As Jay was being prepped for this past weekend’s trip to the Rockies where a good friend’s bachelor party was to take place, I couldn’t help but notice that the tire shop had unevenly filled the air in the freshly installed winter tires. 32-38-42-39-38…
This was obviously not the first time there’d been inconsistency in tire pressures on this car,i but in the eighteen months or so since I’ve been driving the Big L, I’d never checked the Owner’s Manual to see which line on the dash display corresponded to which tire. Usually when one of the tires got too low, I’d just run around with the gauge and air hose and top them all up so that they’d be at the same level, but in this case I just wanted to ease the pressure on the “42” and bring it back in line with the other three (leaving the spare, which I strongly suspected to be “32,” alone).
So which corner would I head to first to economise my efforts ? Let’s see what the ever-wise writers of The Manual suggested :
Is this some kind of koan ? “No correlation” is surely some kind of misprint or inside joke. Or did Toyota go to such Achillean lengths as to install unauditable randomness in each and every limousine ? Just when you thought that Japanese VCRs and their opaquely unprogrammable clocks were but arcane relics of the 90’s never to be rediscovered, a few rubber-coated drops of stupid oozed into the drinking water upstream of Toyota’s Tahara plant. Oh the many joys of technology.
The bachelor party was, by comparison, delightfully old fashioned.ii Nothing but an entire weekend of camaraderie, crisp alpine air, postcard vistas, daring mountain hikes, and enough Old Fashioneds to make me wanna grow a moustache. It’s the simple things in life.
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- In case you’re interested in mid-ownership update, Jay is currently ringing the tills in at an eminently reasonable $0.87/km of driving. An underpriced option ? Compared to the dearly departed ultimate status symbol ($1.25/km), it really is. ↩
- Also delightfully old fashioned was walking outside the car to check tire pressures. So that’s what I did. I love me some tech but it really has to be a lot more reliable and predictable. This guessing game shit is for the birds. ↩