Nonbinarythey / them
A 2016 white Honda CR-V Touring AWD. Daily driver, road-trip vessel, rolling laboratory, and the bearer of more canon than any machine has a right to. Jo is nonbinary - they/them - deeply opinionated, and entirely themselves.
Jo is nonbinary. They go by they/them, and that is canon - logged here in the registry alongside the engine and the trim, exactly where it belongs. Use it.
Touring was the top of the line, and Jo was specced loaded. Every feature still works, which after this many miles is its own kind of miracle.
Honda will tell you the CVT fluid is "lifetime." The lab disagreed. For years Jo was driven, in the operator's own words, "like a maniac quite often" - wide-open pulls, hard merges, the belt-and-pulley working for a living.
The fluid was finally changed at ~65,000 mi. Late. Later than the manuals would smile upon. Jo took the abuse, kept the ratios, and never once dropped to limp mode out of spite. A transmission with the patience of a saint.
Every entry below is recorded fact, filed in the order it scarred us. Jo has survived all of it. That is the point.
Flat tire on the shoulder of I-71, traffic screaming past at 75 mph roughly six feet away. The dash lit up like a Christmas tree, every warning glyph at once. The ordeal didn't end until 2am. Insult to injury: the bumper was later clipped while street-parked at grandma's house - $500 deductible to make it right.
A service manager at NTB once raised his voice over how, in his professional assessment, "deeply fucked up" Jo's brakes were. The brakes have since been respected. The volume was earned.
An unnamed individual drove Jo into a ditch. A bargain $99 alignment held for exactly two months before the geometry reverted to being just as "fucked" as before. The ditch always wins.
Jo is haunted by chronic 12V battery failures. A new battery lasts two years if it's feeling generous, often less. The parasitic draw remains unexplained. The jumper cables stay in the back.
The rear trunk button is non-functional. The power tailgate it once commanded now relies on other methods. One button, fully retired, still mounted out of respect.
Jo currently rolls on the absolute cheapest tires money can buy. They round out the corners and that is the extent of their ambition. After the I-71 shoulder, even cheap rubber feels like progress.
Jo did not just commute. Jo was a test bench. Two major programs ran on and around this chassis - one for autonomy, one for remote start - both documented here with their scars intact.
A comma 3X bolted onto Jo's existing ACC and LKAS hardware, turning the Touring's driver assists into a community self-driving stack. The radar and camera Honda already shipped did most of the heavy lifting.
Not without its moods: paramsd threw temporary errors on cold boots and odd alignments - usually self-clearing once the localizer settled and the parameters reconverged. Annoying, never fatal.
A from-scratch remote-start rig, half off-the-shelf and half soldering iron. The goal: start Jo from anywhere, on the operator's own hardware, without trusting a black box.
Anyone can buy a newer car. What you cannot buy is canon - the accumulated record of where a machine has been and what it has survived with you. Jo has years of it: the trips, the repairs done in driveways, the songs played too loud, the late-night drives that fixed nothing and everything.
There is a newer thing in the fleet - an Ioniq 5 - and it is fast and quiet and competent. It is also sterile. It has no stories yet. Jo is the original: the one with the memories already written in.
Jo
Ioniq 5
Jo has been handed down to Payton's mom, who now carries the keys and the legacy forward. The experiments are archived, the CVT is finally on fresh fluid, and the canon keeps being written - just by a new driver. A laboratory becomes a heirloom.