Scenes From a Vacation: The Dodge Avenger

The Ginger Ninja and I were going to have to travel some distances that weren’t very well served by public transit if they were served at all, so we decided to rent a car. We needed a car that we could pick up at Logan Airport and drop off at Bradley (Hartford’s airport), and Thrifty was offering the best deal.

“I’m hope we don’t get a PT Cruiser,” she said to me at the rental counter.

“Why not?” said the Thrifty rep as he tapped at his computer keyboard. “They’re pretty easy to drive, and you’re probably going to get one since you requested a mid-size car.”

“I kind of wanted a car with a real trunk,” she said. “One where you can’t see all our luggage.”

“Well, you could upgrade to a larger car,” he said, “but that’ll cost more.”

We were going to have the car for a week, so springing a not-so-insignificant amount of money for a trunk seemed a bit much. We stuck with the medium car.

“Hmmm,” said the Thrifty guy. “PT Cruiser.”

He must’ve seen the look of disappointment on Wendy’s face because he did a little mor etyping and said “Wait, I’ve got another car here.”

He handed us the keys and pointed us at this car:

Looking at our rental agreement, we found that the Thrifty guy had exercised his discretionary powers and gave us a free upgrade to a Dodge Avenger. Thank you Thrifty guy, and if any of the Powers That Be at Thrifty stumble across this post, you’ve got a couple of pleased customers here.

The car handled pretty nicely and had some decent power under the hood. Wendy thought it “felt as if its nose was too wide” — meaning that she found ti somewhat difficult to pull into parking spaces, but I didn’t think so.

My only complaint was the car’s colour, a shade that I referred to alternately as “Obnoxio Blue” or “Trying-Too-Hard Purple”. I will admit that it was easy to spot in a crowded parking lot.

The car had a couple of luxury goodies that served us well on the trip from the Boston area to Hartford. One of them was Sirius satellite radio and the other was this:

I noticed it when we first took the car off the lot and Wendy was doing the driving. I was putting the rental agreement in the glove compartment when I noticed another latch on the dash. Opening it revealed an extra compartment on top of the dash, and inside was a diagram showing its purpose.

“Cool, I’d read about these!” I said. “In-dash fridge!”

It was clearly meant for standard soda cans, but it could accomodate a couple of bottles if you laid them on their sides. It may seem a silly luxury, but if you’ve ever gone on a road trip of at least a couple of hours, it’s actually a nice thing to have. Besides, the auto companies’ market research have shown that cup holders are an important part of the North American driving experience, and a lack of them have proven to be a deal-breaker in a car purchase.

Maybe it’s the way they name cars these days, but “Avenger” seemed silly to us. Through out the week, I ended up singing the song that the Russian guy from Clerks sang, substituting “Berserker” with “Avenger”. In case you don’t remember that scene, here it is (warning: it gets sweary)…

All in all, not a bad car, and a pretty nice deal.