I have a hard time accepting that everyone should have their own vehicle in the first place.
This entire post will age poorly if we ever transition out of this incredibly self-indulgent and wasteful period of human civilization.
We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community. It’s absurd we all live in places with lots of people but have no sense of belonging to a community. This goes against literally millions of years of our own evolutionary history. We NEED community to function and have healthy minds.
I mean, it’s not likely to happen. But maybe when the next great apocalyptic event happens the survivors can try to remake things with a little more planning. After the whole period of darkness and cannibalism of course.
We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community.
Not everyone wants to be packed like sardines. That’s the beauty of individualism. You might think this sounds like some sort of utopia, but to me this sounds like hell.
I can’t even entertain this premise. There’s no way neither of them has a preference…
Maybe they just have 2 of the same cars lol
Personally, I’d still have a favorite…
what’s next? joint bank accounts?
Women voting?
Dogs and cats, living together!
Mass hysteria!
Cool video concept.
The black people are eating my vegetables!!!
Delicious. (I’m in Ohio.)
Not in my country!
(Seriously, though, Japan doesn’t do joint bank accounts).
My partner and I have joint financial accounts, but it still would be weird to us to take whatever car.
Why? Is it weird to use whatever plate or fork? What about couch cushions? Umbrellas?
I see cars as tools, so there’s not “my car” and “their car,” but “the small car” (hybrid w/ great gas mileage) and “the big car” (minivan). Before we had kids, we only had one car, and if we needed to be in different places, I would ride my bike, walk, or take the bus. That almost never happened, and it wasn’t a big deal when it did.
Plates, forks, cushions, and umbrellas are not typically as personalized as a car.
Could be they don’t much personalize them
And my argument is that cars should likewise not be personalized. They’re tools.
That’s just your opinion. To me, clothes are tools and there’s no reason to personalize - just wear black everything, that’s what I do. Other people don’t seem to share my opinion and that’s fine too.
Sure, and I agree with you. I don’t find much value in chasing trends, so I wear something respectable for my line of work and call it good.
Cars can be more than tools, and at that point I’d understand the OP that it would be weird to switch those between a couple, but I don’t see any reason for that to be the norm rather than the exception, just like chasing trends shouldn’t be the norm.
Okay, but you started with “why?”, that’s the question I was answering.
No.
You just like spend whatever dollars you find in there?!
Who wants.to adjust the seat and mirrors every time they drive?
Maybe they just hit a button (1, 2)
Don’t even need to hit it sometimes - the profile often goes with the key fob too.
Yeah but if they’re just grabbing keys that wouldn’t work, but hopefully would let them pick the profile when car starts
I guess if you have one set, but there are usually two that come with most cars. Probably whoever grabbed theit preferred car key first means the other grabs their key for the second car?
I wish those worked for all the mirrors too. At least mine won’t do that anyway
As someone who used to work on other people’s cars, I think I’ve had my knees jammed into the dash way too many times to ever want this on one of my cars. Fuck that.
I can relate to this so much lol. I’m very tall and I remember getting into the Mercedes of a little old lady. The seat started moving forward while the steering wheel extended towards me. Felt like I was about to be featured on the hydraulic press channel.
Mercedes was the exact brand I was thinking of when I wrote that comment. For me it brings to mind the trash compactor scene from Star wars
The absolute panic when you put the keys in the ignition and the seat starts moving forward. You try to move it back before your knee slam into the dash, but the controls arent exactly where you thought
You mean due to the risk of accidentally hitting a button that sets the seat to a short position while you drive?
Nope, I mean due to them being automatic when you start the car, and linked to the “driver comfort” profile stored in the key.
As soon as you start the car the seat starts cramming your knees into the dash if it happens to belong to a shorter person. And of course, there’s no sign in the car that the owner is short because the seat moves all the way back when you turn the car off.
/Rant (sorry, the real problem in my opinion is that there isn’t a resistance/safety sensor that stops the whole thing)
Uhh isn’t that why the keys, and some cars have a valet mode? Take the key out of the fob dude.
