Seeing Red
For the last two-thirds of our trip home from Ithaca, my car was telling me with increasing urgency that I was increasingly over the time when I was due for a service check-up. I had taken the car in just before leaving and even went to the extent of having four new tires put on it for good measure. The trip was 7500 miles long, which was apparently enough to cause the service mileage counter to trigger my next service warning. It was very annoying because it came up every time I started the car and required me to actively remove it before I could see the speedometer or any operating information for the car. The last time I got back from a trip with the need for service was after our Mendocino run. That time it was a problem with the brakes when descending a highway hill at high speed. Even though the dealership replaced the brakes under warranty, they said the pulsing of the brakes was perfectly normal. It infuriated me so much that I decided I would consider another make of car rather than Mercedes the next time I needed to change cars. Truth be told, I didn’t know if it was Mercedes or this particular dealership service area that gave me such problems. But I was pretty resolute no matter what.
Then I went on this trip and found that the car performed just fine over the full length of the country and back. I drove all day every day and had absolutely no problems with the car. I felt good enough about it that I wanted to keep it properly serviced because I still had two good years ahead of me with this car based on the lease term. I even wondered if I should consider buying out the lease at expiry so that I could own the car outright in perpetuity. Prior problems were like how the mind deals with pain…all was forgotten. So, I took the car in early this morning for something they call an A Service, which was estimated to take about two hours. I took my iPad so that I could while away the two hours in the lounge. Then it struck me, the dealership was near the Auto Club and I needed to get my International Driving Permit for our upcoming trip to Spain and Portugal. After dropping the car off at the service department and fending off the suggestions for adding tire rotation and tire replacement, I had the foresight to check the Auto Club website and found that it wouldn’t open for another thirty minutes.
Earlier this week I had gotten an email from Mercedes, who keeps track of my car’s mileage digitally. They had noticed that I was almost seven thousand miles over my mileage allotment and suggested that to save the $1,400 surcharge at lease termination, that I could consider an upgrade to a new lease and they would wash away my mileage excess. What a deal. Mercedes is in the habit of always approaching me on lease renewal one to two years ahead of the lease termination, so this outreach seemed more perfunctory than special. But there was the issue of having a half hour to kill…
When I went into the sales area, I was immediately approached by a salesman who asked simply how he could help me. I explained my circumstances and found myself telling him more than I expected about my experience with my car (presumably being serviced at that moment). The highlights were the trailer hitch hitch and the fact that the car was our second choice after the red one we had picked had a failure of the suspension system on our first drive and gave us a fright on a local mountain road. The salesman immediately showed a face of recognition and said, “oh, that was you!” How nice it is to know that my reputation with Mercedes precedes me and that my stories of car-related failure are the things of dealership legend. We carried on our discussion in the most general of ways with me asking why the California market wants such different options than the New York Mercedes market seems to. It was at that point that the salesman asked if he could excuse himself so he could just check to see if he had any GLS models with a factory-installed hitch. No trouble, I still had nowhere to go.
And then it happened, He pulled up just outside where I was sitting in a nice bright new red GLS 450…with a trailer hitch and all the other options I said I would want in a car…and then some. He suggested I might want to see the inside of the car to see how the model had changed over the last two years. This guy must have been a real good fisherman. He had baited the hook and was now just patiently letting me nibble on the bait before trying to set the hook. I got in the car and he had the seat way up so I pushed the controls back as far as it would go. He simply said, “I think they gave you more room in the new model.” Whether that was true or not was hard to tell, but being in the car pushing it back until it felt good made it feel bigger and better than if I had just gotten into it already pushed back.
He then unleashed the technological Kracken. I have to hand it to Mercedes, they have certainly upgraded the control systems and the displays. They were so slick that they blew me away. There were features I had never imagined. The system operates on hand motions and has Artificial Intelligence that takes note of your music, calling and navigation preferences and then suggests them when you get into the car. And this works separately on several profiles, so it will do so separately for Kim and me. That means it will know to play Billy Joel and Meatloaf for me and Cole Porter for Kim. It will go to the vet for Kim and to Home Depot for me. And it will call Lennie for Kim and the Valley Center Water District for me since they always insist on threatening me with a water shut-off for non-payment since I can’t seem to manage their auto-pay system properly.
He had me at hello as they say. Actually, somewhere between the 31,000 challenging miles I’ve had with the white GLS, the flashy red color that I always knew Kim wanted, and the whiz-bang control systems, not to mention the Uber-comfortable new seats with heating and cooling that automatically adjust themselves if you begin to wiggle around in your seat. The feature that took me over the top was the driver-side button that allows me to control the passenger seat. He suggested that I could lean it back if my wife fell asleep. How nice. He has no idea how often Kim falls asleep in the car while I’m driving. Now, if he had a way to keep Betty asleep for the whole trip that would be a great feature.
So, I only got to the Auto Club around noon since it took the extra hour or so to fill out all the paperwork. I was busy seeing red. When I did go it was in our new red car. I called Kim and told her I got her a present. She laughed and said, “well, I do like red.”