Hilarious column on rental-car tech

Lore Sjöberg continues to write laugh-aloud-funny columns in Wired News -- this one is about the great, useless technology that crowds the dashboards of rental cars. I've never owned a car, so pretty much every ride I've ever piloted has been a hertzmobile, and I love getting all those knobs and buttons to endanger myself with:

Satellite radio is very dangerous, because I'm really not qualified to make aesthetic decisions at 70 mph. It generally takes me three near misses to give up and go with the station that most resembles my own record collection. It's nice to know that at least one other person, or perhaps algorithm, out there likes "One Night in Bangkok."

Rental cars these days also have buttons all over the steering wheel, which makes me very happy. This is because like all rational, mature adults, I want to be Speed Racer. All I need is a child and his chimp in the trunk and I'm ready to rock. It's not precisely totally 100 percent the same, though, because Speed's buttons transformed the car into a boat and launched a robot homing pigeon, while my buttons engage cruise control. In all honesty, I'm about 400 times more likely to use cruise control as I am to need a robot pigeon, but it would be nice to have both.

I think the point of having the buttons on the steering wheel is that it's supposed to be safer, but it's actually more dangerous for the first 15 minutes, because that's when I'm experimenting. I'm pressing all the buttons to see what they do. I'd make a terrible James Bond. Two minutes after I pulled into traffic the streets would be covered in oil slicks and smoke screens, and I'd be trailing a grappling hook.

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