Baby Cronk: Christmas 2024

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Christmas 2024

Winter band concert for Trevor

And for Sarah and Austin at BSM

Metro Peds Christmas Party at the holiday lights event in St. Paul (absolute mess of traffic to get there!)

Christmas cookie time!

We bought a new car for Austin and sold the CR-V. This was in an attempt to take advantage of the safety features on the VW that could keep him safe in the event of a seizure. He was finally able to drive again in early December and we wanted something safer in case he seized while driving.

We bought a VW Tiguan, but didn't end up keeping it. Long story...

We originally sought out the VW cars because of a feature called "Emergency Assist". Google it for a video. It is pretty amazing! If the driving is incapacitated, passed out, fell asleep, had a seizure, etc. then the car will keep the vehicle in its lane, brake check a couple times, and if the driver does not take over driving, it will bring the car to a stop while putting on the flashers and honking the horn to alert drivers around. It brings the car to a stop, puts it in park, calls 911, and unlocks the doors for emergency personnel. This is exactly what we need for Austin! We were told that all the VW cars now have it and we picked out the Tiguan. We came to find out (as did the dealership staff, none of whom was aware of it), the feature only triggers in the Tiguan if the cruise control is on and set to a speed. This is useless to us in that scenario because if Austin were not on cruise control or tapped the brake at all while seizing, the safety feature we need is turned off. This was pointed out to us by a parent in an online epilepsy group and we tried it out ourselves on our Tiguan and could not get it to trigger in the way they demonstrated when we bought the car. A stressful month ensued in which the national level VW people got involved and our sales person drove many models of cars on the lot to figure out what was going on. It turns out, there are 2 different operating systems in the VW cars. The one in the Tiguan and Jetta only trigger with the cruise control on. The operating system in the Atlas, Atlas Cross Sport, ID4, and Golf GTI will trigger the Emergency Assist with only the lane assist on as long as the feature is toggled on in the menu on the car (which can stay on all the time). This is what we needed, so we ended up being able to return the Tiguan and get a Golf GTI. Austin loves his sporty little car and we are happy that we have a safety feature to keep him as safe as possible in the event of a seizure. That's the short version of the story. Ugh!

Here's the GTI ended up getting on February 1st.