Yeah lemme just disassemble Karen’s custom leather key fob cover, lol.
Most can be done with a key combo dude on the fob itself.
They must be similar sizes.
My wife and I are about the same height so we don’t have to adjust our seats.
Same with my wife and I. Seat doesn’t move, only adjust rear mirror. The side mirrors are set up for her since it’s minimal adjustment for me, it’s not worth it unless I’m doing a long drive like 3+ hours
I’m quite a bit taller than my partner, but she has a big bum and I don’t and it nets out to us having the same seat position, just different seat back angle to accommodate our different arms
It’s not a big deal. My SO and I are very different heights (like a foot/35cm), and it takes all of 10 seconds:
- slide seatbelt adjustor up/down
- move seat forward/backward
- adjust mirrors
We do it like 2-3x/week, and as the taller person, I’m totally capable of doing the adjustments while driving out of the neighborhood. It’s really a non-issue.
My wife and I are just the right height difference that the little flicky switch on the internal mirror will swap between the angles each of us need.
One day we got a car that has some auto light filtering for night driving and it doesn’t have the switch. Can’t wait to sell it.
You could just replace the mirror, it’s not normally that difficult to swap out
I don’t like the rest of the car either 😅
When I drive my girlfriend’s SUV, I have to stand outside of it and work the controls until I’ve got enough room to get in. It’s not awful, but does kind of suck on hot summer days when I just want to be in the air conditioning.
Our old (2006) minivan has an electronic adjustor, so I just hold that down while getting in (butt in seat, press button, swing legs). Our other car (2007 sedan) is even easier, since I just tap the adjustment bar under the seat and it slides back as I’m sitting on it (again, sideways). Then I adjust the shoulder seat-belt just before grabbing the belt to buckle, then I adjust the rear-view mirror while checking as I back up. It’s pretty smooth and routine.
Our AC takes a while to turn on anyway, so I don’t expect any AC until I’m at least a mile or so down the road. We park in the shade (garage at home and work), so I don’t need the AC anyway when setting out.
My car does this automatically depending on the key fob used, or the smart phone that’s closest to the driver seat depending on which you are carrying. Seat, and mirrors.
I just angle the back and slide the seat and i am good to go. It’s all analogue, quick and easy.
My wife and I happen to use the same seat position and wheel position, so we just have to adjust the rear view mirror and during the time of year when it’s really hot/cold maybe adjust the vents to how we each like. Takes like 5 seconds to adjust
That’s not a thing in modern cars.
Power seats and mirrors with multiple memory is still a luxury car feature and not mainstream like power windows.
The OP did not say what kind of cars they have. It is possible to have 2 cars with memory seats and mirrors. Now if only we could get memory rear view mirrors on the same cars as memory seats. Oh and seatbelt height adjustment memory.
Camera rear views allow this, common in a lot of trucks, they use the backup camera and feed it through a screen where the mirror is.
Both of my cars set the outside mirrors when they set the seats (one by which phone unlocked it, the other by a driver 1/2 button)
But I find I change the centre mirror every time I get in the car, maybe even more than that as I often adjust it while I’m driving
I wouldn’t call it a luxury car feature. In the US basically every car >30k has that. And most new cars cost >30k at this point. Basically every trim over base that’s like the first thing they add.
I had a Ford Focus rental car with power seats once.
When I bought a $50k US car in 2017, only the top trim had memory seats, and they penny pinched it off the top trim hybrid model so I couldn’t get them at any price.
Some OEMs do stuff weird. Hyundai and Kia are some of the worst. Some common features are on the trim just above base, the rest are all in the top trim.
When I bought my Outback in 2018 every trim besides base had it. But that Focus for example was a top trim and apparently only top trim has that. Granted that’s an smaller economy car, vs the Outback.
We’ve got 1 car. If I need to go somewhere and the wife has it, I get the bus. It’s a lot cheaper than owning 2 cars.
