What's wrong with your car today, Sean?
Current Car: Black '96 Toyota Camry
3/11/07: I'm long overdue for an oil change, but I'm shoe shopping with my girlfriend (shoes for me, not for her). The mall has a Jiffy Lube right by it, luckily, so I drop the car off, and give my cell number to call when it's done. I get a muffled call at 3:47. The car's done. Oh, and the place closes at 4:00, with my keys inside the shop if I don't run through the whole mall and an adjacent parking lot in the next 13 minutes.
I get the car fine. I get shoes fine, although it takes many, many stores of shoe salesmen coming back empty handed after searching the back for my size (11) before we get fed up and go to Sports Authority, where the shoes are right on the shelves to test out.
12/23/06: I got towed. The Newport Mall in Jersey City has a parking deck that costs a few bucks, next to a big shopping center with free parking. I've always parking in the free lot by the Shop Rite and Pep Boys and crossed the street to go over. There is now a bastard crouched in a van, watching for anyone who parks in the free lot and then crossed the street. As soon as that happens, he calls a tow truck, and the car get towed. I come back from a movie, and the car's gone. I've got to take the PATH to Grove St. the next morning and walk two miles into an industrial district to get it back. First time I've been towed in Jersey City. And probably the last time I'll ever visit that Shop Rite or Pep Boys again.
3/5/06: I swapped in a new front left headlight. I forget when it had burnt out, but thanks to New Jersey's constant light pollution, it really didn't affect much of my driving. I also put in a new right wiper blade: comparing the left and right side of the windshielf during rian was like some anti-streak Windex commercial.
12/05/05: I had never replaced a wiper on a car before, possibly because I kept totaling them before wear and tear on the wipers became an issue. But after 140,000 miles or so of intermittent use, my left wiper swept away water like a broom with no straw. This is about the easiest repair to make on a car, and a cheap $12.95 one at that, but it took half an hour because I didn't want to force anything to snap off. (My brother turned on the wipers to clear away snow once, it burned out one of the wiper motors, they unevenly clacked together ever after that, and costs him over a thousand bucks worth of gradual and never-successful repairs for the tiny windshield wiper motor, and despite that could never take his car out in the rain. So I had reason to tread carefully around wipers.) Turns out, you gotta do a little forcing - or else lean over the hood of your car in a parking lot for half an hour molesting your wiper.
10/29/05: I was helping my brother move his giant stack of CDs, in one of those giant cylindrical holders that look like two smaller cylindrical holders stacked together. As I was balancing them on a knee and attempting to open my back door to slide them in, the whole thing fell apart in my hands. It really was two smaller cylindrical holders stacked together, and they decided to go their separate ways right when they had a chance to make 50 little gauges on my car. The CDs are undamaged, but a corner of my car looks like it was used as a scratching post.
10/14/05: I'm still revving the engine to start it up, but it's taking less and less of an effort teach time.
Incidentally, my windshield wiper blade is beginning to get loose. This is the easiest repair in the world, but I only remember it when it's raining, at which point I have no desire to fiddle around in the rain with minor car repair. To my (possible) credit, auto parts stores are usually closed when I'm in the car.
10/8/05: I had to get to my brother's house to feed the cats - I'm taking care of them for a week, as well as gorging myself with as much TiVo as I can handle - but it's raining. I'm not afraid of driving in the rain, but when the path to your brother's house runs through the Meadowlands, the roads become submerged. I gave it a shot, and didn't even get out of Jersey City before driving through a swallow section o froad wher ethe water crested over the top of my tires. I was able to drive out of the depression, but the engine conked out back on (relatively) dry land. I was able to get it going again, but it took tow minutes of nonstop revving. I tihnk I've just got some water in the works. Hopefully it'll boil off as I drive it.
7/10/05: My car has survived the drive to Huntsville, Alabama, and back. I poured a bottle of honey-textured oil treatment into the engine on the return trip, just in case the engine needed it. All the same, I could use an oil change.
5/10/05: A friend of mine was in the passenger seat, and he couldn't get the window to roll up. It automatically rolled down, but wouldn't go back up. Lousy electric windows. He opened the car door (at 65 mph), slammed it (this might have been more of the wind's job), and then the window rolled back up as normal. One more little thing to look out for in the future. I think every car get a collection of these little quirks, and when the quirks outweigh the driver's patience, he gets a new car. I must have a lot of patience, since I've driven every car I've owned into the ground.
