Knight Rider

I know that there are a lot of things to look for when purchasing a new car. How reliable is it? What kind of gas mileage does it get? Is it safe? After growing up with a safety engineer father, I definitely made sure I paid extra for the anti-lock brakes. The dealers, of course, took one look at the fact that I'm female and tried to sell me on the more superficial aspects. "Can you see yourself in the red one?" "What kind of interior do you think you want?" "Once you get a moonroof, you'll never be able to drive another car without one."

It happens that the new Focus I bought comes with something called "SYNC," a fancy little system that connects my phone and music to the car. This was definitely not as important as the anti-lock brakes or manual transmission, but it happened to come with the one car that fit the more important specifications. But now I'm finding out just how awesome it is. Everything is voice activated and turns on when I turn the car on, so I just say "Phone. Call Mom & Dad" and it calls them. No more headset; I just talk into the air. I can also say "USB. Play Artist Kanye West" and it will start playing the Kanye songs on my iPod.

So it's pretty exciting that I can talk to my car (would've come in handy on the long drive when I moved out to California), but it turns out that it will talk to me too. It will tell me things like when my car needs service and it'll read text messages to me. Hopefully someone will start texting me phrases that KITT, the car from Knight Rider, would say. If this car lets me feel like I'm David Hasselhoff, it was worth every penny.