Scrape sensitive

A month on, and I continue to be impressed and pleased with our new wheels. I skim-read the handbook, but after a couple of surprises I decided it was worth a closer read.

First surprise was the automatic hill start. The new Astra is equipped with an electronic handbrake - something I've not encountered before. I found it reasonably intuitive, but the salesman had been extra diligent and made sure I was familiar with both ways of using it. It has a operational interlock with the foot brake for safety purposes (you have to depress the foot brake before releasing the handbrake - avoids accidental releasing by (e.g.) kids messing about in the car) but it will also release automatically if you try to pull away when it's engaged.  Releasing the clutch slowly will allow the car to move off after a brief pause.

I don't expect I'll use that feature much, as it increases wear on both clutch and rear brake pads, but it'll probably come in handy from time to time.

What I hadn't immediately realised, but revealed itself the first time I pulled up at Nikki's workplace to drop her off, is that the car has an incline detector. If it's in danger of rolling, the car applies the handbrake automatically for a few seconds, effectively giving you a hands-free hill start. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I thought that was pretty cool.

I like the rain-sensitive wipers too. The wipers don't have an "intermittent" setting in the traditional sense - where they flick on and off after a set number of seconds. Instead, the intermittent position on the wiper stick activates a sensor behind the windscreen which detects when a certain number of raindrops have landed, and triggers a wipe. It's possible to increase or decrease the sensitivity, but once set the wipers automatically react to changes in the rate of rainfall, all the way from full-time wiping to almost no wiping at all, as required.

I guess this is all very mundane to anyone who's had a new car in the last few years, but stuff like this wasn't even an option in 2003 (our last purchase) on the kind of model we were looking at.

The wipers caught me out one frosty morning last week though. I'd left them in the "auto" setting, turned the motor on to get the various demists going, and set about scraping the frost off the windscreen. The sensor interpreted my scraping motion as rain and set the wipers off. Didn't half make me jump I can tell you. I leave them switched off now!