4/09/05: My tires are embarassingly bad. Why didn't I notice this before? I always checked them to see if they were inflated. They were inflated, but they were also as bald as the little guy from the Benny Hill show. I bought four new tires from Pep Boys, and kept the only decent tire out of the four I was driving on as the new spare. (That decent tire was the replacement for a popped tire I had last summer, which I appareently never wrote about here. It was an uneventful a tire change as possible, aside from me walking into an office building in Jersey City carrying my grease-blackened hands like a surgeon that just scrubbed in, and and asking where their bathroom was.
The wobble's completely gone from my car now. I've still got lousy axles, but now that I don't commute with the car, any secondary repair is not on my short list of priorities.
4/3/05: I get an oil change and ask the Strausss people to rotate the tires. There's been a bad wobble, and I'm hoping switching the tires will even them out. Two hours later, I drive out of there with just an oil change. They noted lots of things wrong with the car, none of which they told me about but which they scribbled down on the third copy of a receipt. They didn't rotate the tires, or do anything save the oil change. Then they tried charging me for the tires they didn't rotate. Well, it's what I get for going to a Strauss on a Sunday afternoon.
On the drive back home, I hit a bad pothole and popped a tire. So one of my tires got rotated - with the spare.
3/7/05: I'm starting a new job, in Manhattan. I'll be taking the PATH to work, so my car skips out on eight hours or so of stop and go driving per week. This job might extend my car's life a good couple more years.
12/9/04: Registration's taken care of. Dad went to the DMV (the car is technically in his name for insurance purposes, something I should really change) and was able to get a renewal.
The two year state inspection was also due, so I bussed it to work for most of last week while the car was being looked at. Inspections only take a couple hours, but I conveniently had cracked my radiator just a few days beforehand, so that got taken care of first. It was only a little crack - I could have added a bit of water and coolant whenever the engine began running dry, and could have postponed the repair for months and months - but so long as I was leaving the car at the mechanic's, he might as well FIX it. (Plus that slight issue of no mechanic in New Jersey giving a clean bill of health to a car with a cracked radiator.)
11/22/04: Pain in the ass DMV ... as you can guess, I've been the the DMV twice and STILL haven't been able to renew the registration. I need to find a frickin' notary...
11/06/04: I just checked my registration. It expired last week. Guess who's got a fun trip to the DMV tonight?
I haven't updated this page in a while. Nothing too drastic to report. I drove the car to West Virginia in March, and then Kentucky in August, without incident. I was worried a couple months ago when my transmission got very very sticky. Sudden acceleration was incredibly hard to do: the on ramp of the highway was the scariest place in the world, since my car drove at these points like it was a ten speed with a slipped chain.
I was preparing myself for a long, costly transmission repair job, and didn't take the car in until I knew I could go a week or two without seeing it. The prep was uneccesary: one transmission kit, and the car was back to normal. It still took a couple days to get a ride back to the mechanic's.
7/28/03: Phew. My radiator's fine, my oil pan's fine. The curb had knocked the cap loose on my coolant. My antifreeze and a lot of the radiator water escaped through the loose cap (the potholes on the Westside Highway and Jersey City didn't help matters). I refilled the radiator, bought some antifreeze, and got the problem fixed for $6.99.
7/27/03: Coming back from a disastrous but still damn lucky caving trip, I was passing through Manhattan to get back to Jersey City. I was on the Cross Bronx, but I was cutting down the West Side Highway to go through the Holland Tunnel (always clear on Sunday night). I pulled off the Cross Bronx during a lightning-filled storm, and quickly came to a turnoff. I needed to get one lane right, and an inch-high concrete curb was already blocking me from it. It was just an inch, so I drove over it. This isn't recommended in a Camry, but I just wanted to get home.
Five minutes later, my car's was overheating. it drove fine, but the always-temperate heat needle was maxed out. I pulled over to see if maybe I punched a hole in the radiator or oil pan. But it was raining, so I couldn't tell if I was leaking anything. I didn't want my engine to fuse together, but this had just happened, and I was fiften minutes from home if I drove there. So I drove there (full aware of my previous luck going through the Holland Tunnel). I made it, parked it, and resolved not to think about it until tomorrow morning.
5/10/03: My first call to AAA in two years. Like most previous instances of calamity with the Camry, not the Camry's fault. I locked the keys in the car. I always take then out of the ignition, but I was sitting in the back seat wrapping a present, and the novelty of sitting anywhere other than the driver's seat was enough to make me forget about the keys sitting in my lap. The AAA guy popped my lock in thirty seconds (after waiting an hour) and that was that.
3/31/03: My brakes were squealing like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. They still worked fine, but sounds mighty unhealthy. I figured this would be part of the cleanup when I got the car inspected, but "Weeeeee!" is apparently good enough for the state of New Jersey.
