Thursday, September 14, 2006
Those things with the wheels? Yeah, cars, that's it.
What were we dealing with yesterday? Cars! (Seriously, click on the link. It's Gary Numan's video. Hot tambourine action! It's 3 minutes, 48 seconds of bliss.) My wife's car needed a new timing belt, which basically requires taking the motor apart to get to the belt to change it. Nice design, asses. We all know you're making it unnecessarily complicated so we can't change it ourselves. When I walked the few blocks to pick up her car when it was ready, The guy at Midas let me keep the technical pages they had printed for the job (They printed out step-by-step instructions on how to do it from a database we [normal nonmechanical folks] are not allowed to access. See? They all work together!).
But I did use the plural word cars, didn't I? Well, you may recall that I have a 2000 VW Beetle, a sweet little car, no trouble with it at all, only 42,000 miles on it for pete's sake! No trouble at all except for one thing: Sometime in the spring (too lazy to check blog archives and confirm date) the car started making a noise. A not pleasant noise I instantly knew was the transmission. The VW dealer simply said, "You need a new transmission. That'll be $4,000." Since the car is barely worth $8,000, I said, "Gimme my car," drove it home and put it in the garage. Luckily I have a brother-in-law with a few extra cars and I've been driving one of his for the last 3 (4? 5?) months.
With wife's car in the shop, she needed a way to get to work yesterday. She decided to take the VW (after I jumpstarted the battery and let it charge up) and take it to a shop near her office for a repair estimate (long story involving multiple house ownership, but there's no way we could pay $4,000 in repairs at this moment). Her mechanic sent her to a transmission shop. A secret transmission shop. This guy is good. He doesn't advertise. People just get sent to him. He took part in a contest to put together a transmission blindfolded. And places second! He said VW doesn't even train their mechanics to work on transmissions. They are only trained to replace them for $4,000. (As I suspected...)
The guy called after looking it over for 30 minutes and quoted us a reasonable price, and said he'd crack it open and actually replace the bad parts. What a revolutionary idea!!! Hey VW dealership, eat it!
But I did use the plural word cars, didn't I? Well, you may recall that I have a 2000 VW Beetle, a sweet little car, no trouble with it at all, only 42,000 miles on it for pete's sake! No trouble at all except for one thing: Sometime in the spring (too lazy to check blog archives and confirm date) the car started making a noise. A not pleasant noise I instantly knew was the transmission. The VW dealer simply said, "You need a new transmission. That'll be $4,000." Since the car is barely worth $8,000, I said, "Gimme my car," drove it home and put it in the garage. Luckily I have a brother-in-law with a few extra cars and I've been driving one of his for the last 3 (4? 5?) months.
With wife's car in the shop, she needed a way to get to work yesterday. She decided to take the VW (after I jumpstarted the battery and let it charge up) and take it to a shop near her office for a repair estimate (long story involving multiple house ownership, but there's no way we could pay $4,000 in repairs at this moment). Her mechanic sent her to a transmission shop. A secret transmission shop. This guy is good. He doesn't advertise. People just get sent to him. He took part in a contest to put together a transmission blindfolded. And places second! He said VW doesn't even train their mechanics to work on transmissions. They are only trained to replace them for $4,000. (As I suspected...)
The guy called after looking it over for 30 minutes and quoted us a reasonable price, and said he'd crack it open and actually replace the bad parts. What a revolutionary idea!!! Hey VW dealership, eat it!
# posted by smacky @ 8:14 AM 
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