What's Wrong With This Picture: The Quest For The Family Strip Club Edition

It's funny that this came up. While I was trying out the nav system in a Kia Sportage (review soon to come, Ed and God willing) while researching a story on where famous car guys are buried (story soon to come, Ed and God willing) I was trying to find Henry Ford's grave. He's buried in the family plot at St. Martha's Episcopal Church in Detroit, ironically on Joy Rd. Joy Road, like many Detroit area street names, has an automotive connection (see above regarding Ed & God) and is named after Henry B. Joy. I knew it was on Joy but I wasn't sure how far west so somewhere while still in NW Detroit I pulled over to check the nav system. It has categories for a half dozen different kinds of ethnic foods, but no categories for houses of worship or cemeteries. I ended up using the 411 feature on my MetroPCS phone. The same was true while looking for a Chabad House in Toledo. No categories for houses of worship. I'd done a banzai run to deliver some goods to a customer in NJ and on the way home realized that I hadn't budgeted for tolls. Did you know that it now costs almost $10 to drive the Ohio Turnpike from Toledo to Youngstown? At 30mpg/$3gas that's an outrageous 50% of the actual cost of travel. How can that be possibly justified? I calculated in my head that I had just enough money for just enough fuel to just barely get home. Fortunately, the nav system in the Kia does have the option of giving you a route that avoids tolls. The blizzard was just starting so I knew that I wouldn't be going over 55 and besides I wasn't going to go any faster than that just to save precious fuel. The route was a bit longer, but paying tolls was not an option.

Plan A was watching the Range indicator on the instrument panel and comparing it to the actual road distance from home on the nav screen. That system takes a little while after adding gas to get a stable predictive value. At first the figure is skewed down by the startup and low speeds before hitting the highway, but watching them change while driving as slowly as I dared on the interstate, I could see that the distance was dropping faster than the range and I knew that if at any point the Range started to exceed the distance, I'd make it home on fumes. Plan B was that if those two lines didn't cross before Toledo, I'd be looking for a Chabad rabbi, drop a few names of guys I know here in Detroit to vouch for me, and borrow ten bucks. Plan A worked, though I discovered that Kia's range indicator shuts off when the level drops to only a gallon or so. Who needs Kramer when you have TTAC writers?

So what the Nav systems giveth, in some other areas they taketh away. You may arrive late to a funeral or church services in your Kia, but your neighbor in a Nissan will find the strip club where she's moonlighting to help with the mortgage just fine.

Michael Karesh told me that there are only three companies that produce the data used by the nav systems, Navteq being the one he remembered off hand. I suspect, though, that those firms provide a large amount of information and the companies that use it decide how to implement the user interface and software.

I'm also open to the possibility that including Adult Entertainment as a category on a minivan's nav/info system is clever viral marketing by Nissan in response to Toyota's swagger van.

FTW!!!11!1!1 Moms and dads also have right to have fun. The only wrong thing I see in the picture is that it doesn't have a fold down menu.

How about a Stow-N-Go Brass Pole?

I bet you can lay flat in the Quest.