EP41: Cars, Coffee & Cape Cod: A Rental Camry Story

In this episode, Jon shares his experience driving a rental Toyota Camry through Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He reflects on the historical similarities between New England and Old England, the peculiar absence of drive-throughs, and the quirks of the local traffic. He also discusses the performance and features of the Camry, comparing it to other vehicles like its Lexus counterpart and a BMW 440. Throughout the episode, he provides humorous and candid commentary on his motoring adventures, including a less-than-satisfactory breakfast stop at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

Jaytech – Shine on Me
A family vacation to Cape Cod
Camry: anonymity is Really Quite Nice
Western Star Trucks
Cape Cod and the Cotswolds
J’s driving around old England avoiding motorways pod
The importance of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
Sampling Dunkin Donuts
Short bed utility body Ford
‘25 Camry XS thoughts
J’s review of a ‘25 Camry XSE
Do you need a Lexus? Let alone a German.
Camry feels far more modern than J’s ‘16 Tundra
J struggles with the Camry’s tech; it would have been easier to use a 2015 Camry
J’s issues with the Camry’s adaptive cruise and lane assist
American bacon is bad
The frustrating new policy of not giving napkins in fast food places unless requested
Electric vs gas power delivery
However gas + electric motor together makes for a great package when pressing hard on the right hand pedal
The hybrid as an electric turbo
Hybrid vs full BEVs
2018 BMW 440 driven
Its All About the Mode – J’s test of this era of 3 series when new
Paddle shift vs. Just Mash The Throttle
BMW B58 motor
JB tune – plug and play
Would You Buy One Seocnd Hand?
J can’t take salt on the roads; the destructiveness of rust
Modern cars will be killed by hidden electrical gremlins

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Good day. Good morning, good afternoon. It is John Sons, the motoring historian. I’m doing another one of these. Impromptu Eric, the producer, was like, you know, you are better. That one that you did about the LA fires where you just sat in the truck and recorded it, that one was almost better than the ones that you planned.

So I was like, you know what? I’ll do another one. Maybe I’ll do another one like that. And then I thought yesterday [00:01:00] I, I’ve had this Camry for a bit, family, vacay, Cape Cod. I’ve had this Camry, Basey, obviously new one. It’s from Avis, one of the major. And I was like, you know what, maybe I’ll talk about it a little bit.

Maybe I will. And then I thought, you know what? So I’ll do it as I’m like driving. So, uh, I’m actually driving.

New England. It is like Old England, you know, not just the place names, the whole way they’ve like laid stuff out. It’s like Old England, I guess. More. It’s a function that California’s built for, you know, roads [00:02:00] they have cars on. Whereas this community that we’re in at the moment, like this Cape Cod, it seems to have been mostly built in the 16th, 17th, eighties.

Century. So in that sense, the communities resemble a lot of British towns. In fact, there are older communities than, than uh, uh, a lot of British towns. So for context, if you wanna imagine me in context, I’m on this Highway 28 Falmouth Road in, uh, Cornwall. I hear you say, no, not in Cornwall, in this Massachusetts place.

I just missed the turn for the only bloody drive through. Alright, so this is a feature. Of New England that is worth talking about is, and it is, is this right that in New England, or at least part of New England, they don’t really go in for like drive-throughs and things like that. So that thing where you like stagger out of the motel and get in the truck and start rolling and are [00:03:00] like, uh, where am I gonna stop to get breakfast?

And then you drive for a little bit and there’s a McDonald’s and you just drive through and carry on. That doesn’t happen here. Here, the only on this Falmouth Road drag here. There’s plenty of like strips and places that you can stop and get out delis, as Dana calls them. But I, I tried the. Deli the other day and it took bloody ages.

It’s like Bloody England. Like, it’s like, am I in America or am I in like slow being served England? It was the latter. And if the bacon sandwich had been that good, I’d have been all right with it, but it wasn’t. So I was just like, yes, Daniel, this is why I don’t do delis. So else they do differently here.

And I’m just, ’cause I’m just looking one seeing one and I’m just jumping around here. Is this. Trucks, there’s a lot of Western stars. I love a western star. There must be different rules out here, like around heavy trucks and, and this is why you [00:04:00] see Western stars out here on Eastern seaboard and, and not elsewhere, and.

