MoreCooler.com: It's more cooler with the thing

Captions are under their corresponding pictures.

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Here she be, in all her glory. Mmmmmm... Gloooory....

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From the back. Even got the trailer hitch. You can't really tell from this shot, as I'm too far away, but the gold "Pilot" word is slightly crooked. Gonna have to take it back in and get those morons to fix it.

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My spacious throne. Finally, I have a vehicle seat worthy of my ass!

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Yes, yes, yes, I know what y'all are thinking. "Martin finally gets a car we can actually fit in AFTER we all graduate." What, you jokers think that's coincidental? ^_^ Seriously, though, rear is spacious, with seperate rear AC. In case the back of my head gets warm, I guess.

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Lots of cargo room. Middle seats fold down, and there's a small third row of seats that's currently folded into the floor, under the cargo cover (the thing protecting the bumper right now). I need to check it's actually there, come to think of it; currently just going by the dealer's word...

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Driver's-eye view. If, y'know, I had cool secret-agent camera eyes like Inspector Gadget.

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My thoughts: "Cool camera; even took a picture of my reflection without too much glare."

Mom's thoughts: "I hope to God my college-educated son doesn't think he's getting a picture of the inside of the car right now."

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Here's a nifty little feature, right next to the license plate. I use it to aim - er, avoid hitting small children and animals when backing up. Yep, gots me a rear camera!

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It works by changing the in-dash navigation system screen to the camera view whenever I put the car into reverse. Of course, being told about this at the car dealer's, my first question was: how would you see at night? If I'd waited about three seconds before opening my mouth, I hope I would have realized that rear headlights come on when backing up. I hope.

In this picture, incidentally, I have some village idiot in my sights.

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Much better. Gonna hafta clean blood off the bumper again. I wonder why they call this camera a "safety" feature?

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Here's the navigational system when the car turns on (after a logo screen and a disclaimer about following traffic laws and not staring at the screen while you rear-end a school bus full of retarded school children - I'm paraphrasing a bit). It uses GPS when it has line of sight to the satellites to determine where I am, and when it can't find 'em, it uses a gyroscope to figure out how far and in what direction I've travelled since it last knew where the @#$!@#$% I was. The maps are for lower 48 states only, no Canada, Alaska, Mexico, or Hawaii. It only has detailed coverage for five or six major metropolitan areas per state (there are none in Montana, apparently ^_^ ) at the moment. But since all the data is on a DVD in a reader under the passenger seat, I can upgrade when the new disc comes out (should be in a couple months).

I've named the system "Navi" for obvious reasons. It talks in a fairly pleasant female voice, and just a heads-up, my Mom has exhausted the electronic girlfriend jokes already. I, meanwhile, have exhausted the woman-driver jokes whenever it makes a routing decision I don't quite agree with. ^_^

The Navi system is actually pretty damn cool, and geeks that y'all (us'all) are, I took a lot of pictures to show how it works. Of course, if I want to, I can just leave it in the mode above as a map, and zoom in/out or pan as necessary. But that's no fun. Let's ask it how to get to our old house in SLO.

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I type it in (it has a pretty cool system for doing this, as it looks up locations as you type, but it would take too many pics to demonstrate) and it finds the location. I've set it to "easy route" so it'll make as few turns as possible.

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Here's a zoomed-out view of most of the route it plots, after about 10-15 seconds of thought.

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I can ask it to list the directions, and tell it to avoid streets I think might be troublesome. This list is only partial, by the way, as I have to scroll down.

Now, this isn't how I'd actually USE these directions. When driving, it will actually read these out to me and switch to a special screen to show the maneuver I need to do soon. "In a half mile, stay right to merge onto highway 85 south" (it can say numerical highway names) or "In two miles, exit freeway on the right." Stuff like that. No pics of this coolness, though, as it's hard to drive and take photos at the same time.

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I can also ask it for different types of locations either near the vehicle or near a city. It has thousands of these things programmed in. I can even type in a phone number and it will look it up and direct me to the location. The phone thing actually works, by the way: I've found several restaurants that way. Call 411 on cell, type number when given into car, call restaurant for reservations, ask car for directions. Very useful.

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It has subcategories, too; there are a good number of types of restaurants it knows about.

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It looks like when this DVD came out (two-three years ago) there was another Japanese restaurant in San Luis Obispo. Hunh.

The unit can do lots of other stuff like plan trips, detour around obstacles, track offroad routes, etc. I've yet to use it all. I'm surprised at how cool a factory-option GPS system like this it; I thought it would be far inferior to aftermarket solutions, but just the opposite is true.

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Well, that's it. I hope y'all will forgive me if I gush a bit; I love this car. And the Nav system fascinates me to the point of breaking my solemn vow to the disclaimer not to pay more attention to the screen than to the road. I'm currently planning to travel the states a bit after this quarter, and I think this will be the perfect vehicle for my trek.

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