The engine management system on our 15 year old Ford C-Max seems to have given up in the heat. Which seems to mean that car as a whole is finished. Which seems to mean that we are in new car land - hopefully for the last time.
Maybe an all electric. Probably an automatic.
To make a start we have hired a Cupra Formentor from SEAT, from Enterprise. An automatic hybrid - and the drill seems to be that we don't need to do anything on the hybrid front. But if we are keen, there is a charging cable in the boot. Something more than £35,000 to buy new?
So far I have taken two short drives, with BH observing on the second. Her turn will come!
The good news is that I found it very easy to drive around Epsom. Drive one handed too.
A reasonably roomy car and getting in and out of it is not too bad. Nothing like as tricky as I find lower cars these days.
On the other hand, there are lots of new controls, some of them worked by touch screen. It took me some minutes, for example, to work out how to turn the air conditioning down. Some more minutes to work out how the keyless locking worked. Rather more minutes to work out how to turn it on again and get it to go backwards. Hopefully, as with Microsoft Word, we will find that we can leave most of the tricky features alone. One can let sleeping dogs lie, as it were.
Standard of translation of the manual, presumably from the Spanish, not great. Maybe it was done by machine and not very carefully checked by a not very literate human? Plus very small pages on very cheap paper. But it did not take long to download a pdf facsimile of the manual, which might be easier going when enlarged on a screen. All 394 pages of it.
Maybe a good thing that we are having to do this now - rather than in ten years time when our brains will be ten years more degenerate.
Further report in due course.
PS: Friday morning: during the second drive, we wondered how the car knew enough about permitted speeds to tell me that I was speeding. I now read in the manual that there is a camera built into the rear view mirror which scans the road ahead for road signs. I suppose we are moving into a world where road furniture is as much for the comfort of the on-board computer as the on-board driver. It so happens, that in the course of the bonding mentioned towards the end of reference 3, I read that that chemical structure diagrams in academic papers and elsewhere are intended as much for the computer reader as the human reader, with the computer reader being directed at the population of various chemical databases - databases which support various tricky kinds of searching. Where we will be able to draw the line between our world and that of the computers? Should we care?
References
Reference 1: https://www.cupraofficial.co.uk/.
Reference 2: https://www.cupraofficial.co.uk/datamanual-manual/manuals/cupra/en-uk/CUPRA_FORMENTOR_06_23_EN.pdf.
Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/lemon-barley.html.
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