Rental Car Blues Redux

Ahhh, finally back in my own car. Gleaming white all over: they cleaned it! Not just the parts they replaced but every darn last inch of it. Even the inside is clean, though I'm having to drive with the windows open in 10 degree temperatures in a still-cold car just to get the fumes out from whatever they polished the dash with.

Note to the interested: ABRA does good work.

And my bill: $0.00. Perfect!

I forgot to mention the thing that really annoyed me about the HHR. It's not about the model but this specific car. It pulls to the left. You don't dare take your hand off the wheel for a second, unless you have some screwey idea about getting up close and personal with oncoming lanes of traffic. I can't just hold the wheel, I have to spend all day pulling on the wheel. My arm aches. While driving I feel like I've gotten a muscle pull from the back of my wrist to halfway up from the elbow. Every moment behind the wheel is annoying.

I was going to leave Enterprise a note about it, but after the run-in with the guy at the gas station, filling up so the guage registered at least as high as it did when it was rented out to me, it slipped my mind.

This car takes E85. There is one (!) station in Forest Lake that has one (!) double-sided pump for E85. When I pulled in tonight, one side of the pump was blocked by the tanker filling the reservoirs with new gas. The other side was blocked by two cars filling up (regular gas, mind you) and one waiting.

One might note that during the whole incident there were unused pumps at the other two islands at this station. Nobody had to wait in this row, unless they were waiting for E85. And none of the others were. Technically this takes standard gas as well, but I'm paying for gas somebody else will be using, and I'm not about to pay the extra $.50/gal of standard. Plus, I checked the last couple days, and the car claims to get just 1 mpg less than with standard gas. Definitely not worth the price.

A side note here, I'd let the gas get low during the day, unwilling to have more than the required 1/4 tank in it at drop off. After dropping paperwork off at HQ, I pushed the buttons on the trip up to the gas station to see how much further it said I could still drive on the remains of this tank: 78 miles. No sweat. After a couple miles, it changed to 79. Then 80, 81, and by the time I had driven about 15 miles, it claimed I could still go 85 miles on this tank. Pretty slick, eh? Wonder if I could repeat that?

I judged the space between the tanker and the pumps to be a tad small for the HHR, especially allowing for my need to open my door (big enough that it'd already clipped my leg a good one once) and my need to stand on the other side of the car where some idiot placed the gas cap, another annoying feature of this beast. I circled the pumps, and the line for "my" island just got longer. I swung around the outside of the tanker, and killed off a minute talking to the driver. He informed me he'd just finished, expressed surprise that there was only the one E85 pump, and offered to move his rig in a minute. I continued around to get into position, and suddenly the other side of the pump had cleared. I just needed to back in from where I was, which I proceeded to do.

Of course, that required a bit of back-and-forth, tight quarters being exacerbated by both my turning radius and the sudden presence of another SUV blocking me in so I had even shorter runs to make in my turn.

Got the picture? Are you ready for it? This new driver got impatient with me after complicating my task, and decided to just whip around me and pull up blocking the E85 pump so he could use another one to get regular gas.

ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

I honked at him, something I ordinarily consider the height of rudeness, unless done for safety reasons. Then I backed up - suddenly with more room - and pulled up to the pump on the side that the tanker was no longer blocking.

I could not resist. I rolled my passenger window down and yelled out to him,"You know I was backing up for that pump you just blocked."

He just looked all innocent and puzzled, and responded, "No I didn't. I just thought you were parking across the end of the pumps."

"I'M NOT THAT STUPID!"

I'm not sure why I bothered, except to vent. Some people just aren't trainable.

The Rental Car Blues

I waited and waited for Idiot's insurance company to get back to me about fixing my car. I called my "assigned" adjuster and left messages. They went unanswered. Finally, I went back to the main number and asked for somebody else, somebody who was actually there and could/would talk to me. That got through.

After giving her the claim number, and giving her half a minute to look it up, she let me know that their company took full responsibility for the accident and how did I want to get my car fixed? All this nothing, and suddenly let's go ahead lickety split?

So, what were my options? I mean, the less work I had to do to accomplish anything, the better. There's enough to do already. We settled on my dropping the car off at ABRA in Forest Lake, who works directly with them, and they'd have Enterprise car rental pick me up from there and give me a car for the duration. Only, please start the repairs on a Monday so they didn't have to pay for the weekend.

That seemed reasonable. The process started this Monday. I am now driving a Chevy HHR, dark red. I hate it!