The noise got too much, so I pulled into the first garage I saw and had new brake pads put in. I debated whether or not to bring my book home with me or leave it at work. I left it at work, and so sttod for the next two hours as the slowest person ever to not speak English went about changing my brakes. I got an oil change, too, so all that time on the lift got every last drop of dirty oil out.
2/18/03: My car is inspected and A-OK for the next two years. The catalytic converter needed replacing, which was why my engine's moise level slowly went from lamb to lion over its history with me. It cost $500, but at lest my exhaust isn't super-polluting any more.
Oh, my mechanic found another burnt out tail light. He replaced it, and now the dash light is acting like it originally did: blinking on an hour into long trips. So is that light #4 that's winking out now, or did bulb #3 not take? Or is it still bulb #2?
12/13/02: For the second time in four months, my car got towed away. I was in Boston seeing a friend's play, and she had written down very detailed directions to reach the theater. I followed them right to the theater, and then didn't read the part about parking behind the theater to the right. I parked adjacent to the theater on the left, in a half-empty lot that had a No Parking sign. I come out of the theater, and no car. The whole retrieval process (going to the poice station, trying to remember the license plate, finding the tow lot, going there, finding an ATM for $100 cash) only took an hour. My bat bumper sticker got scratched up in the tow, and the bolt through my rear bumper got knocked off.
11/23/02: A few days after I fixed the burnt light, that dashboard light popped on again. This time there was for a small light in the right headlight. Another fix, but this time the dashboard light stays on even though the bulb is fixed.
9/7/02: The dashboard light which I thought was for the trunk was actually to indicate a burnt bulb. I put the car in park and checked it at night several times, with every light blazing, but could not find this burnt bulb. I checked it with my dad last week, and he finally found it: my left brake light, which doesn't come on when the car's in park.
It took twenty minutes of work to pry up the trunk carpeting, take off two nuts, and then figure out how to disengage a surprise plastic snap the manual didn't bother to include, but we got the bulb changed. Total repair cost: $4.21, and that was for a two bulb package. If anyone needs a brake light, let me know.
9/3/02: For fifteen minutes, I thought my car was stolen. I parked it in Hoboken, possibly the worst town on earth to park in. I lucked into a spot a block from the coffeehouse I was going to. An hour later, I came back to find another car in my spot.
I ran to the police station, hoping they'd towed it. I'd rather pay a ticket than lose my car forever. Within two minutes, they had said that they just towed it. My back end as sticking out into a crosswalk, so that's why they took it. There's double parked cars every twelve feet in Hoboken, I've never seen a tow truck there in my life, and they pick my car to yank away in record time. $75 and a walk to the impound lot later, I was driving it home.
9/1/02: My poor baby just drove 900 miles in a weekend. But she's fine! Phew. This was the same route that killed an earlier car, so I was esepcially wary. The Camry got through just fine, though. Although there's a bit of stickiness to the passenger side window now. The first sign of inevitable decay. Gulp.
6/21/02: My tailpipe got a little dent out of this useless foray, but again, it's not the car's fault.
5/30/02: This wasn't the car's fault, but it certainly counts as something wrong.
1/21/02: How is this possible? Months and months have gone by, and the car's running wthout incident?! I'm very happy this web page has become useless. The Camry has been very good to me.
Just so this update's not completely without griping, my trunk light occasionaly flashes on midway through long trips, usually when the car's pretty low on gas.
10/24/01: Twenty days, and nothing wrong with the car. Surreal. I'm beginning to take it for granted already. The footwell's getting dirtied from my shoes, and I'm afraid the rest of the interior will follow. I figure once I get an oil change, it will stop being the new car and start being the car.
10/4/01: The era of the Topaz, that calamity magnet, is over. I gave up on repairing it, took the bus to work, and began checking for a new car. At the current rate of breakdowns, I could buy a Porsche a year with what I put into that hunk of junk. A couple weeks later, I find a new car (a '96 Camry, new to me at least), snatch it up, and have the Topaz dropped into a volcano. Or donated to charity, whichever one gives me the bigger tax writeoff. All Mercury Topaz griping has been cut and pasted to its new home.
I felt weird buying a foreign car, but it was used, so the money's going to an American. I've heard nothing but good things about Toyotas. They're practically indestructible, have better gas mileage than my old car, and can last for 200,000 miles. Unimportant but neat notes: it's in that modern egg shape that signifies 'new' cars to me, it's got a huge trunk, and both a tape player and CD player. I've also noticed that about 5% of all cars on the road are Camrys now.