If Your Car Were Vim

To turn left you have to clutch first, but to turn right you have to start the windshield wiper first
You'd have to set the "road width" to match the highway, otherwise the car would either turn too sharply in the bends or fail to turn at all, assuming it had more road left
Once you know how it's operated, you hardly notice the pedal pressing.
When it seems to get stuck in the wrong gear, just remember to stamp on the brake pedal a few times and you'll be grand.
If you flip the dashboard up you'd find a second dashboard underneath for setting up the autopilot.
Your friend would have a car that looked radically different to yours from the outside but had the same engine 'under the hood'
Every once in a while, a mistaken sequence of actions will result in someone entering 'non-visual mode'; all the windows go blank, and a directional sonar pops up.
When you fill the tank, you'd have to press the "keep fuel" button, or when you fired up the car again you'd find the tank mysteriously empty.
You'd use one set of controls to drive on streets and a completely different set of control to drive on highways and freeways. There would be remarkably little in common between the two sets of controls.
- Yeah, I find it such a drag to remember how I'm going to move the cursor or delete something, or copy or paste something. Oh, wait -- that doesn't change.
- [You're using the Windows arrow keys. Native vi, without arrow keys or mouse is very modal. Without arrow keys, navigation in insert mode is not possible. And navigation in command mode is done largely with printable letters.]
- No, I don't use the arrow keys. I just don't attempt to navigate in insert mode. In general, I eschew the keypad commands and go with the standard. No sense in getting soft. I actually like having 4-wheel drive (the lever marked ":"), I can shift into that for those bits of tricky maneuvering.
On a road with a few pot holes a heads up display would highlight the pot holes with arrows (like so: ^). On a road with many pot holes (usually a foreign road) the car would automatically switch into a special mode where the suspension would ride over them smoothly and special glass in the windscreen would make it look like the road was actually smooth.
- I've looked into whether I can get Raybans that do the same thing. Seems like you can make them yourself using a filter called 'tr-d\\n'.
The first time you actually sit in the car, you have to ask a friend how to get out again...
While driving, if you encountered obstacles (pile of dirt, snow-covered road, whatever), the "!" lever would magically attach a plow or other tool to remove the obstacle, and you'd carry on driving.
All of your buttons would be on the steering wheel, so that you never had to take your hands off of it.
Pressing one button would put your car into a mode where the steering wheel was connected to the rest of the steering mechanism. Pressing another button would put your car into another mode where it would control the radio dial. It would be impossible to steer and change stations at the same time.

Perhaps it might be better to compare Emacs and vi as existing car models.

LearningVi and learning how to parallel park has some remarkable similarities too: It looks easy, there's so much to remember when you first start (much of it counterintuitive), and once you do it every day, you can't imagine why you thought it was difficult.