Field trip surprise

So, I had to go get a "big van" (15 passenger) from Motor Pool to take my class on a field lab this afternoon. The Motor Pool Lady said in her e-mail, "I'm giving you one of the new vans, please keep it nice" and I thought (but didn't e-mail back, luckily), "Ha, ha, yeah. You mean the one the university bought in 1996 rather than one of the ones they bought in 1992"

(Motor Pool Lady is someone I'm not comfortable joking around with. If it were one of my colleagues in charge of the vans I probably would have said that. But not to Motor Pool Lady.)

Nope. The van I got was brand new - less than 300 miles on it. Still smelled like new car smell. (I know lots of people like that smell; I don't. I think of all the plastics and stuff outgassing weird chemicals and it makes me twitch).

It still handles and rides like a 15 passenger van. But the rear axle is farther back, the whole thing is lower to the ground, and I think the van is also wider. All of these factors should make it less prone to tipping by virtue of giving it a lower center of gravity. I know that's one concern about the 15 passenger vans.

(Way back in, I think it was 2001? One of the instructors for a summer program here was driving an empty van back to motor pool, swerved to avoid hitting an animal, and flipped the van. He was unhurt but the van was kind of messed up. After that, we all had to go through special training and testing to prove we could drive them safely. And actually, at one time, there were rumors of requiring all faculty wanting to drive vans to get CDLs (on our own dimes, of course. But that never came to pass)

So if nothing else, they're safer. And also safer from the standpoint that they're newer and therefore less likely to have the power steering fail or a coolant hose spring a leak (both of which have happened to me on the old vans, but luckily, both happened while I was in a campus parking lot. It would have been far more worrisome to deal with acrid smoke coming from under the hood while I had a vanful of students out on highway 70....)