THIS is German engineering? part 4

This week on the rental lot, I had the choice of:

• A silver 2008 Volkswagen Jetta
• A cream 2008 Chrysler PT Cruiser

Guess which one I chose. Guess. ;-)

The PT Cruiser has lots of space inside, and lots of headroom. The seats are upright, firm and comfortable, giving you a good view of the road. The dashboard is cheesy plastic, and the horizontal passenger grab bar mounted on the dashboard indicates that the passenger should hang on for dear life, but I think that's quite optimistic for the little 2.4 liter four-cylinder. The transmission shifts quite roughly between first and second.

Overall, it's a nice little car, but one thing simply MUST be corrected.

Most cars today have a lift-up or pull-out door handle. NOBODY has thumb-buttons on door handles anymore to release the latch. Nobody... except Chrysler.

This car is blatantly discriminatory against drivers who have no thumbs. How can thumbless drivers ever hope to get into the car? Do they have to buy a special Chrysler accessory, the Remote Keyless Thumb for $300, to help them open the door? Sheesh. Engineers. Sometimes they just need a whack. Next they'll be discriminating against drivers who have no brains. Which is probably a large part of their market.

UPDATE: To clarify my problem; my left thumb is double-jointed in both joints, and applying too much pressure the wrong way tends to dislocate one of them. It's rather painful. My right thumb is a single bone, fused solid from the removal of an extra thumb. It's probably the strongest bone in my body, but it doesn't lend itself to pressing buttons. Therefore I have trouble with push-button car doors like the PT Cruiser, and it's difficult to play console video games like Xbox, or use a Blackberry. As if I had time to play console games or to dink with a Blackberry. ;-)