That’s fantastic if your city offers busses! Or public transportation at all 😭
Bikes are comparatively free
Yeah but that would raise my commute to two hours daily. And an hour of that would be biking home after midnight in a town where I’m very likely to get shot, stabbed, and mugged. Probably at the same time.
Not to mention my bike getting stolen and the fact that I’d likely get stopped by the police here every night due to dark skin
America, FUCK YEA!
I live a mile from the nearest safe road to bike on. People regularly nearly hit me in my car. I’d be dead if I biked anywhere
The only cost is everywhere you go you show up needing a shower.
you get used to it very quickly and stop sweating, unless you purposely go high intensity
I’ve been biking 5-8 miles per day for fun and there’s no choosing not to get sweaty if you dare to live somewhere with hills
true, hills also are a problem
Giggity
Keep you healthy too. I need to start using mine again.
I used to bike to work, then I changed workplace. Now if I tried cycling to work, I’d end up very tired… as in under truck tires.
Distances are far in places designed for cars. My city was made at the height of car based design so it takes an hour and a half to cycle from where I live to where I work, and that’s typical. We do have transit though, which is especially pointed at moving people from residential areas to work places and back
Bike theft is such a problem where I live I’ve been very hesitant to get another one. If they can’t get the whole bike, they’ll wrench off tires/seats, etc. My town might be an outlier, but I wonder how other people deal with this kind of thing when their bike is their primary form of transport.
The good news, I guess, is that there’s a healthy market for bikes and bike parts. Hopefully that means more people are riding them! (Note: some percentage of this comment is a joke but even I don’t know how much)
My closest bus stop is 1.5 miles away and the bus runs every hour (or so they claim)
The city added some sort of public “uber” that you can hail and ride for I think $2 but it only works within city limits and my wife has many friends in the neighboring cities so it was useless if she wanted to meet them, and also sometimes it’d take more than an hour for a pick up
I was gonna say “wait until this guy hears my wife and I SHARE a car… oh, the humanity!”
Do you share your car or her car tho?
Haha at the moment, her car lol. I work from home and she drives to the train station.
Do you ever run into issues with the bus taking a lot longer, and you not accounting for the extra time if your wife take the car? Where I live, 15-20 minute car rides are often 35-45 minute bus rides, and the bus comes half an hour.
Not really. I just leave at the time needed to get to work on time for whatever mode I’m using. It’s about 8 miles, and before COVID it was usually quicker to cycle than sit in traffic. Now there’s less traffic so cycling takes a bit longer than car, but not much. Bus is about the same as cycling.
I’m 57 and not hugely fit, but I can cycle 8 miles each way without any problem. Takes 30-35 minutes depending on wind direction.
I’d love to live in a place with workable public transport, but where I live it would add an hour to my commute each way; effectively an extra 10 hours a week at work
We’ve been trying to make this work with e-bikes. We still HAVE two cars, but don’t really use one of them unless we have to.
Right now I work a hybrid job and landed this job not long after totaling one of our vehicles in an unavoidable wildlife encounter. We ended up not buying a second car and I’ve been biking to stuff in town when I can (I live in a small town and various stuff frequently calls for running to other nearby towns for this or that) and it’s been really nice only having one car to worry about, but with the kids starting school and my wife looking at going back to work, the time to get a second car might come sooner than later
We have one car and I often choose my ebike.
Same but bike instead of bus. In rare cases a Lyft
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My wife and I share the cars like this. Is it so weird? We usually select the best car for the job at hand.
What if it was a daily commute for both you and your wife? Would you play eeny miny moe with the cars every morning?
Good point. She commutes a few days per week, but I’m 100/% work from home. Can’t say I miss commuting.
Commutting 40min+ each way every day, I envy.
Yea, why is this such a surprise. Especially with kids or groceries. Different trips require different transportation needs.
Same. And the best car at hand is the EV one, 100pct of the time. Whoever goes out takes that car. In the off chance the second person need to go out at the same time, they take the older crappy car.
Best for the job, sure, but not randomly.
