Yahoo Autos How a Bad Headrest Nearly Ruined Drew Magary's Dream Car
I found the car. After decades of saving money and months of touring showrooms and going on test drives with politely aggressive salesmen, I figured out the car I wanted. The car I needed. I spent my childhood daydreaming of owning a Ferrari or a Lambo or a Porsche or some other low-slung sports car in the Wolf of Wall Street class. Turns out all these years later that my dream car was actually just a super-nice Hyundai.
The Hyundai in question here was the 2022 Tucson Limited Hybrid. And oh, it was the perfect car. It represented an upgrade from the 2012 Kia Soul I’d been driving for the previous 10 years in ways that were extremely pronounced: Leather interior. A touchscreen display that actually worked. Heated steering wheel. More cameras than a bank vault. More pickup than a triple espresso. The now-essential Sport mode. Air-conditioned seats. A ride so smooth I could run over a human body and not know it. The stereo system even had a Sounds Of Nature option so I could speed around the D.C. Beltway pretending I was fly-fishing in Montana. This was the one. This was the dream car.
Best of all, I could afford it. The dealer had one coming in a couple of weeks. Dark blue, which beat silver because silver cars are both legion and so goddamn boring. Once my new Tucson came off the truck, I got the call and hauled ass over to the dealer to claim my prize. I gave the new car a spin around the lot to confirm its majesty, then ran into the showroom to get the paperwork done. It was mine. All mine.
Then, on the ride back home, I thought to myself, Hey, this seat’s a little bit uncomfortable. I figured that would change once I’d broken the car in a little bit.
It did not change. I’ve had three back surgeries, so the wrong seat can destroy both my spine and my morale with little effort. Every day I drove the Tucson, I’d get pain shooting down my sciatic nerve. I messed with the power seats in the hope that I’d find positional nirvana. I never did. I stuck a rolled up T-shirt behind me for lumbar support. I bought a memory foam pillow for my neck. Nothing. Still pain. This was, in certain ways, the first car I bought that I had ever truly loved, and I couldn’t drive it.
And do you know why? Because of the headrest.
Head restraints were made mandatory on all new cars in the 1960s, and with good reason. If someone rear-ends you, it’s helpful to have something to cushion the impact. Otherwise your head could come clean off. Headrests are necessary safety equipment. But of course, every car manufacturer is now extremely horny for safety features and will surgically implant an airbag into your sternum if it means they can lock down a vaunted five-star safety rating from the NHTSA. Hyundai is not exempt from such desires. In fact, my Tucson even won a Top Safety Pick award from the IIHS. I’m sure the headrest had something to do with it.
But that headrest sucked. It stuck out a good two inches forward of the top of the driver’s seat, poking at my head and giving me no way to rest my spine flush and comfortable against the seatback. The headrest only adjusted up and down, not back and forth. This car can send waves of warmed air up my butt-crack like a Japanese toilet, and yet a fully adjustable headrest was somehow a corner worth cutting for Hyundai’s designers and executives.
I freaked out about the headrest 24/7. I hated myself for buying a car and somehow overlooking the single most important thing a guy my size needed for it to work. I hated that I didn’t take the Tucson for an extra 500 laps around the lot to make absolutely certain that no pain would kick in. I thought about taking it back to the dealer but hated myself for even considering the idea. I tried driving it day after day, hoping that my body would somehow magically conform to the headrest’s belligerence. No luck. I seethed at Hyundai from afar. Fucking headrest. Fucking Hyundai. How did they fuck up something so easy?
Then I turned my rage back onto myself. This is what you get for being such a sucker for a fancy car. You deserve this Aesop’s fable shit.
But I refused to take the car back. I still loved it. I knew I could make it perfect somehow, like it was a bad boyfriend. Also, I had already put a Defector bumper sticker on the back. So I kept poking around for a solution. I tried turning the headrest backward (I did this once with an old Accord we owned), but the backside of this restraint was slanted so steeply that any safety benefits were wiped out entirely. I tried looking for alternate headrests on Amazon. They do not sell such things. I called the dealer to complain and they referred me to their parts department, who said they’d never heard such a complaint from customers (I’ve checked the Hyundai forums; there are many such complaints) and that they had no aftermarket headrests available for a 2022. I tried to switch out the headrest from the Tucson with the headrest from our Honda minivan, but neither one fit the other. I asked everyone I knew who knows cars for help. All of them were at a loss, and probably deeply annoyed with my needy barrage of questions.
Screw it, I’ll just take it to a custom upholstery shop, I thought. I could tell them to shave the nightmare headrest back a few inches, maybe get my initials tastefully monogrammed into the leather. I didn’t know what it would cost (with my luck, probably $5000), but I was so deep into this car—which, I must point out again, is a Hyundai Tucson—that I was willing to do anything. If I had to rip the entire goddamn seat out and reupholster it myself, that’s what I would do.
And then, a friend of mine floated an idea that I will, for the rest of my life, regret not thinking of myself:
"Try the rear headrest on the front."
Would Hyundai encourage you to do this? No. Is there the possibility the Tucson’s five-star safety rating would be adversely affected by such a modification? I guess. Will I tell you, the Road & Track reader, to make the switch if you have such a problem? Our legal team says I will not.
All I can tell you is that I, being of free will, got real into the idea. Such an elegant proposal. So simple. So affordable. I switched the headrests, and guess what? It worked. My spine fits into the seat now, and my head still has ample cushioning for impact. I drove to pick up my daughter at a friend’s house and my back pain stayed mum, and has stayed mum ever since. The curse was broken. The shroud of neuroses enveloping my blue steel beauty disappeared. Rabbits and fawns cavorted gaily around my Tucson as thick shafts of happy sunlight beamed down upon it. My white upper-class nightmare was over, and my dream car was, at long last, living up to my dreams. The best car I ever bought. The best car I will ever drive.
And then I took it for another spin and realized they had forgotten to install a wiper blade.
Drew Magary is a co-founder of Defector and a columnist for SFGate. His sixth book, The Night The Lights Went Out, is available right now in bookstores and online.
You Might Also Like
