Today was the first day of my new twice-weekly schedule of renting a car to drive into my work's Chicago office. I've driven Fords for the past 20 years so when I do rent cars, I spent the first 15 minutes trying to figure out how everything works.Today's rental was a 2009 Nissan Altima with .5 miles (not a typo -- it had one half of one mile on it). The rental car guy told me how to start it (step on the brake and push the start button), but he didn't mention there was anything out of the norm about the gear shifter.
I put it in drive -- take a close look at the photo above. The shifter moves down and then to the left and down. I assumed this was some way to lock it into the drive position. So, I pulled out of the airport car rental area, and drove about a mile toward the highway. I could see, hear and smell that the transmission was burning up. It wasn't shifting. I had it up to about 40 mph, the tachometer was up to 6 and still it wasn't shifting out of first.
Before I got onto the highway I stopped, pulled over and called Enterprise and reported the problem. I figured I'd have to go back and get a different car. The rental car guy told me to move the shifter over to the right. Apparently, the right position is for automatic transmission and the left position is for manual transmission.
No where near the shifter did it say anything about automatic vs. manual. And, who's ever heard of a car that has both automatic transmission and manual transmission.
Seems to me like a lot of rental car companies are soon going to be selling very, very low-mileage Nissan Altimas with burned out transmissions.
1 comment:
Oh Sharon, I bet that was a riot!! My Sebring convertible had the dual shifts also, I remember how confusing that was, and also a little fun at times!!!! Enjoy girlfriend!! CAS
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