Obviously the towns do look cutesy. I mean, it works for me for a bit, but after a while it all feels a bit too much like the Cotw, you know, in Europe. I don’t know. I like a bit of, I feel like the cot swells has to be offset with the gnarlies of Birmingham. You know, maybe that people would say the same of, uh, Boston Offsets the sort of, you know, the city offsets this as the, you know, and this is like, you know, Windsor or somewhere like that, but just Americans, it’s on a bigger scale.

Yeah, it’s all like winding lanes with trees growing over. You know, it’s like if you tell the GPS to take you around Southern England, keeping off the freeways. Keeping off the motorways, which it did last time I was in England and, uh, worked really well. In fact, I’ll insert a link now for that pod that I did where I talked about driving around Old England.

Anyway, this New England is, is nice here. You know, it’s definitely a whole lot richer. Basically [00:05:00] everyone who moved is parked New England. It, it came here, it was clear that they thought to themselves, wow, I could be like the Squire in a Jane Austen novel. You know everyone, every working class person, sailor Pilgrim.

I went to Plymouth Rock yesterday. I won’t bore you. Well, no, actually it’s not boring. It’s interesting, but you know, it is just a rock. So you know, it’s a story that’s interesting. Oh, Will’s chair. The story’s interesting because one, it was families who came. That’s why it was memorable. Second reason why it was memorable was because, uh, shit, I should choose what I’m gonna be.

Second reason why it was memorable was because they did the Mayflower Compact. So it’s a system of government. So you’ve got families and government, but the only reason they did the compact was ’cause they landed in the wrong place and the king had told ’em they could have land down by the Hudson River, but they weren’t anywhere near the Hudson River.

So they were like, take us there. And the captain of the ship went of the Mayflower went, no. So they were like, what are we gonna do? And, [00:06:00] and the party was in danger of breaking up and they were like, we’re gonna do this compact to write how we are gonna run. You know, our little posse here. Hello. Good morning.

What can I get for you today? Good morning. Can I do a sourdough breakfast sandwich? Perfect. Anything else with ketchup please? With ketchup. I can give you ketchup back on the side. That’s okay. Awesome. Perfect. Anything else? Can I also do a uh, medium cappuccino? Actually a large cappuccino. We’ll see how good Dunking Donuts is.

I’ll tell you what there is though. There’s this awesome little Ford truck with a wooden rack. And like an extended boom. But it’s like a sh, it’s like a short, really short, it’s like a short bad truck, but it’s got like a utility bed on it. I should take a picture of it. Alright, so yeah. In Cape Cod have this, uh, rental Camry.[00:07:00]

I mean, it’s new, it’s only done 6,000 miles, so let’s say it’s a 2025. I guess it’s a base spec. I haven’t been and looked at the badge or something like that, but it’s like a cloth interior. It’s done about 7,000 miles and it sadly has been abused. There’s bashes on a lot of panels and they’ve taken the floor mats out.

It’s filthy anyway, and. I guess it tracks straight, but like all rental cars used to years ago, it smells slightly of cigarette smoke, even though they’ve tried to, to clear it. So, uh, hopefully we’ll, uh, we’ll be able to get away with that. Now, I’ve, uh, you heard me in Dunking a moment ago. I’m, uh. I’m gonna sample a Dunking Bacon and egg sandwich.

Doesn’t look that inspiring to be honest, but you know, we’ll see. So the Camry, I mean, I drove that excess E didn’t I, a couple of months ago and I linked to to that and, and I did feel like of the cars that I drove in that way, it was the best car. And with hindsight, [00:08:00] given the fact that we’re all spending our own money on these things, it just seems so much better value than anything else that we experienced.

It doesn’t do. Anything particularly well, but it does everything really a little bit better than you expect it to. So well that you wonder if you need the Lexus and you certainly feel like you couldn’t justify, you know, you’d be wasting money if you were buying a Porsche or the BMW, you know, that’s how it, how it makes you feel a little bit, it makes me feel like, like that again.

I guess I’m coming to it from the experience of driving the truck and, you know, it definitely feels like 10 years on from the truck. My tundras are 2016 and so, so that this is, and it’s a car, you know, not a truck, which, and the truck was already like old hat into 16. But I guess, you know, because I drive so many old vehicles, it doesn’t, it still feels pretty modern to me.

