{"id":7845,"date":"2026-07-17T07:39:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T12:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=7845"},"modified":"2026-07-17T07:39:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T12:39:18","slug":"new-truck-has-tons-of-bells-and-whistles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/new-truck-has-tons-of-bells-and-whistles\/","title":{"rendered":"New Truck Has Tons of Bells and Whistles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>

I bought a new truck about\"\"<\/a> 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\u2019t fit in that cute little bed, such as hay bales, plywood sheets, rolls of barbed wire, and t-posts. Hobby farm stuff.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t ram the trailer hitch into the tailgate. It worked perfectly.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That reminds me of a story about my late friend A.M. \u201cMonk\u201d 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, \u201cYou need to meet Monk. He\u2019s a damn liberal like you.\u201d We became good friends for those last two years of Monk\u2019s 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, \u201cMy ass is on fire!\u201d<\/p>\n

I had forgotten to turn off the seat heater on the passenger side.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryI 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[85,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-85","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7848,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7845\/revisions\/7848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}