Let's start with it being ugly. It's Chevy's version of the P T Cruiser, only lumpier. It chugs gas, not too bad for its class but much worse mileage than I'm used to, and the gas is all on my dime. "Free" rental doesn't pay for the $15+/day they charge me for their insurance coverage. My insurance cover's whatever I'm driving but that doesn't count to the rental people. The visor doesn't block the sun. It's got a bigger turning radius than works well with all the funny places I drive into, and parallel parking is again an interesting endeavor. I no longer know where "my" corners are. (I start in a new vehicle by sending imaginary feelers out into the full body of the car until it feels like it's a part of me. Essentially for 10-12 hours a day, it is.)

Internally, everything is in the wrong place for my habits, or moves the wrong way, so I have to think about what I'm doing rather than where I'm driving. I never have figured out why sometimes the dashboard tells me the time, the radio station I'm tuned to, the odometer reading, and if I ask it to, all kinds of other things including individual tire pressure, and other times all those displays are black and stay black. I did figure out how to move the seat back away from the front so I'm not biting my kneecaps while I drive, but I have to keep resetting it every couple days. The lights and radio stay on well past shutting it off or even removing the key, and I just can't get used to that. Glad it's not actually my battery that's being asked to do that.

I can't figure out how the cruise control works. I've used cruise control on older American cars before, but nothing I try tells it to kick in on this thing. Lucky I am used to not having it. Of course I need to pay more attention to my speeds because it doesn't "feel" like I'm going the speed I am.

And of course it's not stickered "Dynamex" so I can park in loading zones. If I can find a meter or a handicap space I'm fine, but still nobody knows who I am by looking at the monster I rode in on. And speaking of handicap parking, my hanger card cracked in three places and the hanger part separated completely from the rest the first time I used it in this car so it doesn't actually hang any more. Sigh! Another errand to take time off work for. I'm not saying the brittleness of the card is the car's fault, but the rearview mirror is weirdly shaped and it's a pain to get the hanger card on or off, even without cracking apart.

So when do I get my car back?

Yesterday the guy fixing it called me, claiming he left me voicemail the previous day and was disappointed I hadn't called back. (I checked after the call: no message.) The upshot was after they pulled the metal parts off they found some plastic ones that needed replacing, and then there's my tricked-up paint job. I was in just the frame of mind when I dropped the car off to point out my silver-red-silver racing stripe on my white car. This comes from preserving as much of the old paint job as I could get away with when I had the car painted white for work. If they'd just put silver striping on a white replacement part, it'd look funny right next to the "original". It'd look repaired. So they're doing what they can to make it match the rest of the car. They're even making the underside parts red again!

He figured it'd be ready Friday morning and cost about $2600. I don't need to know the cost. It's not mine. Just... interesting.

But I called this afternoon to see if they could pin down the ETA for pick up any better for me. I was informed it'd just finished getting painted, like that told me anything about when it would be ready. So I asked for a translation of that into terms of time. There are plans to rearrange. I can now authorotatively state that the definition of "Friday morning" means sometime after 2PM.

Of course it does. How did I not know that?

What's that going to translate into tomorrow?

Bambi 1, Hyundai 1

I think that's the proper way to report the score when they're both casualties.

It was dark, and after carefully navigating snowy roads all day, I'm driving home on now-dry pavement and Bambi jumps out of nowhere and attacks my car. Ironic, huh? I guess I'm lucky that the power steering didn't go out until about 4 blocks from home, when I turned off the highway into town. There was no traffic nearby, so an extra-slow turn didn't cause any more problems, and after that I crawled the rest of the way. I had to jockey the car back and forth to back it in to the driveway. I figure it'll have to be towed to a repair shop from there, after the insurance company has its say.

Naturally this is just after the tranny rebuild, front end alignment and four new tires. I'm really hoping it doesn't get totaled. The wrinkled side panel obstructs the passenger door from opening, the hood is crumpled, there are pieces of the bumper in the back of the car, the light assembly is a gaping black hole, and obviously some internal damage. It's an '07, but with 192,000+ miles. Those blue book boys don't realize that those puppies are good for 400,000 miles with minimal repairs.

The insurance people totaled out a high mileage Geo Metro on me with front end damage years back, but the price of repairs was equal to the insurance payout, so I got it fixed and put another couple hundred thou on it. Loved the 3-cylinder engine with the 48-50 MPG that baby got. Mostly I love Hyundais, but this was back when I was looking for even better economy. When those were discontinued, I went back to Hyundais.

My last car-deer incident was several years ago, and that time the score was Hyundai 2, Bambi 0. A headlight needed replacing and I had venison for the freezer. Back then I found out that one doesn't need to wait two hours for the highway patrol to come by and verify the roadkill if one plans butcher the deer one's self. That's only if you want to take it to a "real" butcher, and need proof you haven't been poaching. Of course, I found that out after waiting those two hours. This time I found out from the local sheriff's office that they no longer write up car-deer incidents. One less headache, anyway.