So this. This Camry feels super modern and as such, I find I trip over the technology [00:09:00] when you start it, but the engine doesn’t like fire up. So it, it’s hard to tell whether or not you can put it in gear. So I’m constantly trying to put it in gear or get it going or I somehow mis coordinate the putting the brake on and pushing the power button.

It’s, I, I dunno what it is. I just, it’s just. You know, look, right now it’s just now saying that the vehicle assist is deactivated and I need to be careful when his assist when exiting the vehicle, it’s full of these kind of like computery. Would you like a paper hat with that sir? Kind of of shit that you really don’t.

It is interesting to me because you do end up feeling that this product 10 years ago would’ve driven just as well. It might have even had cruise control, but I wouldn’t have spent 10 minutes wrestling with the cruise control because the cruise control isn’t just cruise control, it’s also adaptive cruise control, and it’s also lane assist.

And when you first [00:10:00] switch it on, you need to know. Which menu to toggle into to deactivate that. So you only get the cruise, you don’t get the whole self-driving piece. Now, if that seemed complicated to explain, imagine what it was like driving with your family at five o’clock in the morning having just taken a red eye from East Coast.

We didn’t plan to do that by the way we spent all day in the airport. I just want to commemorate, uh, commemorate a day, which otherwise would be, uh, consigned to the dust bin at time because it was not a good memory. It was a bad memory. When you arrive at the airport at eight o’clock in the morning, to be told the plane’s gonna leave at 1 35, to be told at noon that it’s gonna leave at 3 35, to be told at three that it’s gonna leave at six 30.

Mike. Garda was Chinese torture. It really, you know, it just reminds you how, or reminds me how important it is to be independent. So this is why when my wife talked about renting a [00:11:00] car, I didn’t bleed about what it was. I was just like, absolutely. I just want the independence improving that point. Look, I’m just sitting in it now minding my own business.

I feel more comfortable sitting in the car. Not at least, ’cause the seats are better than any of the ones in the rental hat. It’s like, you know, I don’t dislike my wife’s family, but you know, it’s fun hanging out with them. But I do feel in my own space when I’m in the car, that’s really what I’m saying, I feel in my own, when I’m in the car, I might take my second bite of bacon sandwich.

I’ve gotta say Americans do bacon badly. There’s never enough of that. And the little amount there is, they always bloody incinerate. So to the point where it’s like what we would call in England, you know, it’s crispy. It’s like we, we would call it, and it, and they, they always do like the tail bit of the bacon.

You know how it comes where there’s like the round bit and the tail bit. They always do the tail back and they incinerate the crap out of it. So it’s stiff. So it’s really small. It’s like, well, I don’t understand the point of it. [00:12:00] It’s like I felt about pickup trucks. And I just wanna say like, what the fuck?

We never giving any napkins. They asked for three catchups. They gave me the three catchups. They didn’t give me any napkins. Like what happened to that? Again, it’s another backward step. This, it was better when they gave you the napkins automatically. I don’t know how many creams and sugar I want in my coffee.

Gimme three of each and then I can choose. That’s how it was in the 1990s when Gamy and I first. Traveled here. Now I know that’s, that quote is gonna age very badly. That’s why the planet is burning the wastefulness of capitalism. But my word, it was good fucking living. I just used a napkin from yesterday that I found in the foot.

Well, I’m not picking me, I’m sitting here now trying to think of more to say about this Camry. I mean, it’s white. It couldn’t be any more. Neutral. The other one, because it was high trim, the one that I [00:13:00] drove like a couple of months ago. ’cause it was high trim. You felt like you didn’t need the Lexus. With this, you, you don’t need the Lexus, but you, you might like to have it.

Um, you know, ’cause it’s not that nice inside. It’s a bit plasticy. So because it has the hybrid, a power delivery is really awesome. And by that I mean I’ve had it in, I dunno what mode it defaults to. It has like a sport, normal eco. I haven’t played with them at all. Reason for that is I’ve just found that if you just stab the throttle, like away from any kind of launch, it’ll just chirp the tires just a little bit because it’s like the hybrid and the gas working together, and I’m telling you, you’ve experienced it before you’ve seen it.

