Squishy

That's the best way to describe the rental car here. It's a Fiat Punta.

The steering feels squishy, the accelerator feels squishy, the clutch feels squishy, and the gear shift feels squishy. The brakes are very non-squishy.

The acceleration is squishy. Somehow it has nearly zero power at low RPMs. Once the rpms get higher then it seems to have some power. Someone suggested it may be a turbo diesel which performs like that. The accelerator is weird in that you can't use it keeping the heel anchored and depressing the toe. If you want real acceleration you have to extend your leg, the pedal seems to have about a full foot of motion.

The car has neat features though. For example, when the front window-wiper is on, if you change gear into reverse, the rear wiper automatically turns on! There are controls to adjust the tilt of the headlights in low-beam mode. There are various radio tuning and volume controls on the steering wheel. In the middle of the dash is a button with a steering wheel on it which makes the word "city" appear, can't feel any difference so I'm not sure what that's about. There's a phone button which I think might be a bluetooth handsfree phone link to the car stereo, but I haven't tried. The very last button I noticed, and perhaps the one that frightens me the most, is a button with the windows logo on it. Not sure if I want to press that one.

As for driving here... whatever, doesn't seem too bad, I'm pretty comfortable. People are aggressive and yet somewhat courteous at the same time. Drive crazy highway speeds, cut people off a lot, use the horn at minor disturbances, but go a snail's pace over speed bumps, and allow people to enter and exit roundabouts relatively easily instead of fighting for your position. And then there are really weird situations in which there'll be 30 cars in a row in one lane, going slow cause of congestion, while the lane right beside them is completely empty! (so I take that lane and pass them all). Then suddenly, it's the other lane with all the cars while the original lane is empty.