A New Car?

Have you bought a new car lately?  We certainly were not planning to replace my wife’s 2016 Subaru Outback.  At least not that is until a year ago in November when my wife was involved in a roll-over crash after being T-boned by a speeding car.

I am so thankful she survived the crash mostly unscathed.  But when I approached the accident scene that night and stared at the car in disbelief, with my wife in the back of an ambulance and me not knowing if she was okay, one of the firemen saw me looking the car over and said not to worry about getting the car fixed as a roll over crash is an automatic insurance total.  He was right.

I credit the safety of this car and the plethora of airbags that rapidly deployed with saving her life.  But these wonderful airbags had remained hidden for many years.  When my wife bought this new 2016 Subaru Outback, we were both amazed with all of the safety features that came standard on her car.

Nice additions such as a rear back up camera became federally mandated on all new cars starting in May 2018.  But her car also had blind spot warning, cross traffic warning, lane departure warning, and lane keep assist (also known as lane centering).  I was so impressed, that I bought a Subaru WRX the following May to gain these safety features.

Less than a week after her accident, my wife was taking delivery of her brand new 2024 Subaru Outback.

This new model came with additional safety features that we either knowingly or unknowingly discovered.

The first is a Driver Monitoring system.  Using an infrared LED and camera, it monitors to see if the driver is falling asleep at the wheel.  It can also determine if the driver is inattentive, e.g., taking your eyes off the road.  If detected, an audible alarm sounds, and a message is displayed “Keep Eyes on the road.”

It also has facial recognition as when I get into the car, it says hello David and adjusts the seat and mirrors to my saved preference.  The same feature works for my wife as well.  Although a funny story on a recent trip, my wife was sitting in the back seat with our granddaughter and after the car greeted me and adjusted the seat accordingly, I must have turned away and then it recognized my wife in the backseat and proceeded to adjust the seat forward to her settings crunching my legs up against the dash.  I felt a little like Indiana Jones in one those cave scenes where the ceiling is coming down to crush him.

The other unknown safety feature we each discovered suddenly, is Reverse Automatic Braking.  When backing up, the system will audibly alert you as you get closer and closer to an obstruction.  If you still do not stop, the system abruptly applies the brakes.

Once when my wife was backing down the very steep driveway at our friend’s house, the sensors apparently detected the slope of the driveway as a wall and slammed on the brakes.  The car would not move after that.  Her friend who also has an Outback had discovered that on her own car and told my wife she had to back down at an angle to avoid that happening.

Well, the same thing happened to me as we were heading out on our trip to Louisville.  Just as I reached the slope of our driveway where it dropped down to meet the street, the automatic braking kicked in giving us a jolt and making me think I had just backed into something.  It had never happened before on our driveway and the only thing I could figure was we had the back of the car loaded down with all the luggage we were taking on our trip thus making the back end of the car lower to the ground.

Other than the unexpected application of the brakes when backing up, I have no complaints with any of these safety features and in fact I feel so much safer driving with them, that I will never buy another car that does not have these features.

Some of these safety features are options on a new car but like the backup cameras, some may become mandated by federal law in the future.  But not every federal mandate is safety related.  Some positively impact our environment as well.

If you have a bought a car since November 2023, you are already familiar with Auto Stop-Start.  This feature shuts down an internal combustion engine (ICE) after the car has been idling for a certain time. It is designed to reduce fuel consumption and tail pipe emissions.

When the car salesman was explaining to my wife about some of the features her new car had different from her old, he mentioned the Auto Stop-Start.

Another funny story, when my eldest sister bought a new 2024 Subaru Crosstrek, the salesman failed to tell her about this feature.  As she was driving home in her new car and came to a red traffic light, she stopped and so did her engine.  She thought what is wrong with my brand-new car.  Fortunately, just as it happened, her salesman called her to say he had forgotten to mention it.

My sister manually turns it off every time she starts her car, but my wife uses it all the time.  When I drive her car, I occasionally will turn it off also.  Recently when I was running errands and came to a red light, the engine shut off and displayed the message below.

I know from renting cars on occasion that not all manufacturers include this enhanced feature in their Auto Stop-Start but, in a Subaru, the Auto Stop-Start also clocks the time the engine has been shut off and how much gasoline you have saved.  Displaying the amount of gas you save (which translates to dollars) seems like positive reinforcement to encourage you to use the system and seeing the message above, I thought how nice we had saved almost 3/10 of a gallon.  But then I thought wait a minute, while saving that gas, we have also waisted 34 minutes of our life sitting at a red light (or stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic).

Our salesman had told us that depending on how you drive, you could save up to a half a gallon a tank. Which is a nice thought.  I usually am the one to fill up my wife’s car and so as I drive to the gas station (and stop at red lights), I get to see how she has done.  After filling up, I always reset the Trip A odometer to 0.0 so I can track the next tank.

At some point, I decided not to reset the Trip B odometer to see the longer-term cumulative effect.  After filling up, I again had to stop and saw that over 5,000 miles, we had saved almost four gallons, also nice.  But what really hit me was that we had been sitting at a red light for almost 7.5 hours!  That’s an almost full workday we have waisted of our life stuck in traffic.

Although I am “semi” retired, I stay very busy and so whenever I feel like I am wasting my time waiting somewhere, I get irritated.  But I also recognize the beneficial cumulative effect when change is made such as when we switched from incandescent light bulbs to CFLs and then to LEDs, it was the aggregate of the change that translated into huge savings in electricity worldwide.  So, in the future, I’ll just have to accept the displayed time I have spent in traffic with the engine off is for the better good of the environment.