Temporary vehicle: Kia Carnival
Sabriena’s sister Shaina and her family are coming out to visit and hopefully learn why the heck we opted to stay in Australia. This presented a logistics problem, as our car has five seats, there’s four of them, and three of us. Unless we got really intimate really quickly, and dodged the cops the whole way home, this wasn’t happening, so a couple months back we reserved a rental minivan with 7 seats: a Kia Carnival.
In to pick it up this morning, and we had a spot of drama - earlier in the week they rang to confirm it, and then told me we couldn’t use a credit card, their machine only accepts debit cards, and in addition to that the person who did the booking misquoted us so it’d be more expensive than we planned for. This was a triple-whammy of bad news, as I had just transferred all our excess funds over for the month onto the mortgage. We could redraw it, but it absolutely wasn’t going to be available on Friday. The second issue was that our credit card covers the rental vehicle excess if we crash it, so paying by debit card would mean it’d cost an additional ~$800AUD to get the same protection. The incorrect quote we can’t really complain too much about, the “correct” amount was basically what was advertised on the website, and in retrospect we should have wondered why it was so goddamn cheap instead of just going “ahh yeah sounds great”.
So on the advice of some folks on a local Discord guild, I went in there prepared to argue it down - if they weren’t going to take my credit card, I was going to argue for the excess coverage to be covered by them. I argue like a bastard online, but in-person I’m extremely conflict-averse, so this caused me no small amount of stress in the couple of days leading up to it.
Fortunately, we got in there, they ran the credit card, and it miraculously worked. Everything went through without a hitch, and I parked this battleship grey (I was expecting white) suburban monstrousity in the driveway of our suburban-looking house.
Update: 2024-12-31: We returned it today, and I’ll note my thoughts here in case we ever have need to rent one again. I don’t know what it’s like to own one, apparently previous incarnations of it have had huge reliability issues, so I can only comment on what it’s like to drive.
It was fairly gutless if you wanted to pass someone. That may have been because we had it in “eco” mode the entire time, but thankfully that didn’t come up more than once. But for being in “eco” mode, the fuel economy wasn’t much to write home about: ~7.9L/100KM on mostly highway driving, which is less than 20% better than my 15-year-old V8 Commodore manages on the highway… but then again it does not have the aerodynamic characteristics of a phone booth either.
The steering and pedal feel is light, very light, which I learned a day or two into driving it that is because it has all sorts of driver assist shit. I have mixed feelings about the active lane-keep assist (what’s effectively a responsibly named self-driving of one of the lower-levels, but without the wanky overpromising)… I can see the appeal, but it also kept the car closer to the edge of the road than I normally would (after a while I decided I do not give a shit as it’s not my left-hand balljoints, but if I owned it I would prefer to not run along the shoulder most days).
The radar cruise control though? Holy shit I’m in love. Like 95% of my frustration with freeway driving is people who speed up and slow down all over the place so I’m constantly adjusting the cruise control until I give up and pass them in favour of following someone who can maintain a speed. The cruise control on this sucker takes all that out, I followed someone for fully 20 minutes before realizing they were doing about 85KM/h in a 100 zone. Utterly brilliant, wish I could afford to upgrade my VE Commodore to a VF that has it (I think?).
Wireless Android Auto was included, which was pretty great - but a Qi charger wouldn’t have gone astray. There was no shortage of USB charge points though, including for the middle passengers.
The rest of it was fairly standard minivan fare. At least two people took a head blow from the middle row seats, because you pull a lever, the back comes forward, then it slides. When you want to slide it back, you must slide it first, then rock the seat back, and it must be common human nature to put the backrest back, try to slide it, realize it’s locked, pull the lever, then take a spring loaded headrest to the temple before you realize the error of your ways.
Anyway, we comfortably fit 7 people in it, plus luggage for four in the back. I’d definitely rent one again if the need arose.
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