Finally. It takes a long time to get from Santorini to Colorado Springs. Much has been written about Greece; I’ll get it up here eventually. Most of it’s going to have to wait for Jonah to get home from work, since she did most of the writing.

We ended up renting a car in the Denver airport for $45. I couldn’t find a cheaper way to get back home, so now I have a car at the Colorado Springs airport, a rental car, and a Jonah at work. The car is a brand new Dodge Caliber that had 2 miles on it when I drove it out of the rental lot. I’ve never a car with less than 10 miles on it before. It’s astoundingly disappointing for a brand new car. Driving it, I want to ask Chrysler if anyone bothered to drive the damn thing, or even sit in it, before putting it into production. I’ve driven several brand new Chryslers lately, and I just can’t believe how much they all suck. My biggest complaints about the Caliber are that the windshield is so amazingly poorly designed that you can’t see around curves due to the pillars getting in the way, the driving position is astoundingly uncomfortable, the steering is sloppy with a huge dead spot in the center, and it handles like a boat. There was also a rattle somewhere in the back which is just unacceptable for a car that’s only got 2 miles on it.

And then there’s the smaller things, like the instrument lighting is WHITE. Seriously, white. This is classic Dodge crappiness. The rest of the automotive world has realized that amber instrument lighting preserves the driver’s night vision. Dodge, however, has apparently figured “White looks cool. Screw practical.” Another little thing: the base version I drove has manual mirrors, not electric, which in and of itself is fine. And there’s no way to adjust them without rolling down the windows and moving them around. Which, really, is fine, except that unlike normal cars with fixed wing mirror mounts, the only way to adjust the angle is by sticking your fingers all over the glass.

Oh, and then there’s the transmission. The whole time driving it, I couldn’t figure out how they’d made the slushbox act like a Continuously Variable Transmission when you floored it. The rest of the time it felt like a 4 speed. I chalked it up to some really fancy torque converters, and decided that automatic transmissions were really getting a lot better. This morning decided to look it up to see if anyone talks about the the transmission in the Calibar and discoverd that it acts like a CVT when you floor it because it *IS* a CVT. Which brings me to the next question:

Why the hell doesn’t it act like a CVT the rest of the time? The answer? Apparently Americans are likely to think the car is “broken” if it’s not shifting. So they program the CVT to work like a 4-speed auto with, I admit, reasonably smooth shifts. But still, that’s insane. Toyota got the CVT more or less right with the Prius: keep the engine at a constant RPM that varies with accelerator pedal position. Also, the transmission in the Prius is completely smooth. Dodge has totally screwed this one up–the downshifts pointlessly lurch the car around! I mean, here they have a great piece of technology, and have programmed it to act stupidly for fat americans.

Anyway, don’t buy Dodge. As far as I can tell, no one does these days, except for police departments and rental car companies. I can only guess that they get smoking good deals. Why can’t I rent a cheap, base-model Accord, Camry, or Mazda in this country?