Gargh. Stupid Car.
Friday, ~2:30 PM, Kylene and I are on our way to the County Clerk to get our marriage license.
Heading south on I-65, just past the Martin Luther King exit, 1/2 mile before the 21st St. Exit, my car, a 2003 Saturn L300 totally looses power and the engine halts. Leaving us on the side of the highway. Talk about suck.
I managed to get over from the center lane, across two lanes of traffic, flick on the hazard lights, and start to aim for the hard shoulder, and slow to about 45mph by the time I lost hydraulic pressure. From there on, it was an easy coast and slight left turn to straighten out, some gentle brake pumping and a gentle gradual tug of the emergency brake level to get to a nice stop.
This took the span of about seven seconds, and Kylene initially thought I decided to take the MLK exit. I was too busy getting the car over and out of the way of traffic that moves a breezy 70-75mph to explain on the way over. Once we stopped I immediately said, “The fuel pump just died.”
See, I’d been in a car that had this happen about eight years ago. We were traveling to surprise my brother at Grove City College.
So we called the local Saturn repair shop, had the car towed, and managed to phone a friend to pick us up on the side of the highway. In the fourty minutes we waited, we were passed by five police / sheriff cruisers. Not ONE stopped. I was furious, and at several points had nearly called 911 on my cell phone to complain. What exactly are my tax dollars for? Here’s a disabled vehicle stranded on a six-lane highway and no one public servant stops to check on us to make sure #1, that we’re OK, #2 that we have a means of getting somewhere other than the side of the highway. I am still rather furious about this.
So the car gets towed, and I don’t hear anything until the next day, when I call the repair shop to see what’s going on.
After being put on hold (waiting for a transfer) three times, I finally commented to the receptionist that I found it rather ironic that their service department was doing a terrible job of supplying customer service by simply answering their telephone. Next thing I know, I’m on the phone with the service department manager, who personally looked up the info on the car.
I was right. It was the fuel pump. Suck.
That’s a $750 repair. You can get the pumps for ~$350, labor to install them is that much too. If I had a set of jack stands, a good jack, more free time, and Kylene actually living at my house, I’d have told them to have it towed to my house, and that for $300 I can drop the fuel tank and repair it. I’ve replaced these before, on several late 90′s fords. I have the service manual for my car, and I know how to do this kind of thing. Still it was easier for me to just drop the $750 this time.
The worst part is, all they did to find out what was wrong was plug a device like this into the socket under the dash.
I hate paying for mechanics to do something that I could do if I had the right tools. I’m about convinced that for less than the cost of this one repair I could have bought the tools I needed (including the code reader), fixed the car, and had the tools to use next time something goes wrong.
I’d love to have one of these code readers, and I think I should carry it in the trunk of the car, along with a printout of the codes for my vehicle. Then if the car ever dies on the road again, if I can figure out exactly what it is before the tow truck gets there, I can tell them to take it to my house.
Maybe I’m just a crazy idealist, but I shouldn’t have to pay $300+ for a job that takes two people ten minutes.
Update: Adding up the costs of all tools / equipment I’d have needed, I’ve come to a total of less than $640 had I done the job myself. It probably would have taken me two hours or so, just because I haven’t done it to this exact model of car, and that I’d be paranoid and super-careful. In reality in a shop where you raise the car up on a rack, have two sets of hands available, and all the tools they can change fuel pumps in as few as 10 minutes. My experience at a Ford dealership was that we never actually siphoned the tanks prior to replacing the assembly. Techs doing the work of changing filters when a station in town got bad gas could easily complete 40+ hours of billable work in a single 8 hour day. And they did.
November 6th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
You should look into getting the Scan Guage II. It has LCD output and clears check engine lights.
November 7th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
I thought I posted this, but maybe I’m losing it.
I think Chris Rock said it best.
“If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they’re lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is ‘Run!’”
November 8th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Believe it or not, there are actually much worse places than there to have your car break down: in 1997 when I was looking for a house, I was tempted (for a very short time!) to consider a fixer-upper house that was being sold very cheaply, something like $5K, so I could pay for it outright and save money for what I really wanted to get long-term. I drove into the neighborhood, got a good look at the house from the street, as well as the rest of the street, and spent very little time there, as all the houses on the street were in bad repair, everything was trashy, and there were too many bullet holes: in other words, my 93 Saturn SC2 with about 100K miles on it at the time was the most valuable thing on the street! I decided it wasn’t worth *THAT* much to save on the mortgage bills, because I might have ended up spending it all on trying to keep the place secure :)
November 9th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Yeah, there’s areas like that.
Oddly enough, even when I’m in the ghetto here in Indy, I’m not _nearly_ as worried as when I was in certain areas of Jackson MS.
The ghetto here is lush compared to some of the parts of town down there.
Seriously. Poor people up here in Indy have it _good_ compared to down there. I worked in the 14th block of Delaware for about 9 months, never worried about my safety. There was a murder at a gas station a few blocks south a few months ago, and several cars were broken into at night, but I never felt ‘freaked’ to be in that area.
Even when I head to the east side further out on 10th I don’t get freaked out. Probably the worst place I’ve been was the “ghetto Kroger” off 15th during a munchies run for the office off Delaware. Even then I made it out unscathed, and didn’t really mind all that much. I did worry about leaving my car in the parking lot there, but the wheels were still there when I came out. :-p