New Truck Has Tons of Bells and Whistles

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I bought a new truck about two months ago. I have driven it 4,000 miles to date, including two road trips to Austin. I have figured out most of its bells and whistles. It is a Ford Maverick hybrid, nicely appointed, with a hardshell bed that is so short that I also had to buy a 5×12 utility to haul items that won’t fit in that cute little bed, such as hay bales, plywood sheets, rolls of barbed wire, and t-posts. Hobby farm stuff.

I went from driving a 2001 Toyota Tundra to a compact truck that can practically drive itself on the highway. My other vehicle was a 2006 Honda Element that I loved, but after shelling out a few thousand dollars for repairs on these vehicles, I figured it was time to buy something new.

A longtime acquaintance, somewhat related to me by marriage in that East Texas crooked family tree way (his daughter is married to my two older daughters’ stepbrother), owns Lufkin Ford. So I got the friends-and-family discount. I picked the truck on their website, he sent me a price, and we had a deal. That is the way I prefer to buy a new vehicle. I then sold the two older vehicles outright.

Any new vehicle I buy will stay in the family for at least a decade. My Beautiful Mystery Companion in town drives our 2014 Toyota Rav4, which is still going strong with 211,000 miles on it. If I am lucky enough to make it to 80, I will still be driving the Maverick, notwithstanding a wreck.

This truck fits me perfectly. The high-tech features were challenging to master. The Maverick has a trailer accessory button that, once calibrated, will park the trailer ball directly under the hitch with the truck in neutral and my hands off the wheel, as if I were in the car wash. That made me exceedingly nervous the first time. I talked my BMC into standing out there to make sure I didn’t ram the trailer hitch into the tailgate. It worked perfectly.

Another feature, when activated, lets me take my foot off the brake at a standstill. It was designed for old farts like me, whose leg starts to ache from pressing the brake pedal in stop-and-go traffic. I call this the geezer leg feature. Yet another feature heats the steering wheel, an option I discovered by accident and thought I was coming down with a fever.

That reminds me of a story about my late friend A.M. “Monk” Willis. We met when he was 92. I had come back to Longview in 2008 to run the paper and was introduced to him by Dr. John Coppedge, a retired surgeon and political operative who told me, “You need to meet Monk. He’s a damn liberal like you.” We became good friends for those last two years of Monk’s life. One day I was reluctantly taking him to the smoke shop, complaining that I was contributing to the delinquency of a senior citizen. It was a cold, wet East Texas winter day. Suddenly Monk yelled, “My ass is on fire!”

I had forgotten to turn off the seat heater on the passenger side.

The Maverick will actually drive itself when on cruise, if I push a button on the steering wheel. It still requires me to keep my hands on the wheel, but it steers itself and keeps a safe distance between the truck and the vehicle in front of it.

The jury is still out on whether I am going to use this feature. It makes me nervous not to have control of its steering, and the Maverick and I have had some minor arguments while steering that compelled me to turn that feature off.

This brings me to Waymo, the self-driving car now ubiquitous in downtown Austin. A Waymo has all sorts of gadgets and gizmos attached to its exterior to allow it to drive itself. One can hail one through Uber. When in Austin this week for a friend’s book launch at Book People, I stayed at a hotel about half a mile away. I thought about using Waymo but decided to book a human driver instead. My driver back to the hotel was a woman with a Chevy Volt, an EV. I asked her whether Waymo was hurting her business and that of other Uber drivers. This set off a diatribe, liberally spiced with curse words. The answer was clearly yes; it was hurting her livelihood.

I left a generous tip in the Uber app and wished her good night. For now, I am sticking with human drivers. That includes me in my new Ford Maverick.

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