^[1]Its no secret that I got whacked earlier this week.  While my car is in the shop my rental car coverage kicks in and I get a vehicle while my beast is being repaired.  Sounds good? 

Not really, Enterprise Rent A Car is the default rental that my insurance arranges and takes direct bills from.  The only one so I become a captive customer.  Still not so bad, I guess.  The problem is they don’t rent any 6 passenger cars and at least once a day I need a CAR with that much room. Enterprise rents almost anything but a car.  Need any size or shape of a minivan, trucklet, suv, crossover-truck-station-wagon-thingy and they got you covered.

By the end of the first day I was fairly disenchanted with the ‘07 Dodge Durango.  Every pitch, roll and yaw was amplified with the height of the blasted thing.  Add in nearly a half tank of gas….7.2 gallons for 82 miles.  To say it sucked is putting it mildly. At 11.34MPG I put a nice down payment on an oil dictators summer home in the Alps.  A few observations after 3 days with one of those beasts…

• You don’t drive them, you aim and hope for the best.
• Elevated seating contrary to popular justification for owning one does not mean you see further down the road.  You see the black out tinted window of the SUV in front of you, not its bumper.
• The thing has blind spots bigger than a football field.  Short of sticking your head out the window you never know what is there.  Kinda like driving my Dad’s Class A RV. 
• Small car drivers are assholes, or are they cutting in front of SUV’s on purpose and slowing down to see what happens?  Really even a mid-size SUV like this weighs 2 1/2 tons and takes some effort to slow down. 
• super strong quads and a healthy back are needed for climbing into the beast, I can’t imagine what a lift kit would be like for ingress/egress with any sort of dignity.

At least Enterprise listened to my concerns and got me into one of those crossover-truck-station-wagon-thingies, (Mazda CX9) Friday night.  Ride is still rougher than I prefer but at least it should get better mpg.  They have promised me a car on Monday.  I hope they come through. 

Related posts:

1. Pop quiz: which of the following are L.A. transportation cliches? ^[2]
2. Short interview w/ Estevan Oriol ^[3]
3. Phil Spector sentenced to 19 years to life ^[4]
4. Whole Life Times gets a whole lot greener…think of it that way. ^[5]
5. ICME: LA’s "best" dead on side of road ^[6]