As @dr.mrs.knits tells it, the car said hello to her mother by name. Then it worked out that the person in the driver’s seat was “someone six inches taller” and slid the seat forward anyway. “It’s scooting her up so that she can put her feet on the brakes,” she says, “but it’s forcing my patella through the steering block.”

She posted the story to TikTok on July 20, 2026, under the caption “I need answers from the car people.” She says she had to drive her mom’s car the day before, that it is a newer car, and that “the youngest car I’ve ever driven is 2014.” She does not say what make or model it is. Her verdict comes in the first eight seconds: “We’ve upgraded out of every single thing that makes a car drivable.”

The trouble starts before the engine does. To close the driver’s door, she says, “there’s no longer a little scoopy part where your hand goes. It’s just a wall.” She describes gripping the panel with her fingertips to pull it shut.

The push button start does not throw her. “They had those back then,” she says of 2014. The seat does. She compares it to the trash compactor scene in Star Wars: “My knees are going into my chin, and I’m fumbling for the button to try to figure out how to scoot myself back.” Her caption carries the hashtag #medstudent, and the anatomy keeps coming. Once she is finally situated, she reports, “My femurs are unbound.”

A Two Inch Button Where She Expected a Gear Shift

Ready to leave, she looks down for a gear shift, “so I know what gear I’m in.” It is not there. “We’ve replaced it with a button,” she says, one “about two inches long, and the only way that you can see what gear you’re in is if you’re in complete darkness.” It was the middle of the day.

She describes “pressing a button a mysterious number of times to get into reverse” and peering at it “like you’re trying to test if your new toy actually is glow in the dark.” Her objection is to how little effort it takes. “I want to be physically moved around to put my car into reverse,” she says. “I could be on the highway and be like, blink. Now I’m in neutral.”

She gets it into reverse, backs out and pulls up to a road crossing, “where I lean all the way forward to look left to look right.” That is when the seatbelt pulls her back. “I get yeeted back into the seat,” she says. She still does not know what the feature is: “I haven’t figured that one out.”

On the road she notices it is hot and “no air is coming out of the vents.” She knows exactly what she wants: “a knob that is blue and that is red,” for colder and hotter, and “another knob that is big fan or little fan. That’s it. That is all I want.” Instead, she says, she had to press through “three different menu selections,” and she jokes that the car wanted her to choose that her left eyeball be cooled “to a temperature of 69.5.” She describes swerving while she hunted through the menu. Her counteroffer: “Give me blue and give me big fan.”

One knob did survive. It is “the AMFM scan knob,” which she jokes “hasn’t been used since the invention of Bluetooth in 1945.” “It’s like a taunt,” she says. “We left you one that no one’s ever touched before.”

She closes with her platform: “I’m pro gearshift. I’m pro knob. I’m pro car that drives like a car and not like a garbage compactor.” She wants the people who design cars to sort it out “before I need to buy my next car,” and her last words are a plea for “a prindle,” the lever she looked down for and did not find.

Five Things to Find in a Borrowed Car Before It Leaves the Driveway

Every problem she lists hit her while she was already in the seat or already moving. Taken in the order she met them, they make a short check to run with the owner standing at the window.

The seat comes first. Before you press start, ask the owner whether the seat moves to a saved position when the car comes on, and which control slides it back. Put your hand on that control, then press the button. She was “fumbling” for it with her knees already pinned.

Next is the gear selector. With your foot on the brake, have the owner show you how to pick reverse, drive and park, and where the car tells you which one you are in when the sun is out. She was counting presses and squinting at a button in daylight.

Ask about the seatbelt. If it tightens by itself, find out when. She got pulled back at the exact moment she was leaning forward to check for traffic at a crossing, and a day later she still could not say what had triggered it.

Set the temperature and fan while you are parked. If the controls live in a screen, have the owner walk you through the taps once. She describes swerving while she worked the menus, so if it needs changing on the road, pull over or hand the job to a passenger.

Last, find the door pull before you sit down, since hers looked like “just a wall.” If you are the one lending the car, those five stops are the walkthrough to give before you hand over the key.