Rental Car Review, Special Edition
So, in an unprecedented move, I am going to give a rental car review for a car that I did not rent or drive.

One of my coworkers was having problems with his serpentine belt, which led to problems with his water pump (or problems with his water pump that led to problems with his serpentine belt, it is unclear), so he had to rent two cars in the past few weeks. The first time he got a Malibu, which was by all accounts fine for a rental car and is not the subject of this post. The second vehicle he got was a Chevrolet Uplander minivan.

Now, GM no longer makes the Uplander, and I must say that was a good call, because it was pretty bad. Mostly I am going to bitch about the quality of the second row seats. The main problem is that the seats were incredibly narrow, about as wide as the seats on my RX-8, if you took just the middle part and removed all of the side bolsters, so about a foot wide at most. This is coupled by the fact that there are no arm rests anywhere on either side of these seats, so the end result is that the only thing preventing you from sliding off the side of this tiny seat is the seatbelt and your own reflexes. And as long as I'm complaining about the seat, I'm going to nitpick the location of the back ajustment (on the inboard side, sticking out between the seat and the back), which while I had no call to use, was nonetheless in the wrong spot. About the only thing not wrong with the seat was that it was cloth and not, say, vinyl.

The rest of the interior seemed rather on the poor side, but I'm not sure if that's because the interior is poor or if it can be blamed on the abuse a rental car gets. The main complaint my coworker had (other than it being a minivan) was that the mileage was poor, although from a quick check it looks like it gets about the same miles per gallon as his GTO.

Oh, on a completely unrelated note, I saw someone driving a Lotus Seven replica of some sort earlier today. Probably a Caterham, but I can't be sure.