This morning at about 7:35 I turned in the keys to Enterprise Rent-a-Caliber and am finally rid of the Dodge Caliber.  I don’t want you to think that I hate the car, except that I do.  I have had 4 men (I notice that women dont’ do this) ask me how I like it when the family piles out of the vehicle.  Each one got a standard three word response, “I hate it.”  Yeah, that’s a pretty strong statement to make about a car.  Except that a car that big and heavy needs a very serious engine, 6 cylinders at least, or maybe an iVTEC 4 cylinder engine that pushes various Hondas around.  The 4 banger inside the Caliber is most at home at a red light.  It purs and hums there until the light turns green.  If you stomp on the gas the car gets even more fidgety because it doesn’t know how to accelerate.  I was at a left hand turn, the light was green and a car was more than a quarter mile down the road so I thought I had room to turn left.  I hit the gas.  The gas laughed (laughing gas?), the car jittered forward and finally started to move smoothly as I was narrowly into the left hand turn lane before the other vehicle was going through the same intersection.
The upsides of the low visibility windows that the Caliber has are many and varied.  For example, not being able to see means your body will be in a relaxed state when you get into the accident instead of being tensed up.  Another fine quality of low visibility is that bullets flying at you from outside of a car in a high speed chase will have a smaller target if they have to go through the glass.  Of course most bullets would whip through the steel doors make that less of an issue.  The last upside I’m going to mention is that not seeing where your hood is makes it more likely for you to stay back from other vehicles at a red light because you wouldn’t want to bump into them.  15 feet until the next car may or may not be how far back I was from them… I don’t know, it was hard to tell unless I got out of the car to look.

There are some nice features that I have mentioned before like lights in the cup holders at night.  A stereo that sounds so horrible that you actually drive with it off so that your focus is more on the road (that you can’t see so well, anyway) helps.  There is a drink cooler in the dashboard.  Nice.  I can have cold drinks while I drive, but do I want to be driving?  Last, but not least, I love the fact that the ‘large storage space’ in the back is not any larger than my Honda Civic’s was.  Who needs to put things in the back of a vehicle?  Not me for sure.  Our stroller barely fit  in the back with anything else.

If you see a Caliber on the road, steer clear of them, they’re a mobile accident waiting to happen.