i drove a car

Welp, drove a Jeep Rubicon.

They should actually call it the Jeep Carrhae.

Because it gets annihilated by superior technology and serves as a warning to future civilizations.

This thing is priced like a premium, luxury/performance vehicle. Hilarious, but I don’t think most people appreciate the joke.

Control

The control surfaces and instruments are all, from a tactile standpoint, terrible. Alarmingly bad. The stalks feel so flimsy and rickety that I think they might actually be made out of plastic reclaimed from 1980s action figures. I could feel the unfinished creases where the mouldings mated; you don’t even encounter that shit in Mitsubishi Mirages. Every time I signaled a turn, I was sure the stalk was going to break off. Imagine using that stalk for 100k miles! (haha, just kidding, this jeep would ever make it to 100k miles)

If it takes you a moment to locate the usual mirror and window controls, don’t worry. They’re all in the wrong place because this vehicle has removable doors. Yep, a shitload of interface compromises just so you can take the doors off of your car for … reasons.

But don’t worry, the build-quality evident throughout the vehicle should give you confidence that the doors will probably reattach and function flawlessly.

Ride

How’s the ride? Loud. Loud as fuck. Hope you don’t like to listen to the radio or the thoughts rattling around your head, because the road noise will drown it out. There’s also some kind of harmonic resonance that occurs at higher speeds that interacts with the flimsy removable doors to create an even more awful sound than usual. Also, the factory-provided offroad tires will start howling at 30mph and get louder and louder, and more erratic, and make it increasingly hard to steer on regular, human roads. But who needs roads when you’re off-roading!?

Suspension is ruinously bad. Stiff, unforgiving, kidney-poundingly bad. Every turn I took at speed felt alarming. You might be thinking to yourself: “Buddy, the suspension is tuned for off-roading!” To which I say: what percentage of Jeeps Rubicon will ever, ever leave the suburbs? The answer is zero. Zero percent.

Positive

It’s not all bad. Here are the positives:

• There are physical buttons that perform basic car functions; climate control (very important), radio/media controls, iphone stuff.
• Visibility is pretty good, for a modern SUV. You can use your own human eyeballs to view things outside the vehicle in almost 360 degrees.

Okay, short list.

Thanks for reading.