Auto Reviews By Me

This past weekend Celia and I were down in South Florida. Her family has a couple of vacation houses in Jensen Beach. Since we were there for a wedding that was in Vero Beach, we just stayed at her family's place... which brings me to the point of this entry: I drove a vehicle that I had never even heard of before Friday. Our rental was a SUV called a Jeep Compass which we put about 250 miles on. This medium size SUV is packing a 2.4 litre Inline 4 cylinder engine that applies an embarrassing 172 horsepower to the pavement. It comes in 4 different trims. We were rocking the Sport 4x2 version which runs around $19k. Let me start by saying that I never expect too much out of a rental but this was the worst rental ever. For one thing, it had NO power. There are times when we were driving along the 2 lane beach road and I had to pass someone. Now I have been doing this my whole life since I grew up in rural Oklahoma... and I have had to do it in some under-powered autos; but this was something altogether different. I was actually nervous to pass because the power was so bad. Nextly, it is a really loud car (At this point I refuse to recognize it as an SUV so I will be calling it a car) on the highway. You can hear and feel every bump and the wind noise is noticeable. Not to mention that when you actually press down on the gas pedal and the engine winds up, the noise drowns everything else out. I would expect this from a vehicle with some cajones, but this was an annoying, remote-controlled-airplane whine. The buttons were all in the wrong places as well. The cruise control handle was underneath the steering wheel. Celia noticed that I was getting annoyed with that.

In closing I would like to congratulate Detroit on producing another turd that is supposed to compete against foreign models. Fail.

Laters,

jth

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