Car Stereo

As soon as we arrived in New Zealand, we headed to a Toyota dealership to buy a Toyota Prius hybrid. Petrol in NZ is rather expensive. It was a second-hand import (very common in NZ since Japan also drives on the left) so most of the display and many of the controls are in Japanese. The onboard computer has useful functions like where to find the nearest golf course (in Japan) and the GPS is hilariously confused about where we are (off the map as far as it is concerned).

Anyway, it had a cassette deck (!) but no CD player. I told them I wanted a CD player installed under the screen in the empty bay. When I took delivery they had installed a multi-loader in the boot (== trunk). There was a little display between the steering wheel and the driver's door, but most functions had to be accessed using a remote control. Atfer a few days we were going crazy. Obviously the driver can't operate a remote control while driving, and the passengers can't either. Plus every time we put the stroller into the boot or take it out we risk clobbering the multiloader. I called the dealership and expressed my profound dissatisfaction. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the player stopped working.

Once we had finished house hunting, we scheduled it for servicing. I took the car to the dealership to be fixed. What followed was like something out of Fawlty Towers -- confusion all round about who was fixing what, exactly where my car was (at an independent stereo installation place), confusion about what they were doing (they thought they were fixing the multiloader). After some firm insistence we have...ta da a nice single disc CD player that lets a passenger pop in a CD.

The trade off was that we lost the use of the screen. The only function I ever used was the fuel economy report, and I would only look at that occasionally out of geeky interest. The screen isn't completely dead though -- it still flashes up a safety warning -- or at least the first two characters mean "safety" in Chinese. I could probably puzzle out some of the rest given a dictionary and sufficient time.

We had to get a few other things fixed. In the course of (re)learning to parallel park on the other side of the street we managed to scrape off some of those lead wheel balancing things that they attach to the rim of the wheel. And the kids had stress tested the cup holder.

After driving only a Prius for a few months, it was strange to drive a conventional Toyota Corolla when we visited family in Christchurch last week. When you stop at lights, the petrol engine doesn't turn off. How strange is that?