Park That Thought

The thing that attracted me to this Car+Driver story is that it means I don't have to mention Coronavirus.

Because it's got absolutely nothing to do with Coronavirus.

It starts back in early February - this was before the West got too concerned about Coronavirus.

Oh Bugger.

Anyway, Car+Driver tried out Hyundai's "Smart Park" self-parking system as demonstrated by an advert in the middle of The Super Bowl.  That story is here.  Here is their still from that ad:

The bloke without the coffee is impressing the bloke who looks like him but does have coffee by allowing his Hyundai Sonata to park itself into a narrow gap.

Now, being me, I was more interested in the very badly parked car to the right of it.  Now it had obviously been very badly parked by somebody connected to the advert in order to demonstrate the parking feature of the Sonata.

But, in the real World, you wouldn't want to use that feature in this case because the moron who can't park is almost certain to damage your car by:

a) trying to get in to his own car and

b) trying to reverse out into the road

 

But, back to that car itself. I spent ages trying to work out what the hell it actually is.  It sort of looks vaguely familiar in an old Jeep Cherokee or perhaps Nissanish sort of way - but it has a strange R logo on it so it's either a make that we don't have in Britain that Americans would identify straight off or it's an old Hyundai (or Kia) that the ad people have disguised so as not to distract viewers from the Sonata.

 

Well that didn't work.

 

And, judging by the article that led me to write this, the Smart Park can't be trusted either.