Meet the New Van

So here's my new van. Or should I say my wife's new van. Surprisingly, it's my first Chevy. My dad has owned a 100 Chevys. How come this is my first? I dunno.

Our last van was a Ford. A Windstar. It was pretty good for a piece of crap. Generally speaking, I hate Fords. Unless they are Mustangs or F-150s. I owned a Ford Tempo when I was in my late teens. That thing had everything go wrong with it that could possibly go wrong with it plus a couple of extra things. Replacing the clutch took me a week. A CV shaft, 3 days. Brakes, a whole day. That sticks in a man's mechanical memory.

The Windstar we had was a 5000 pound vehicle that handled like it was 10,000 pounds. The alignment was never quite right and the seats were less comfortable than the vinyl seats in the 1981 Chevy Sport Van my parent's bought after our 1979 Chevy Malibu. The Malibu was cool because they bought it brand new and I remember being at the dealer when we closed the deal. Also, this was pre-"we must save the children" America, and it was cool to sit in the "way back". Nowadays, letting your kids sit in the way back is grounds for a stint in county jail.

If I had to pick the one thing that bugged me the most about the Windstar it would be the doors that automatically locked themselves once the vehicle was moving. I hated that because every time I got out of the van and tried to open the back door to get my kids out I would have to hit the unlock button. Of course, my wife would knowingly hit that button about 1 second before I would. Irritating.

The beauty of this Chevy is, besides not feeling like I was driving a Penske 26 foot rental truck, not only does it lock the doors automagically for you when you start driving, it UNLOCKS the doors for you when it stops.

It UNLOCKS the doors for you??!! That's crazy. Why couldn't Ford think of that? I dunno. I suspect that they worked on the door lock/unlock code towards the end of a long holiday weekend (perhaps Thanksgiving) and then forgot what they had been working on when they came back in on Monday.

So far I have only one complaint with our new Chevy. It smells like cigarette smoke. Mixed with Febreeze. I don't really find the smoke smell offensive, until it is mixed with something else designed to "hide" it.

I didn't notice the odor until after we brought it home. During the test drive, I detected something a little "off". When I asked my son he acted like I was crazy. (sigh) My nose had been recently assaulted by the death scent of my truck. Not to mention that the Petersburg landfill was directly across the street from the used car lot and the dealer himself smoked in his building. So it was useless. Whatever. The smell will go away in the "crisp New England air" this weekend.