The Craptiva

Thanks to the backend of the Disco being a bit bent from a bingle, we have had a hire car for the last two weeks. The insurance company issued us with something 'similar' to the Disco, and it ended up being nothing like it.

A Craptiva might be roughly the same size, and give you a higher than usual driving position, but it is not a Disco.

On the good side, it has a pile of room inside - except for headroom when I am getting in and out. It has a wickedly sloped windscreen, probably copied from the design of the X5, and I found that I bashed my head on the A pillar everytime I got in and out. It hurt.

The back seats have acres of leg room. When you look at a car like this and a Commodore or a Falcon, it really is chalk and cheese as far as legroom in the back goes. The ads tell you that these things can seat 7, but that would be two adults and 5 midgets. Or three very skinny people in the backseat. Three rowers or three wrestlers would not fit across the back seat.

The boot had stacks of room as well, and the car had more pockets than a magicians waistcoat. If anything, it had too many places to stick stuff, like cans of drink, and not enough places to stick important things, like elbows. When I am driving, I like to rest one elbow on the window shelf and the other on the console thingy between the front seats in the Disco. Both are at the perfect height, and the window shelf is flat and broad enough for an elbow like mine.

The Captiva has a black hole between the seats which is supposed to take two cans of drink, but it is deep enough to take a small keg of beer. I kept on falling sideways as my elbow was sucked into that black hole. I tried leaning the other way, but the window shelf is narrow and slopes downwards. You'd need superglue to keep your elbow on the shelf. I was reduced to hanging onto the Jesus strap when in the passenger seat thanks to the lack of elbow facilities.

The motor has no shortage of get up and go, but that meant that it went through about 50% more fuel in two weeks than we are used to, and we really didn't go anywhere during that time except to school and back twice a day. It is about as fuel efficient as a T-34.

I am also used to the sedate way the Disco takes off. It's like driving the Titanic - when you want to leave the quay, the captain says "forward half" to the first officer, he repeats the order to someone near the helmsman, that guy moves the telegraph lever to half forward, that signal is repeated in the boiler room where an engineer tells the stokers to start shovelling in the coal.

About five minutes later, there is a rumble, a puff of black smoke and the screw starts to turn. Advancing in the Disco is like finding a cure for AIDS. It's a long wait.

The Craptiva on the other hand had a throttle that was as sensitive as a hooker after a night with a football team. Touch it lightly, and it was about 3 seconds to an expensive speeding ticket. That is one aspect that I hate about modern cars - the marketers all think that performance is the key attribute that buyers are looking for, so they put racey engines with featherweight throttles into Mack trucks. What I want is comfort, with a bit of performance if I ram the pedal to the floor. When you're stuck in a 10 mile tailback with the traffic advancing in fits and starts, the last thing you want is a power pedal that threatens to hurl your front bumper into the tailshaft of the car in front, and brakes that will lead to early onset whiplash during a short drive to the shops.

I didn't take it out on the open road, but I wasn't tempted after crashing it through a few of the local pot holes. By the time I extracted my hips from the base of my skull, I was of the opinion that I didn't want to be bashing it over the corrugations of the Pacific Highway at 110 any time soon.

The Disco came back today. Minus a few feet of exhaust, which is being put back on tomorrow, and with some extra masking tape that wasn't there when I dropped it off. One phone call later, I found out that the tape was holding the back window in whilst the glue dried.