Driving Down Under

On my most recent trip, I had the, er, pleasure of renting a car from Avis.

Unfortunately, Avis is about at good at delivering what you ask for in Oz as they are in the US... I'd requested a Toyota Corolla with a GPS. Not too difficult, right?

Wrong.

When I arrived in Sydney, they had Corollas, but no GPS's. So, the helpful people at Avis put me into the largest thing next to a 747 that they had at the airport - a Holden Commodore... with a built in GPS. OK. I had no real choice except to hang out at Avis hoping someone would be returning a car with a Tom Tom or other portable GPS, which wasn't likely in the next three hours according to Avis. The other option was to try navigating Sydney without a GPS, which would have been a bigger problem. It's by no means a grid city, and it's hard enough driving on the left without also having to figure out a map...

So, after the bags were packed in the hold, we cast our lines away and sailed off in the Aussie aircraft carrier...

Holden used to be an independent auto maker... in 1930. Then, GM gobbled them up. Despite being owned by GM, I didn't see a whole lot of influence, i.e. tired GM models from Detroit being rebranded as Holdens. But they do rebrand a bunch of Daiwoo's from South Korea... To their credit, the Commodore was designed by Holden in Oz, and they still manufacture their own engines (transmissions are imported).

Driving on the left isn't unusual -- it's a hold-over from the British Empire in Australia, New Zealand, and strangely, Japan. It sounds intimidating, but after a few minutes, you just get used to it. I only turned into the wrong lane at an intersection once... Unfortunately, the transposition of the turn signals and wipers is harder to remember. Up until the day I left, I signaled with my wipers about half the time. Then, when I got home, I started doing the same thing because mu hands had been re-trainined.

Ride-wise, the Commodore sailed pretty smoothly. But it was still a boat. Parking it was a downright pain, and being a good deal heavier than the Corolla, it sucked down gas a lot faster. At $3/gallon, that's a problem. But gas was about $6/gallon in SYD. Filling it up cost me $75 for 3/4 of a tank...

My biggest complaint was the GPS. It was moderately useful, but the "user interface" sucked. All the controls were in the steering wheel, and shared with the radio.... Spelling out a location meant scrolling a thumbwheel thru every letter of the alphabet, and then more scrolling to find [ENTER]. Sounds great, until you realize that you can't do it while in motion. You have to come to a stop to do anything. If you take too long, the controls revert back to the radio, so instead of scrolling for the letter "W" you've just changed the radio station for the umpteenth time... What a pain... With the Tom Tom, Navman or Garmin touchscreen, that's never an issue, and if you're moving, the passenger can operate the GPS.

The next complaint about the built-in GPS was the display... It was monochrome and integrated into the driver's gauges (directly in back of the steering wheel), and didn't have an overview map. Therefore, you really have no indication where you're going aside from an arrow showing your next turn. That's a huge disadvantage when you're in a strange city, see the ocean is to your left, and know your hotel is on the beach, yet the arrows are telling you to turn right. In one example, I was directed to make three left turns instead of a single right turn...

That's been corrected in newer versions, which have a color display in the center console. But that didn't do me any good...

My final gripe about the GPS. Did I mention it was a piece of crap?... Twice, it ignored where I wanted to go, and kept giving me directions back to the airport instead of the hotel. Maybe the car was a distant relative of Herbie the Love Bug, and realized how much I didn't like it, so it wanted to go home. Fortunately, Avis provisioned the car with a detailed map of Sydney in book form, so my passenger was able to get me where I needed to go.

Too bad we didn't know about the book when we were at the rental counter... I would have opted for the Corolla.