Tomorrow I find out what the insurance company says, and meanwhile get to drive the Buick with the heater problem. It's a bit warmer out now, so it might not be too bad. Wish me luck, and an early spring.

Now let's see if the adrenaline level is down enough I can get some sleep tonight.

Replacement Cars

The trouble with replacement cars is that they are different. All your habits are wrong. Reaching for one thing gets you another. Radio settings are not yours, and so many systems exist for setting radios that you could take an hour to figure it out - if it was worth the bother , or even if you could. Mirrors need adjusting, turning radii are different, the seat needs adjusting and at its best is still different from what your muscles are used to. Trying all this after dark is enough to bring on swearing.

This is especially true when switching from a Korean Hyundai of recent manufacture to a '94 Buick. Even with one of my sons in the car- who drove the Buick all last summer- we couldn't figure out how to turn off the dome light for 5 minutes. He had figured out the radio resets last summer, but has forgotten them in the meantime. Lucky for me, one of them was KNOW, MPR's news station, because his musical tastes... well, let's settle for saying they're not mine.

He was, at least, helpful enough to dig the car out of the snow, chip off enough ice to get a door open and start it, clean out the ashtray and accumulated crap, and ride up with me to the nearest Wal Mart where we could replace wiper blades after 9PM. That was especially helpful because with them as awful as they were, and roads wet and salty as they were, it took two to see the road in the face of oncoming headlights, especially when from a semi. It was good we kept the jug with the remainder of the blue-juice from filling the reservoir in the back of the car, because the lines to the windshield were frozen solid. Nobody's driven the car since October, and what little was left was summer blend. Periodically yesterday I'd get out, pour blue juice over the windshield, and turn on the wipers full bore so I could see again. With brand new wipers, it worked well.

The biggest problem, however, was lack of heat. Or should I just say this car is mostly solar-powered in the heating department these days, and the sun only cooperated for a few hours midday. Back when my mom was driving this thing, after my dad got too blind to drive, it developed a tiny radiator leak. Most of you already know how this part of the story ends, but I'll tell it anyway. Being too cheap to go for an actual fix to the problem, a decision we all agreed with, by the way, considering their age and driving distances, a can of leak stopping stuff was put in the radiator. It worked beautifully, stopping up not only the radiator leak but most of the heater core as well. There's plenty of heat for mild October nights, but not for sub-zero January weather, even with extra layers of clothes and driving tucked in under a double-layer polar fleece lap blanket. The windows, at least, stayed frost-free.

I didn't.

This morning my youngest was still home when I got up. That only means he overslept or is sick. Sick it is, but he left me the keys to use his car today, which is a newer year model of my Hyundai Accent. (He bought it on my advice, having taken a number of them up near or over 400,000 miles.) I know how to tune in my radio stations, where all the signals and gadgets and buttons are, and best of all, that it has great heat!!!!

Now if only I hadn't filled the Buick with $30 gas last night, being unable to face freezing my tush off this morning with no way thaw it out all day.

Tranny Repair

The "check engine" light had been off and on - mostly off - for a couple months. No symptoms. Ignore it and it goes away, at least until the next time.

Finally a symptom. Klunk! up into 4th gear, or so I was informed, since I wasn't sure if it was 4th or 5th. All day it was snowy and slick, so the car never went all that fast until mid afternoon. It was mostly highway driving, steady in whatever gear for long periods. But the klunk! repeated often enough that I called my favorite mechanic and asked who they recommended, since I knew from years of doing business there that they didn't handle trannies. They gave me a recommendation. The tranny place could fit me in for diagnosis that afternoon.

By then I knew I had lost an upper gear, since my RPMs had risen from their usual steady 2.5 to 3.5-4 thousand. I kept it under 60 mph until I got it into the shop. By that time diagnosis took a bit, since there were around 40 codes from the check engine light going on and off, and each had to be cleared. Each told the same story.

The klunk! was due to (jargon jargon jargon) when the (jargon) slipped going up into 4th gear. The computer recognized it and finally started preventing it from staying in 4th gear, in order to protect the gear, or even going in in the first place. More engine wear, worse gas mileage.

Yep, I'd figured out that last part.

What seems odd is the rebuild that my tranny needs to protect that 4th gear is as costly as if 4th gear went and got destroyed anyway. Or at least I think the two grand is as expensive as if the damage occurred. I could be wrong. But since I plan to put another 200,000 miles on this car, it's necessary.

I waited after they closed for my son to get off work, get his cell messages, and come pick me up on his way home. This just had to be the night he didn't turn his phone on until he was almost home, so he had to come back down, pick me up, and head home all over again. Now I'm here, trying to figure out whether I should go straight to bed or fix something for supper first, meaning I have to stay up even later.

Oh, you noticed too that blogging just delays that decision?