Nervous Nellie

 Meet our rental car:

A black Toyota C-HR

The morning before we returned her, we realized there was an excellent name for her, because holy cow, modern cars have anxiety.

Nell tries to comply with imagined lane-paint sometimes, nudging the wheel "helpfully" in ways that were both startling and(given Scotland's weird, only half-marked lanes) often objectively wrong.

Nell asks you to check all the seats, to make sure they're empty, every time you turn her off. 

Nell asks you to comply with a liability waiver, every time you turn her on. 

Sometimes the status of your Bluetooth surprises Nell, so she'll ditch displaying your phone's navigation while you're using it. That's a cool one.

But mostly...

Nell beeps.

Nell beeps if you get out of the car while she's in park and you have the key in your pocket.

Nell beeps (many times) if you try to lock the doors and the windows are cracked, even a sliver.

Nell beeps if the speed limit changes.

Nell beeps if you're going significantly under the speed limit.

Nell beeps (incessantly) if you go even 1 mile per hour over the speed limit.

Nell beeps if a pedestrian walks past.

Nell beeps if you indicate a lane change and there is a car within 25 meters of you.

And Nell especially beeps when she sees anything near her front or rear bumpers. 

And by "near" I mean "within 3 meters I beep slowly but consistently, like a clock ringing the hour."

"Within 2 meters I beep more quickly, like a songbird spotting a cat near a nest."

"Within a meter I beep constantly -- imagine if C3P0 were suddenly put in R2D2's body and could only twitter to communicate, and then you shot near him with a high-powered rifle."

And "within half a meter, imagine that the car needed a way to tell the occupants that, within the next 3 seconds, the car would self-destruct."

With all the constant beeping, chiming, and twittering, it was honestly hard sometimes to tell what Nell was most anxious about at any given moment. She was just generally low-key freaking out most of the time.

She did get us around Scotland quite well though, survived running off-road and into curbs on narrow roads and single lanes (especially in Skye) quite often. 

She was a good car.

But damn, was she nervous.

(Author's note: this entry is being entered asynchronously from the rest, so I can refer to "Nell" from here on out and the reader will understand.)