Rental Car Goodness

Rented a car this week when I was in Madison on business. The guy at the counter was really excited because he had a Malibu to rent me. "My favorite car in the lot" he told me. I smiled politely and took the keys.

I hate American cars. Specifically, I hate American design, American engineering, and American construction. About the only thing I like about American cars is that they're cheap to repair. Which is a good thing, because, as I mentioned earlier, they're designed, engineered, and manufactured in America.

The Malibu Maxx (I guess you could call it a wagon, or a hatchback. It's schizophrenia in car form) didn't suck as bad as I was expecting it to. Granted, it only had 6,000 miles on it, so it won't start falling apart for a few more weeks. I liked the remote startup feature. Didn't start the car once while I was sitting in it over the course of three days. Will definitely look for something like that in my next car. Liked the auto-stick feature (wherein you can control when the car shifts gears, without a clutch pedal) but I will never buy a car with this feature. Why? After twenty minutes, the smell of burning car parts begin to fill the cabin. I remarked to my clueless (and much older, boring, lame) coworker that "someone must be burning some tires or something" before switching back to regular automatic mode because he would very much disapprove of me setting the car on fire.

I drove the hell out of the car. Floored it everywhere we went. Redlined it as frequently as possible. Randomly turned off traction control in the middle of hard accelerations. Slammed on the brakes. In three days, we used a half a tank of gas. The thing really surprised me the mileage it was getting with the way I was driving it.

All in all, would I buy one? Hell no. Would I rent one again? Hell yes.