Yup, that’s how we do it. We have kids and two cars: minivan and hybrid sedan. The hybrid gets more than 2x the mileage vs the minivan, it’s smaller, and both of us prefer it, so it’s what we use 90% of the time. We take the minivan if we’re all going somewhere, or we both need to be somewhere at the same time. I’ll also take the minivan for cargo (hardware store, dump, furniture store, etc).
Before we had kids, we had one car. When we both needed to be somewhere at the same time, I’d take my bicycle or the bus, and my SO would take the car.
Each person having “their” car makes no sense to me, I see cars as tools in the toolbox, and we take the one that’s best suited to the task at hand.
That’s pretty much how we do it, but with a phev and an SUV. On days we both work she takes the phev, I the SUV. When one of us is going somewhere we take the phev. But if it’s snowing or we want to haul kayaks or load up heavy to go camping, the SUV.
The phev is "hers"and the SUV “mine”. But only vaguely 🤷♂️ we don’t actually care that much. But also it’s not a free for all. She would probably be a little miffed if I just randomly took the phev to work forcing her into the SUV. But if we talked about it first she’d probably be fine 🤷♂️
For snow, snow tires should be more than sufficient. That’s what we do and it works fine for us here in Utah. No AWD, just decent tires.
We bought a second car when our first was born because our existing car (2-door coup w/ manual transmission) was a bit frustrating to load a car-seat into (we did it for a year though), and my SO couldn’t drive stick. So we picked up a hybrid (the same one we drive today about 10 years later), and the stick became “mine” by default (commuter only), and the hybrid was “hers,” at least for a couple of years until I was able to junk it because I was riding my bike to work every day. We stuck with a single car for another few years until #3 was born and I switched jobs (both in the same year, new job was more than twice as far), and the bike commute just wasn’t happening.
And that’s where we are today. My SO still feels some ownership over the hybrid, but it has largely become my commuter now. We’ll probably swap the hybrid for an EV soon-ish and later exchange the minivan for something my SO likes to drive more once car seats aren’t an issue. And when the kids leave the house, we’ll go back down to one car (ideally none, but I don’t think my SO would go for that).
I ride my bike and my partner theirs, we aren’t savages.
Commendable. But many of us live where cars are the only practical way to get around. My wife and I both drive 30 minutes to get to work.
Oh boy. Fuck Cars is not going to be happy…
30 mins by car is 35-40 mins by bike where I live, because bikes aren’t affected by traffic.
Roads are 55mph here, seldom any traffic, so it’s more like 2 hours by bike. For us anyway.
Do you each randomly choose a bike every morning? That is really the point here.
No we don’t because we are not savages :)
my partner likes to eat in her car.
I like to camp in bear country.
we share but there are definitely assigned vehicles. Also cutely I bought hers for her and she bought mine for me and we both love that.
What do you each drive? Comparable trim packages?
no she drives a small commuter vehicle and i’m in a van. So if she needs the van she’ll take it but she has heard me warn her enough times that a bear will hike 30,000 miles to tear the door off my van for a taco bell wrapper that she doesn’t eat in it. She mostly just uses her car.
for a taco bell wrapper that she doesn’t eat
Does she usually eat the wrappers?
You guys usually have two cars?
How else are you supposed to get to work? The bus takes 2 and a half hours and you will get there late and have to leave early. God I wish the bus was viable.
Where I live that’s not even the problem any more, and not because it was fixed either. You have to leave early regardless to have time to get stuck in traffic, find the only parking spot is far away, then walk 10 min in the rain, then dry off for work.
Unless you have older kids, then more cars. It’s cars all the way down.
I know right? imagine having even one car…
Nothing spices up a marriage like Communism.
Boutta seize the means of reproduction. Hammer that ass, and sickle those tiddies. Stand in a bread line to put a bun in the oven. It’s OUR orgasm, comrade
Poetry, absolute poetry
I love my wife, she can’t drive for shit though, nor does she respect vehicle maintenence, much less asthetic care.
Nope.
