Honda Vezel: First Thoughts

Not long after getting my license, people kept asking me:

“When are you buying a car?”

Honestly I’d never even thought about it. For one thing I know nothing about cars, and for another, every car I actually like the look of has a price tag that makes me want to kneel.

Then my parents started asking too, and eventually came right out with “Tell me how much you’re short and I’ll cover it, just go buy a car already.” At that point I figured having a license and not buying a car was pretty pathetic, and I really didn’t want to spend my parents’ money on this anyway.

So the goal became: “Buy a car I’m comfortable driving, within what I can afford on my own.”

Which raises the question — what do I buy?

As a total car illiterate, the first thing I ruled out was asking on social media. When you post “what should I buy” on certain platforms, what you get back isn’t answers — it’s the responders’ one-man show of showing off and preening, plus advice to spend a bit more.

Like asking on Quora how much 1+1 is. You’ll get someone writing an essay on why 1 is 1, the origin of the plus sign, historical anecdotes about 1+1, and inevitably they’ll drag in Goldbach’s conjecture and toss in their own take on it. Sure, there are a million possible answers, but 1+1=2 is the least likely one to be told to you straight.

Then I asked my coworkers. They sized up my height, asked my budget, and concluded: “Either go buy a Changhe van, or add 300K and get a XXXXXX,” or “You call anything under 200K a car?”

Getting nowhere, I was browsing the Hi-PDA forum and saw a term that fit perfectly: “keyboard car god.” Makes sense — arguing on a keyboard is useless. In the end you have to go look yourself.

So I gave up on “asking others for advice,” started reading specs and went to 4S dealers to touch real cars. But the more I filtered, the fewer options remained. I didn’t actually want an SUV, and I definitely didn’t want one of those “compact SUVs specially rolled out to cater to the Chinese market.” I like regular sedans. But the biggest problem: I can’t fit into a regular sedan, so I’m stuck with the deformed SUVs… Among the deformed SUVs, I narrowed it down to a few models.

One weekend I sacrificed my Galgame time to go test-drive them, and found that only the Honda Vezel was something I could actually sit in… the others were all too cramped… too uncomfortable, too awful…

Asked about the price and it was reasonable. It used to be out of stock, but now there’s inventory, no markup, and actually a discount. The 4S salesperson could tell I was interested and called me every day asking what I was unhappy with, why I hadn’t ordered yet.

Honestly I wasn’t unhappy with anything. I just felt that ordering this fast would make me look like a “fool with money” to them. Especially since the salesperson, though about my age, talked with the thick vibe of a high school Chinese teacher. Looking at her felt like being a student getting lectured, and while she explained the car’s features I was literally nodding along like I was in class.

“Wait a minute! I’m the one buying the car, I’m the customer, why do I feel like the one being educated?” I only remembered this problem after I’d paid the deposit and got home.

What was reassuring, though, was that before the weekend pickup, other 4S dealers kept calling too. Comparing them, I basically confirmed this one wasn’t screwing me over — fairly honest, actually.

And then a new problem: I’ve only touched a car six times total on the road, counting the driving test. Zero other road experience. If I just drive out, am I going to be a literal road killer?

At this point my mind filled with photos of crash scenes and the feeling of how hard the test car was to control during the road test.

“First time driving on the road, how do I pretend I do this often, urgent, asking online.” I was one step from posting that.

After thinking it over, I could only bring an experienced driver along. Couldn’t get anyone else, so I called up Duan Laoshi, who I’d been chatting with online every day lately.

Teacher Duan claims to be an old hand, says his driving is absolutely 66666, no problem at all.

“Ah, right — even though my driving skills are top-notch, I do slip up sometimes. Like I’m always scraping tree bark or curbing the wheels and blowing tires.” On the way to pick up the car, Duan Laoshi humbly confessed this to me. It felt like a liability waiver — I could practically hear him saying “don’t blame me if I curb the wheels later.”

My feelings at that moment were complicated, but I was in too deep, so I just dragged Duan Laoshi along.

Picking up a car at a 4S dealer these days is genuinely convenient. The insurance company and the vehicle office both have desks there, so insurance and plates can be handled on-site, and this dealer magically gave me a cheap insurance price, no different from buying it outside. Just shows how fierce the competition is now.

Paperwork done, car seen, checked over from every angle with no issues, so it was ready to drive off. Duan Laoshi asked me:

“You driving or me?”

A hard choice. After much deliberation, I decided to do it myself. Because I didn’t want the car to blow a tire on a curb the moment it left the lot.

First time driving an automatic. But it’s so much simpler than manual… After I hit the gas, pulled onto the road, and turned the wheel a bit, I discovered an astonishing fact.

“Holy shit, THIS is a car. What the hell was that thing at the driving school?!”

Handling and throttle control, both were just so much better than those unstable pieces of crap at the driving school. And then I discovered another astonishing fact.

The rote-memorization driving style they drill into you for the road test is basically useless. What you actually use is the mirror-checking you learn in the closed-course test. But during the road test, the instructor wouldn’t let you look at the mirrors — he made you watch his hand signals. Even in the closed-course test, the instructor made you memorize a few points, and when the point showed up in the mirror you’d turn the wheel.

Fortunately, because I was too tall sitting in those instructor cars, my sightline was high, so I couldn’t use the cheat marks the instructor provided at all — mostly I had to look myself. And because of that, during the road test not being able to see the mirrors was miserable.

Now being able to see the mirrors while driving on the road feels incredibly relaxing, and with good handling, driving turned out way easier than I imagined!

This reminded me of an article I wrote earlier: The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

Sometimes, to reach a goal fast, we treat everything like an exam and do things targeted at the exam’s rules and boxes. But those things only get you through the exam — in actual practice they’re useless…

Like recently, revisiting English grammar and studying Japanese drove this home even harder. My multiple-choice Japanese homework has few mistakes, but faced with a screen full of Japanese eroge, I still feel I improve more in actual practice. Studying just to pass a level test is useless.

Yeah. What you cram for exams is ultimately useless.

P.S.: The Vezel is such an Apple simp — all its playback controls only support iPod and iPhone, Nexus barely works, and the Android-based ZX1 doesn’t work either. Eventually I found the Walkman A15 works over Bluetooth, but that’s useless too, the sound quality is terrible. Tomorrow I’ll try the D100 via AUX.

P.S.S.: And so I am now officially a broke bastard with zero savings.