Ford Escort Van
Fro a week I had a Ford Escort van as a replacement whilst the regular vehicle had the front brakes replaced at a central maintenance facility. The loan pool van required 3 different keys to operate it (I never found out how to open the passenger door from the outside). This was all low-tech traditional turn the key to unlock it, no electronics. The one feature that it did have was an alarm. This used to go off randomly at all sorts of inconvenient times and you could only reset it by taking the key out of the ignition and pressing the butting on the zapper. On one occasions I took the key whilst going along on a straight road, to discover that said van pulled to one side and in correcting the drift, the steering promptly locked. Logic suggests that the best option is to brake to fix the lack of steering in a controlled manner, what actually happened was a huge panic trying to get the bloody key back in the ignition so I could steer again. Of course with the engine stopped you only get one shot at the brakes with the servo, given that they were crap anyway and you had to near enough stand up in the seat, this led to a major brown-trouser moment......
Fen roads, straight for miles with a huge ditch either side.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
