsReviews

Rental car review Toyota Avalon

Sunday, June 29, 2008 

Rental Car Review: Toyota Avalon

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The Toyota Avalon is a very nice car – comfortable and large. The engine is powerful and the car is spry for it’s size, quite capable of zipping past a string of cars to make an exit.

We took it up commonwealth avenue in Boston, a street with a far, far less than perfect surface and it the suspension never got upset, nor did it get noisy in the car. While the car is roomy it is easy to navigate though narrow streets filled with stochiometric Boston drivers and pedestrians.

We found the stereo plenty loud and very quite good. The car came with satellite radio, which is kind of entertaining – a punk channel even – but doesn’t work all that well under trees or on narrow urban streets; just blacking out is a bit more annoying than the fade out of standard radio and we find ourselves tuning into the very fine local radio. The radio cover door is a bit over the top: why would you want to cover a radio? It isn’t for security – it’s just aesthetic and makes the radio hard to control when closed by the door edge is ugly when open.

  • Quiet – very quiet, very silent.
  • Comfortable – extremely comfortable and easy egrees. Well designed controls.
  • Engine – fast, powerful and quiet.
  • Suspension – very agile and stable. Never got upset.
  • Basic amenities – everything that could be reasonably powered is.
  • Stereo – excellent sound quality though the low frequency isn’t hip hop friendly.
  • Security – a large, roomy, secure trunk.
Posted at 08:00:28 GMT-0700

Category: photoRental carsReviews

Renting an Audi A4 Quattro

Thursday, December 13, 2007 

Hertz was very nice to me and rented me a brand new Audi A4 instead of the Taurus I reserved. It had a whole 50km on the odometer when I got it. It was kind of fun: fast, accelerated hard with the four wheel drive in sport mode and a six speed transmission, even on the snow and ice. The sound system was great… but…

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So like many good cars these days, it had an iPod dock in the glove box. Pop your iPod in the slot and the stereo recognizes it as a… CD? whatever. And it has a changer, so it allocates CD’s “1” through “6” to the CD changer and “7” though “12” to the iPod. It seems to allocate them to playlists it finds on the iPod, but it doesn’t extract any text. You change from file to file with the track changing knob, which indexes through tracks 1-99… and then 1-99… and then 1-99… Which means you’re finding your songs by the sound. Now this is an interface that in 1983 made sense for a CD… 10 or so tracks, you can probably remember what’s what. But it does not work for an iPod with 10,000 tracks… not at all. Not even a little bit.

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Ironically the display is matrix addressed and has more pixels than early iPods and can clearly read the file structure… it has two knobs and plenty of buttons, more interface input than the ipod and plenty to implement the ipod’s simple knob+4 buttons. Why it doesn’t extract and show some useful text is beyond me. It also makes it clear how well designed the iPod interface is for navigating huge numbers of files when you try something completely lame.

Nice car though…

Posted at 21:00:26 GMT-0700

Category: photoRental carsReviews