A new version of normality

I have had several foreign cars (Honda, Nissan, and Toyota) since I arrived in San Diego on April 27, 1993. I grew up in the muscle car generation in South Texas, so if you would have told me in early 1993 that some day I would be dedicated to foreign cars, I might have gone down to my uncle’s house in Kingsville, Texas, borrowed 40 or 50 of his guns, and went-a searchin’ for ya. That’s how dedicated I had been raised to American automobiles.

I never really regretted buying foreign until I got a 2019 Honda Insight Hybrid on July 21, 2019. To read about my problems with that car, see these two previous posts:

A 5,000-mile review

Follow-up

The problems never got any better. With nothing to do during the pandemic except reading, watching TV/movies, gardening, and, of course, playing with Little Queen Olivia, I decided to trade the 2019 Insight Hybrid in on a 2021 Insight Hybrid . I figured that with my monthly letters to Honda concerning all of my problems, two years should be sufficient for them to get the problems fixed.

I got the 2021 car on July 9 with 63 miles on it. The 2019 was black while the 2021 is cosmic metallic blue.

I ended July 2020 with 317 miles on the car, not enough miles to determine if it’s going to have the same problems as the 2019 car.

However, the 2021 has a much bigger problem, in my opinion, concerning cruise control.

I bought my first car, a 1976 Chevrolet Impala, in August 1977. It had a little over 4,000 miles on it and was a test-drive car. In today’s world, there is no such thing as a test-drive car because you only get to test drive the car that you are thinking about buying. In early 1978, cruise controls were making their inroads into cars, mostly as options. I found a cruise control at Sears, bought it, and installed it. My gas mileage in the Impala with its big 400 cubic inch engine climbed from 7.7 miles per gallon to over 10 miles per gallon. I was sold! I have had cruise control in every car since then. I’m pretty addicted to it, especially in long drives.

Sadly, the cruise control in the 2021 Honda Insight Hybrid absolutely sucks.

With the 2019 car, I could use cruise control everywhere, even down to 25 miles per hour in slow rush hour traffic. Cruise control in the 2021 is completely useless unless I’m all by myself. It’s the damned “driver assist” functions, and the “necessary ones” cannot be turned off.

The problem is that driver assist has many options. The ones that cause me problems are related to cruise control, and they cannot be turned off, only modified with Honda-programmed options.

One option is when following traffic. I can set how far behind the traffic I can use cruise control before the car takes over. Even if I set the option for short, I cannot make the distance short enough to allow me to use cruise control at slower speeds in rush hour traffic.

Another option is to set the width of the area that the car monitors for traffic. It has normal, narrow, and wide options. Definitely do not set it for wide. It looks at the whole freeway and won’t let cruise control work if there’s another car within a hundred miles of me. Narrow works best, but if another car pulls in front of me, my car slams on the brakes. Slamming on the brakes in anything other than an emergency can be dangerous, especially on the highway with traffic doing California highway speeds.

An additional problem is that the car does not understand what a curve is. I can be on cruise control on a straight stretch with cars in lanes to both sides of me. As soon as I begin to go around a curve, the car thinks I’ll be going straight and that the cars in the lanes to both sides of me now suddenly are in my lane. Once again, the car slams on the brakes.

The 2021 Honda Insight Hybrid is so dangerous on cruise control that I have decided not to use it unless I’m pretty much the only one on the highway. I’d be willing to bet that all Honda cars with cruise control have the same problem, but I can only speak for my car. Perhaps I have another lemon like my 2019 car.

I was hoping that this car might be my last car purchase but now I’m thinking that I’ll only have it for one to two years, especially if the pandemic ends or we get a viable vaccine and I get to go cruising out in the wide open again. I won’t be able to drive long distances without cruise control, like to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tucson, and Atlanta, where the cactus & succulent clubs want me to do presentations on Nature’s Geometry: Succulents once things return to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality.

I’m actually thinking that there’s going to be a new version of normality.