Learning to drive

After 10 hours on the road from Chengdu, we arrive in Xian and then the driving really starts. First across the city in rush hour traffic. This takes maybe 45 minutes. Then, when we are two miles from our hotel, the road gets next level crowded with cars, scooters, and people. I'm inching along, checking the navigation to make sure I don't make a wrong turn. Often, there are no easy corrections after wrong turns in the big cities, so one mistake could mean 20 minutes. I get through the most crowded narrow road and onto a big road. But wait, only 50 meters then a sharp right into an even narrower street which our hotel is on. All I'm thinking about is where to park. Well, that and not running over anyone. Or scratching the car. A spot magically appears on the left. Our car's auto parking does't recognize it, so I need to manually park. Parallel park to the left. Thankfully the car has lots of cameras and eventually I'm able to focus on the right three views and zig/zag my way into the spot. It's then that I noticed we have parked at the base of Xian's historical city wall.

I learned to drive in 1982 via my high school's driver ed program. There was a lecture part of it and a road driving part. For the road part, day one was in the school parking lot learning the basics. Day two, the teacher had me on the freeway because he needed to pick up some auto parts in San Mateo. Day three or four was the hills of San Francisco. And that was that. And it seemed simpler then which is maybe nostalgia intruding. But it was simpler - get in the car, check the side mirror and rear view mirror (passenger side mirror was a luxury). Check the pedal distance. Start the car and go. When driving, basically know the locations of all the cars around you. I learned to drive a stick shift. I drove this way until this year.

A few months back, we replaced our small 2007 VW hatchback will a full sized EV NIO ET7 sedan. Now, besides the three mirrors, it has three screens. The large, center dash multi-function main screen, a small digital display above the steering wheel, and a projected display on the windshield. I'm still adjusting when to look at what screen and what I part of the screen to focus on. For example, when I'm navigating and need to make a right turn, I look at the main screen to make sure I turn at the right time, while also looking at camera showing traffic on the right, the camera showing cross traffic, and my eyes on the street. With all the scooters, it's easy to focus on the right camera traffic but I also need to keep my eyes up so I don't miss a pedestrian coming from the other direction. I'm sure this is easy for people 16 and learning to drive. For me, it's a long ways from the three mirrors. My epiphany when driving through Xian, is I still have the fundamentals of the three mirrors to relay on and when needed can use the other screens, like when parking or checking for cross traffic.

The GPS system is also a step up. Large screen, clear directions. Except I'm the type that gets anxious when it says to turn left in 150 meters. I'm looking for the "right", right turn, and the distance count down. Oh, the verbal clues and GPS screen are in Chinese. When navigating complex or new areas (at least complex areas to me), I was getting nervous and speaking out loud. "Where to turn? Here? Why is the map showing that?". Sabrina would try to help and read the map and tell me where to turn or not turn. Another signal for my feeble cognition. At some point during this trip, I learned to breath through the GPS anxiety and just make sense of the map and it was a lot less stressful for everyone.

The ET7 has self-driving enabled which I used on the highway. It was really useful for my post coffee crash late morning. It's not full self-driving in the sense it needs me to keep my hands on the wheel in case some takeover event happens. It changes lanes and passes slower cars on it's own. But it's not always smart about that. Or, my working theory is it lacks enough distance in it's vision to know not to change lanes when it will catch up to a slow moving car/truck before it has the chance to switch lanes back. So, I found myself disabling self-driving whenever there was moderate traffic and wishing for a simpler form of cruise control.