drscott | Car trouble

Since I left home at 18 to go to school in Boston, I never needed to own a car until I left there for British Columbia in '89. I flew into Seattle, stayed in a Motel 6 near the airport (and did my daily running along the Green River where the eponymous serial killer left his victims), and bought my first car, an '86 4WD Toyota Tercel wagon, at a dealership near Lake Union in Seattle. I drove it up to Vancouver and eventually registered it in BC, giving up my gorgeous Mount Rainier plates. I drove that car into the bush, over mountains, back and forth across the country twice, down to California, and finally sold it to a dealer who had bought one of the lots I sold when I subdivided my land on Bowen Island. I never had a minute of downtime with that car.

When I moved to California in '97, I bought a '94 Geo Prizm (a clone of the Toyota Corolla from the same assembly lines at the NUMMI joint venture plant in Fremont.) It, too, has been trouble-free, with one exception: the starter motor/solenoid. I've had it replaced twice, and yesterday when I went to start the car to go to the gym, it just clicked at me. Having been through this twice before, I repeated the diagnostics and tried jumpstarting it. Nothing; same problem. The part is buried so deeply in the engine area you can't even get to it to whack it with a hammer, which sometimes fixes dead spot problems long enough to keep it running. So during dinner time the tow truck driver arrived in one of those huge flatbed tow trucks, turned on his brilliant landing lights, and pushed my car out into the street and up to his truck. I had never seen the entire procedure, which involves 1) attaching a winch to the underbody hooks in front, 2) lowering the rear end of the flatbed so it forms a ramp; 3) pulling the car up the ramp, 4) attaching 4 corner cables to hold the car in place, 5) bringing the flatbed back up. All of this took place while I stood in the spotlight from the lamps, feeling like an extra in Close Encounters, knowing half my neighbors were watching this spectacle of noise and light in our normally dark, quiet neighborhood. The driver promised to drop my note to the mechanic and the key in the shop's dropbox, and when I called this morning it had, indeed, arrived. For $35 a hunky guy drives up to your door and uses a $100K piece of equipment to put on a 15-minute show, then follows your orders for another 15 minutes. Really a good deal.

Now I'm thinking of buying that great engineer's toy, a Prius. It's impossible to justify financially, and I would feel guilty about owning one when it would be better used by someone who drives much more than I do. But then I'm encouraging thereby production of more of them, so.... [goes into rationalization mode]