Mia the petrol head

Work has shifted focus to a new client: Ford Motor Company. I'm working on an upgrade to their Sync My Ride site, as vehicles with this new voice activated technology will be rolling off the production lines in a few months. Its a cool service where you can issue commands to the car and your media players in a Star Trek, "computer, lower defense shields" kind of way.

I've learnt more about "vehicles" (not just cars, have to be mindful of SUVs, crossovers (which i thought were SUVs) and trucks (utes)) in the last 3 weeks than my entire 33 years put together. I can now talk trim levels, dealer experiences, and models, which comes in handy not an inch in my car-free new existence here. I've learnt that, despite the horrendous traffic I witness every day and the snaking freeways and highways that clot the countryside, New York does not have a car culture because people here don't drive to work and are the highest public transport users in the country (fair enough). "There are 3 types of cars here," someone at work said, "yellow ones, black ones, and ones with flashing lights." California is car country, for example, because people drive everywhere.

I've also been highly amused at the way certain car, sorry vehicle, brands are pronounced here. And I've had to adopt these prononciations otherwise people look at me like I'm a freak:

• Jaguar = jagwah
• Hyundai = hundeye
• Mazda = mahzdah
• Nissan = kneesan

So I sit in meetings and decipher sentences like "But Joe Meatball isn't gunna trade in his kneesan for a Focus SEL front wheel drive with Sync just cos he's gunna drive from the beltway to the I90 5 mins faster unless we make this dead easy. are you feeling me?"