boxy

I didn't appreciate the severity of the ice in the car park until I stepped out and remembered all the elasticated foot grip devices back at home. Fortunately, my dad's oversized car had shown no sign of being bothered and I was relieved at successfully completing the first journey of any great extent in something the size of a small van with automatic gears. Whilst I learned to drive in my parents' previous big red car, the Prairie only looked big on the outside and was almost identical in handling to my driving instructor's Micra; this Doblo could do with the windscreen and windows all being a foot closer so that the driver has better views of the corners and the gear-changing mechanism could probably benefit from an update which told it that it was being used in a city with near-blanket 20mph residential speed limits and that it shouldn't always try to shift up immediately upon reaching 19mph. The automatic-at-low-speed effect was what I really wasn't looking forward to after we were given an automatic by mistake in Napier which felt like it wanted me to speed up into things in the airport car park, but this was generally OK at lower speeds and only slightly inconvenient to have in the Economy mode when it failed to appreciate that you'd just turned onto a motorway.