Also, she’s literally told me she’d be afraid to drive my car precisely because I keep it so nice and she doesn’t want to be responsible for fucking it up.
I fell into this trap. We have a nice, fancy, efficient EV that’s my daily driver, and a larger, less efficient gas vehicle that doubles as the family car/road trip machine that she dailies. We work roughly the same distance from our offices, but on days when she has to go across town on an errand, she takes the EV. It makes sense to save gas and whatnot.
Rims are fucked. I think she’s rubbed them on every available curb in a 25 mile radius. She doesn’t care. Fuck me for wanting a nice car I guess.
Likewise mine. I bought an electric car to replace her Honda to save the poor Jazz from her gear changing technique
We have two cars, but the electric gets used most by a long way as electrons are much less costly than diesel
It’s not that we grab whichever car, just we’re not in America and don’t need to travel by car all the time and whoever chooses a car second gets the Subaru
This is one thing I love about having old but reliable cars. Our bigger family car that my wife drives is banged up in so many ways but I can just ignore it. As long as the mirrors work I don’t have to worry about how many scratches are on the housing, and as long as the tires hold air it’s easier to ignore the wheels that look like somebody was practicing their angle grinder technique.
And then with my little commuter car, even though I like to park far away and I don’t drive into shit, I still don’t have to worry about other people or keeping it looking clean, etc.
In general I find it liberating and good for the ol’ mental health to not obsess over superficial qualities of material possessions. So if I can make it easier to do that, it’s a win.
We have two electric cars, a big one and a small one. The small one is “mine” and the big one is “his.” However, we both work from home so the only commute anymore is taking the kids to school. So, whenever possible, we take the little one because it’s more efficient by far. He doesn’t mind and thankfully it saves seat profiles, even if we always have to adjust the mirror.
The day when they make that adjust to the profiles! In mine we found kind of a sweet spot for seating position with the mirror adjusted the same for both of us. Heights are close through.
Wouldn’t that be great? I think some fancy cars do it, but not ours. To be fair, it’s a small price to pay for giving gas companies and PG&E less money.
If you’re talking about adjustable rear view mirrors then I think one of the last and only cars to do it was the 90s Mercedes Benz S class. They had it memory linked with steering and seating. It was weird and cool.
Also, if you’re charging your car in a PG&E area you’re technically giving them more money since the gas they provide is natural gas and not petroleum gas. You’d be sticking it to BP or Cheveron (or standard oil if you want to go old school).
We do have solar, which doesn’t cover everything but covers some. Either way, we figure if we use the more efficient car, less goes to PG&E than if we were charging the larger car more frequently.
I’m seeing cars with the rear view mirror is just a screen. At that point you shouldn’t have to adjust it
Mine has that too. Its cool and not so cool. Camera gets dirty, but I can spray to clean it. Driving in rain you just see water kicked up from the tires so it’s all you see. Its also harder to gauge distance IMO. On the plus side, if you have the back window blocked by heads in the back seat / recently purchased a big object like a TV, it’s a great backup so you can see out the back. Also, mine at least seems too use a wide angle camera, this is pretty nice since you can see blind spots and more lanes when on 3+ lane highway.
That seems really rough anywhere with snow. Whole car accumulates so much crap on it that gets kicked up in the winter between freeze/thaw cycles, dirt that gets shoveled/plowed with snow, slushy muck getting kicked up from the road when it’s just close enough to freezing to form, etc.
Same, but with a hybrid and a minivan. We use the hybrid whenever possible (~2x the gas efficiency, cheaper repairs, etc). It’s not a big deal, and our adjusting process is completely manual (adjust seatbelt, seat, and mirrors) since we’re very different heights.
I haven’t done the math, but I imagine it saves hundreds every year on gas alone. We put something like 15k miles on the small car, and 5-10k miles on the big car.
For years we didn’t have our own sides of the bed, but then one day we got a bed side table and that all came to an end.
My parents have “the new minivan” and “the old minivan,” I guess that’s what happens when you adopt four kids and two dogs.
