Idiot Lights

I was trying to remember. Was it the fifties or sixties they started replacing gauges in cars with idiot lights? I've never cared for the lights because by the time the light pops on you're in trouble. With the gauges, if the car was starting to heat up you could see it at a glance and try to remedy it. With the lights the only indication you have is the car has overheated. You might have passed a station just a couple miles back where you could have stopped if there was a gauge indicating a problem, but basically when a light pops on it means "You may already be too late to save your engine". Our Blazer is wonderful in this respect. Besides the fuel gauge, it has gauges for engine temperature, oil pressure, and alternator like they used to do on all cars. The Cadillac is an entirely different creature however. It's taken the idiot light concept to a whole new level. It doesn't even have a gas gauge, but gives you the number of gallons remaining. It will have an "F" when you've just filled up, and an "E" when you'd better get to a station quickly. In between these two it will show something like "16", meaning there are 16 gallons remaining in the tank. As to oil pressure, engine temperature or whether the alternator is charging it doesn't just give you a light, it will give you a little message. Something to the effect "We hate to be the ones to tell you, but you've just burned your engine up because you ran out of coolant".

This morning I'm out mowing the lawn and start to get too hot. The thermometer on the back porch is saying 92°, so I take a break in the air conditioning for a while. My wife had taken the Cadillac and headed over to another town about 35 miles away to have lunch with a group of lady friends, and while I'm inside the phone rings. She says she'd been trying to call me. The car is heating up so she stopped at a station, bought some coolant and added it to the reservoir, even though it didn't take much. I figured she had received one of the cars little love notes telling her she was in trouble, but not so. She said as she started back out it was showing two hundred twenty five and still going up, what should she do. I asked "where are you reading this temperature" unaware there was anything in that car that would actually give you some useful information. There was silence on the phone for a second, then she said "I was looking at the "Trip Counter" and thinking it said "Temp". Now she did make me swear not to tell a soul, so if she asks, you didn't hear it from me.