This car got sick the day after Thanksgiving. Three and a half months ago. We took it in – what – two weeks ago? I really can’t complain that it took two weeks to fix since we let it sit in the garage for months.
Gary says it drives like a new car, and no lights came on. I asked him to drive it home, because if any lights came on I would lose my mind and drive it into an embankment.
They did give us ten percent off the parts and labor for our aggravation. The thing that was evidently so hard to diagnose was a bad cylinder. Why on earth a bad cylinder could cause the dynamic stability control light to come on I don’t know.
I may try driving it somewhere today. I still feel a little betrayed.
4 responses to “It’s Baa-aack”
The photo took me back to my youth. It looks like the old much-beloved Nash Rambler!
~~silk – my most beloved car was my 87 Honda CRX. 60 mpg, I swear.
Ellen’s Mini needed a valve job on two of its cylinders. I cannot imagine how something like that could happen without Ellen noticing a degradation in the operating performance of the car over time unless we got some bad gasoline. I don’t drive the Mini so I didn’t get involved until after MiniCooper failed to fix the problem the first time. However, as soon as I started driving it, I could tell what Ellen’s complaint was. The car was stalling out in all gears if the RPMs were allowed to drop down too low. You had to constantly rev the engine. I had a car that drove like that when I was a kid so I had no problem slipping back into that driving rhythm. The Mini guys would not have any idea that that was not normal for our old Mini. Once, I told them what we needed fixed, they sent it off for the engine work. They said that the diagnostic lights were just a side-effect of the bad valves.
Gary – but the aggravating thing was that back in the day the mechanic would actually drive the car, not just plug it into the computer, get a cryptic printout, and then shove the car back at me for me to wait for it to degrade.