And speaking of Engineering

Since I am on an engineering tirade, let's talk about my car issue. Once we bought my Honda Civic and the GPS unit for the computer, we went through a number of power inverters that plug into the 12 volt power plug in the car. They would work for a while, but when we got into stop and go, they overheated and shut down causing the computer to go to battery and soon shut down. After fighting with BestBuy over Inverter models, we went to Honda to see what might be wrong with the car. It seems that the wise engineers at Honda have created a power outlet that is slightly off standard size. This means that some plug in items work, others don't. The last person I spoke to at the local Honda dealer admitted, for example, that some of the cell phone chargers blow fuses -- consistently. SO, we ended up having to have an inverter hardwired directly to the battery in order to safely use the computer and GPS in the car. My question is this: If Honda is aware of this engineering issue (off sized recepticle), wouldnt it make sense to FIX the problem? I mean, they even tell me that the plug is NOT a cigarette lighter, simply a power outlet. What good is a power outlet that doesn't provide consistent usable power? Ah well, I imagine that if we look at all the stuff in our lives, we could replicate this post over and over. It's just wrong!