Steering Wheel
Getting the electric car right
A Toyota is not a car that makes you want to write poetry. It is a car you get into, press the start button, select Drive, and take wherever you need to go. No drama, no complicated rituals, no need to call the children over to explain how to operate the touchscreen.
The coding exemption that comes with a catch
Filipino motorists appreciate the freedom to leave the house on a given morning without checking the last digit of the license plate. In Metro Manila, this can be worth a surprising amount of money. A day without number coding means another day of using the car, another day without arranging a ride, another day without pondering why a perfectly serviceable vehicle has to stay in the garage. So when a salesperson mentions that a particular electrified vehicle can be driven even on its coding day, a prospective buyer has incentive to sit up a little straighter.
The car can help, but it cannot drive for you
Cars have become remarkably good at worrying about us. They can warn when we are drifting out of a lane, tell us when another vehicle has entered our blind spot, apply the brakes when we fail to notice something ahead, and, in some cases, even keep themselves pointed in the right direction while traffic crawls along. It is an extraordinary development, particularly in a country where driving is akin to participating in a live-action negotiation with several hundred strangers. The problem is that the smarter the car becomes, the greater the temptation for us to become slightly less smart ourselves.
The electric car meets the Filipino road
The electric vehicle has arrived in the Philippines with a promise familiar to anyone who has spent an afternoon crawling along EDSA: less dependence on gasoline, quieter motoring, and a little less money disappearing into the fuel tank. It’s an appealing proposition. The only complication is that the Filipino road has never been particularly interested in making life easy for anyone.
The most expensive thing in your car is time
A car can tell you many things. It can tell you that a door is open, a tire needs air, a passenger has forgotten to buckle up, or that you are getting dangerously close to the vehicle in front of you. What it cannot tell you is why you have been sitting in the same spot for 23 minutes. This is the peculiar economics of driving in the Philippines. We fork over a great deal of money buying cars that can go very fast, and then spend a considerable portion of our lives making sure they do not.