With those onboard films of Toyota, LA more cars, because the way it launches, there’s, there’s something very different. We’ve, I’ve talked about this in other pods. It’s different. It, the power delivery in an [00:14:00] EV is different. It’s not just us car guys being like, oh, it’s interesting, this beeping. It’s a trash truck, but the trash truck’s got all like livery on it.

It’s like sign written black and gold. It’s not like a normal trash truck at all. Anyway, I was talking about something then. I can’t remember what it was. Um, it might come back. Yeah. The launch of this Camry is incredible. The hybrid and the, yeah, I know what I was talking about. I was saying that EVs, it’s easy to feel like, oh, you’re just being snobbish.

You just don’t like EVs. You know, a bur you just like anti ev. I, I, there is something different in the power delivery of an EV versus a. A gas powered vehicle. There’s something that actually makes me up, realized. It might be the vigor of it. It might just be, it might be the torque. Of it, it, I don’t know.

It’s just to do with, you know, if there’s, if I’ve been prattling on for ages, uh, [00:15:00] recently with the motorcycles about how a v twin just, it does just feel different to ride. And I never used to get it. I still love the inline falls, but I really fall in love with, uh, with V twins as, as well. It’s like having, having two wives, sort of, I still love the old one, but, you know, but the, the, the vwe thing is smooth.

Really, that’s just the way the power comes in now, the ev ev i, I think if we can, we can recognize that there is something different, therefore, about the way the power is delivered. Now the old organic power delivery, especially the way that, like a normally aspirated motor rev, think of a BMW inline six or something like that, that like zing to like even a fairly low red line, you know, six grand red line or something like that, that, that kind of power delivery.

You know, I grew up on that, so I, I love that. Now I’m gonna say this Camry, it’s that. Old fashioned, you know, gas powered. [00:16:00] But now with this sort of electric turbo, that’s the way I feel like the hybrid works. And is it sustained push? I don’t know. I’m on Cape Cod. I don’t wanna go to speeding ticket. I’ve not been faster.

I’m not driven faster and stupid. I’m just saying under acceleration, the thing pulls really well and it’s really fun and it doesn’t give a shit what mode you’re in. And again, right. I feel like for this environment and ev, it has a pure EV mode. I’ve not played around with that either. I guess I. I guess I should, shouldn’t I?

But you know, it seems to go into, if you modulate the throttle properly, you can see when it’s in pure EV mode. It’s quite easy for me to do that. I mean, I guess it was showing 47 MPG when I started driving it, and I’ve done a couple of hundred miles in it and have nurtured it up to like 50 MPG. I say nurtured.

I mean, I’ve just talked about the throttle response. You can tell that I’ve been led foot in it when there’s been opportunity, but I just haven’t, you know, [00:17:00] I’ve not been driving stupidly and herky jerkily and the rest of the time, you know, when it’s been pottering in traffic, I’ve deliberately been.

Toggle in to keep it in. Uh, it wants to coast right? And if you coast up really slowly, it, it will, if you coast in the right way, it’ll even toggle in some regen braking. It’s not as aggressive for regen braking as I think I might like, but like with so many things on this car, it’s calibrated to be familiar and easy.

And, and usable. And I guess I found myself looking at it next to, uh, a Volkswagen ID four. If you think about the way that the German makers fell over themselves to deliver EV innovation and have possibly done a total like British car industry on themselves and completely fallen on their swords, I mean, it’ll see, it’ll remain to be seen whether they survive, but, but really.

You know, you only need to look at used values of take hands to see how, [00:18:00] you know, the, these luxury EVs, what people want to be part in and drive. So I’ve given something else as well, which is partly why I wanted to, to record this piece. So, I mean, compose myself into, you know, what music should we have this episode?

I could edit something in, in this point could, when I’m editing this back, I can’t remember when I did the LA episode. I can’t remember it in musical.

So, um, my brother-in-law has a, uh, 2017 BMW four 40. He’s a techie guy, so he is the [00:19:00] right kind of car for him because, uh, you know, he’s the guy who’s ready to spend the time on the forums reading what the parts are that you need to replace so that, so the motor doesn’t blow up. And he’s put a tune on it, but just a little one.

And he was showing me how you do the tune and it’s just like a little plugin. So, just to be clear here, the street race guys at the moment love this. He’s calls it the, I think the motor name is the B 58. They love this platform because with an easy tuning device. I think the maker that he has is JB Tune of, if I find the link, put it in.

