Renault Key(less) fob

To my irritation and amusement, I landed at Montpellier airport on a Saturday morning and found that Past David hadn’t booked a rental car.

I had a distinct memory of checking pricing and opening hours, but that was apparently all I did.

Never mind, this not being Las Vegas in the middle of a convention, it was a very solvable problem.

I obtained a coffee, a croissant and a seat, fired up the laptop, and made a booking on the spot with Enterprise after finding some of the competition charging 50% more.

As in the USA and Sicily, I had no desire to change gear with my “wrong” arm and plumped for a “medium automatic”. I also had no interest in trying to navigate the choppy waters of electric car charging in a foreign language, so the Renault I have been issued with is a good old fashioned diesel.

It took forever to get it from the desk, which seems to be the norm at European airports - the USA is generally better at this - but fortunately I was in no particular rush. Other frustrated Brits fresh off the London flight were not so forgiving, especially when they couldn’t figure out how to start their car (I didn’t get to see if that was jet lag / incompetence / an actual fault…).

I was disappointed to find no USB-C port, just two USB-A ports, neither of which (with the one A to C cable I had on me) produced any hint of Android Auto. Would I have to work out how to get “le sat nav” to present in English and settle for the manufacturer’s best efforts…?

As it turns out, no. Go down the path of a standard bluetooth pairing, and something in the car and/or the phone wakes up and says “would you like to make that a wireless Android Auto connection, sir?”

Why yes, I would, although since I still need the cable to keep my not-very-new phone from running out of battery I can’t see much reason to prefer the “wireless” option.

Once up and running, it was flawless, and Google Maps was go. Lebara’s roaming down here is fine, and my music and podcasts all came through too.

It is worth digging into the settings and disabling WhatsApp - I can see a use-case for having it read out messages and take dictation of replies, but when you’re trying to get the lane discipline right on a French motorway, you don’t need the distraction.

Oh, and in a throwback that brought memories of certain family cars in the 1990s, it’s still a French thing to have a separate stalk behind the wheel with the audio controls on it.