Chevy Sonic vs Ford Fusion hybrid
 

I recently visited Kauai and Oahu and rented a car on both islands.

In Kauai my only options were between a Nissan Frontier or a Chevy Sonic. Since I wasn't doing construction in Kauai, I chose the Sonic. To my surprise, even with speeds not exceeding 50 MPH, the Sonic only averaged 31 MPG. Not very impressive for a gutless econobox.

There were more options in Oahu, so I managed to get a Ford Fusion hybrid. The car is very nice, with plenty of power, low noise in the cabin, smooth riding, and had extras like auto climate control. I spent all day driving probably 60 miles total, often sitting in traffic not moving for many minutes, and the car returned 47 MPG! That's just 3 MPG away from a gen III Prius.

The Fusion hybrid is now my go-to car when renting. I really cannot think of a better car in that class when considering fuel efficiency, comfort, features, and performance.

All that said, I'll probably never visit Oahu again. That place sucks. Glad I visited Pearl Harbor and saw some sites, but vacation to me is not being in a perpetual traffic jam and (almost) being forced to pay $30/night for parking.

I saw a Chevy Volt in a parking lot

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That panel in the lower fascia with the diamond indentations looks like nothing so much as a silver duct-tape grille block. :thumbup:

I haven't driven a Volt yet, but I hear they are nice. Too bad rental companies don't offer more interesting vehicles. I'm surprised they even bother putting a Fusion hybrid on their lot.

I've tried some of the "sporty" offerings like the Dodge Charger and was very unimpressed. There is no reason to offer a low performance version of higher performance cars when they inherit the drawbacks of performance cars such as limited cargo volume, limited amenities, and relatively poor fuel economy.

What are your preferences for a rental car? Any others I should check out?

Have you tried using Turo? There are many more interesting choices there.

It's not on my company's preferred vendor list. As a result, I only rent from National and Enterprise.

That said, it's about time we had a personal vehicle rental market. My idea on this came from my annoyance of paying $10 day to park my vehicle at my local airport, and then needing to pay for a rental at my destination. The perfect solution would be to drive to the airport to depart, and shortly thereafter someone would rent your vehicle for most of the duration of your trip. Upon arriving at the destination, someone there would have a vehicle available to rent. Everyone needing a place to park at departure and needing a vehicle at arrival is a silly, silly problem.

Last night there was a man carrying a pole-saw to the checkout of Home Depot. I was thinking to myself that I use mine for about 30 minutes per year, if that. Silly that everyone needs their own pole-saw, lawn mower, leaf blower, ladder, garbage can, etc, etc. Why do we need a garbage truck to stop every 20ft to grab an individual can? I'm sure the whole cul-de-sac I live in could share a dumpster.

...in a perfect world. In this one:
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Just A Car Guy: Today's total WTF

Need cheering up?

autonews.com:Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye
'Everyone will have 5 years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap'

So what are we left with to exercise our freedom of movement? Bicycles and boats? Anything else? Steampunk dirigibles?

Wait a minute...OR scrap it? It'd be hard to keep it on the road if you do that.

When I see things like that, I wonder how the person even gets out of bed.

I tend to agree with most of Bob's assessment of the future. Nailing down the timeline is difficult because it will be hockey stick shaped. There is always a tipping point where enough pieces of technology are developed sufficiently to disrupt how things used to be.

Smartphones are a good example of this phenomenon because nobody had them, and then all of a sudden the pieces needed to make them great (touch screen, GPS, camera, internet, etc) came together and most everyone adopted them. Similarly, when car tech is sufficiently developed, the sensors will be super cheap and unobtrusive, the algorithms refined, the inter-vehicle network established, and the other various technologies developed to the point that autonomy is preferred.

I wonder if our endless march towards giving up freedom for autonomy will influence our willingness to surrender personal freedoms to the government? Will freedom of speech be considered a bad idea in the future? How about freedom to associate, freedom to travel, privacy?

Somewhere around 10 years ago, I had Pandora playing music on my PC and noticed a message that said "Angie likes this song too". I was aghast that Pandora had sold that info to Facebook. It lead me to despise Facebook and not trust it. Despite that, and Facebook sucking compared to competitors, it became the dominant social media company, and I have an account to this day.

Some things I suppose I'm willing to surrender in the name of convenience or economics, but I am concerned about the slippery slope of giving up independence of thought and action.

New "homey" Uber used-vehicle?

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RedPoint, what did you like more than Facebook?

I have heard women ranting about being in love with Pinterestwitteragram, but I have not found anything to like about other social media.

hopefully, redpoint5 will answer in turn.
With me it's more them making a point early on about their boyfriend/husband(/father /jk).

Then there's the joke where the atheist tells the Christian he has an off-by-one error.

Personally, I had a good laugh when people forsook Myspace and Rupert Murdoch for Facespook and the sociopath. I still visit news aggregators daily. The originals, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Drew Curtis' Fark.com. If there is a middle ground between social media and news aggregators, it's forums like Ecomodder, Reddit, 4chan, ....

Need cheering up? Here's a rebuttal to Bob Lutz:

https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-rand-report/