But you can get an extra, you know, in his case, 40 horsepower. In some cases, 120. Horsepower. And the way it works is it tricks the motor, it tricks the turbo into thinking. It’s not boosting when actually it is. So it then over boosts giving you, now that [00:20:00] sounds a bit crude, doesn’t it? I didn’t drive it in sport Plus.

I drove it around Cape Cod and it’s my brother-in-law’s car. So with those limitations, you know, what we’re saying is I’m just occasionally, you know, I’m falling back from the traffic and I’m occasionally coming in the throttle and I’m doing that in what he called Prius mode, the eco mode. I’m doing that in the normal mode that it defaults in sport as many years ago.

In fact, when this F nine, when this era of cars sort of launched, I, I went to the immediate island Concord. And, um, I had a BMW rental car, a F 90 T 3 28 rental car, and I drove up from Miami to Amelia Island all the way there. I was a bit disappointed by it ’cause it drove like a Camry, you know, the throttle response was lazy and it just wasn’t.

And, and it was a time before I realized that the modes really counted for something because. When you put this car in sport Plus it was like it was a track vehicle, so [00:21:00] I behaved very badly on the road, which is like a b roadie in from the freeway into the Amelia Island Concord. I really behaved like a hooligan along at a really awesome piece of road and was struck by the fact that with these modern cars, with certainly with this era of BMW, the mode creates a completely different car.

The, the mode is so, so that’s why I didn’t even put, you know, this, this four 40, it’s a grand coop, so it’s like I didn’t even put it in sport Plus. ’cause I always find those shifts too hard and the suspension too hard for the road. Sport plus on the road when you gunned it, oh my word. It was awesome. The turbo boost, the pinon, your seat, the dry, you know, it, it was really nice.

The Thor. Uh, so it’s, the other thing that I did was, uh, I, I played with the paddles a little bit to like knock it down a couple of gears and that was quite [00:22:00] good fun. But if you just mash the throttle as usual with BMW, they, you know, I was like shifting at six grand. It’s like, you know, when you just mash the throttle, it’ll take it like tip.

Seven and a quarter, which is like into just like my wife’s E 46. It’ll like take it into the red before it makes the shift. I mean, it’s really, uh, you’re like, wow, BMW and, you know, all that set up to make it feel more, you know, sporty and racey. But it really, the car drives itself harder than you. We’d drive it and there’s that sense that you’ve got the BMW engineers who know what the car can, can do on the, on the track there.

So you know what a hugely capable and, and altogether awesome vehicle. I mean, it, it’s white as well. It, it completely fades into the background, but you know, it’s packing. But I mean, you could. Pick a number in terms of horsepower and torque. ’cause it’s a turbo and you can get inside the brain of the, and manipulate what it, what it’s thinking and what [00:23:00] it’s gonna do.

So really, uh, an interesting car. Not, not something that I would recommend buying secondhand because the dongle, which plugs in under the bonnet, he, I said to him, if you cut into the wiring harness to do this, he went, no, it’s a plug and play. And I went, so when you get rid of it, when you sell the car, you’re gonna just unplug it.

And he went, yeah. And I’m like, oh, so that’s caviar EOR secondhand, isn’t it? Because this car, it looks like it’s a family wagon. ’cause it is a family wagon. You know, it’s all wheel drive one. Careful, you know. Well, he’s actually the second owner, but he bought it from Florida. He’s bought new in Florida and he had it shipped up.

So it’s only done half a dozen Vermont winter. Jesus. By the way, can I just say the weather here is so cruel. Like I just couldn’t, any car I cared about. It’s just to salt, to drive on salt roads. It’s just, oh wow. I don’t even think I could do it to the tundra. Now. It just pains, especially when you start to see the rust creeping through.

I [00:24:00] mean, seeing the rust from the saline air on the stuff that I street, it’s because the rust is the product genuinely being, you know, destroy. But with these electrical things, like with cars, traditionally they would like rust away. You could do the mechanical, well now the electrics are way, way too complicated.

Like any rust or salt in that. And you just, you just wanna get rid of the car. ’cause you, you’re gonna be chasing electrical gremlins forever and ever. And ever. Oh. That’s what’s gonna happen to older cars. To old cars In future, they’re gonna look all right, but be hiding all these electrical. Thank you.

Drive through.

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