Brave New World

I won't go into detail again that I was not prepared to "upgrade" to a new car yet, but had to. While there are some features that are very cool and practical and I love that so far, it has mainly run on electricity we "harvested" on our roof, I have used computers of varying sizes long enough to know they have their quirks and bugs. And this car is essentially a glorified computer on wheels. Apart from the fact that I find it pretty distracting when you have to consciously look at a touchscreen and click several times in order to turn on the music or change temperature settings rather than just blindly press a button or turn a dial, I have trust issues. When I mentioned to the Empress recently that I'd prefer a physical handbrake of some kind to an automatic feature that I don't even have to consciously klick, but that is supposed to activate automatically when I stop the engine after parking, she called this "a very old-fashioned point of view". Well, last week my trust issues were confirmed when all of a sudden my car decided to run amok mid-drive. Highflyer had picked me up in town and shortly into the drive an amber light appeared on the dashboard. We soon found out what it was: both front indicators had stopped working and just released a very aggressive noise whenever you wanted to signal where you were going. Not exactly the best in evening traffic, but at least the rear ones were still working. When we got out of the car and locked it, the front lights would not switch off. We tried all light settings and even got the confirmation that all lights were switched off, while they were clearly on (see photo). After a few attempts of stopping and starting the engine the lights eventually went out after 20 minutes or so. There were some other issues and so I had it checked at a garage the following day, but just like with a laptop that you force to shut down it was as if nothing had ever happened when I drove there, indicators working, etc. The service technicians ran some electronic tests and pushed updates, so let's hope for the best. I asked if such electronic issues were common and the guy nodded, saying "yep, unfortunately". Yaaay.