Our car is out of action for the last two weeks; it's in the garage waiting for a new part to be delivered.
My parents have very kindly lent us one of their cars for the duration, because we travel 70km each way to work and public transport isn't an option (it would be a bus, then a train, then a tram, then a half hour walk, so probably a total of 3 hours each way and there's no way we'd do it within creche opening hours!). They're using their second car.
I can't drive my parents' car because I'm not insured - I'm on a provisional licence. Plus roughly half of our commute is on motorway, and I can't do that on a provisional. So DH is doing all the driving.
The car is a small engined automatic. Our own is a manual diesel with a bigger engine and generally a lot more power. DH detests my parents' car, he finds it unresponsive and it changes gear at ridiculous times (changing up a gear halfway up a steep hill, for example!) or doesn't change when it should (accelerating on the straight, it'll stay in a low gear till the engine is racing before it changes up). I know he's right, I'd find it annoying to drive too.
The problem is that DH emphatically refuses to adjust his driving to suit the car's limitations. He floors the accelerator despite knowing that it'll just make the engine unhappy. It can't keep up with him at all. He admitted last week that he knows he's mistreating it, that he shouldn't be trying to push it when he knows well that it won't perform the way he wants it to. But he keeps doing it. He gets angry and forces the revs up into the red - the same shade of red as his face while he's doing it.
We've had the same argument over and over for the last two weeks. My dad specifically asked me to mind the car as it's old and they need it. But DH insists on driving it badly, and when I pull him up on it he says it's the car's fault for being useless. I think he's being horribly ungrateful to my parents; they lent us the car in good faith, thinking we'd take good care of it, and he isn't. I feel he's forcing my to lie to my parents and I don't like it. Also he said he wouldn't treat a car belonging to his parents that way, but it's different because it's my parents. When I asked him why, he said 'my parents would never own an automatic' - which is a total cop out of an answer, and just comes back to blaming the car!
I'm utterly confused by all this. I'm so used to thinking of DH as a fundamentally nice person but at the moment he's coming across as a selfish, entitled git and I just don't like him.