Why we don't drive expensive cars

My brother and his wife were kind enough to loan us the use of their luxury car during our visit this weekend, not even mentioning that they probably took out extra insurance on it. Being the designated driver, I tried to convince myself that it was like any other car I had ever driven, just a couple hundred grand more.

But it is not like any other car. First off, the ignition is on the left side of the steering wheel. Either some left-handed engineer, tired of having to fight his way through a right-handed world, wreaked his revenge on the rest us, or the car was originally intended for the British market and everything was placed on the right side of the car, but at the last minute everything was changed back to the left side of the car, and someone forgot to move the ignition to the right side of the steering wheel.

This car was also designed for multiple body parts to work together. To get the car to start you must, at the moment you are turning the key, also press the brake. Fortunately the brake is where one would expect the brake to be, and not somewhere else, such as in the glove compartment.

Your next hurdle comes upon disembarking from the car. You must lock the car so that it stays locked until such time as you are ready to unlock it. This is not an easy task with this car. When you press the lock on the remote -- which, incidentally, is the same button as the unlock -- the car, with unfailing politeness, senses that you are still near the car and will immediately unlock itself, in case you decide you want to enter again. And so you become engaged in a battle of lock-unlock-lock-unlock, as you vie to see which of you can be the fastest to lock or unlock the door.

The car always wins.

You may try an assortment of solutions for this, which we did, including moving away from the car in six-inch increments to see if distance has any effect on the doors remaining locked. You could try manually locking the doors, IF you can find a button to manually lock them. We could not, although we did not look in the glove compartment.

But all you are really doing when you try these solutions is sending out an advertisement to would-be thieves who might happen to be observing your efforts: DRIVER HAS NO IDEA HOW TO LOCK THE CAR. HELP YOURSELF TO ANYTHING INSIDE AFTER SHE LEAVES.

The best way to get the car to stay locked, evidently, is to lock the car with the remote and immediately hurl the remote as far away as possible, preferably to a trusted passenger standing several miles away. In the event that you are alone, an open field will do for the toss, unless an untrustworthy personage is lurking there.

This is obviously WAY superior to the way the rest of us lock our car, which is: We lock the car.

We never did get the driver's side to stay locked, and we finally settled for setting the alarm, so that if any unauthorized person DID happen to open the door an alarm would immediately sound. With any luck, the car would also immediately lock itself again, hopefully with the unauthorized person inside.