A Very Expensive Day

Boy was today a Red Letter Day! (I never really understood what that means or where it came from) Anyway, in one day, I had to tow a car to the shop for repairs, call in a plumber to fix a pipe behind a wall in the shower, and call in an electrician for a problem on a circuit in the kitchen. It wasn’t a blown breaker, it was a wire somewhere. All in all everything is easily over a grand.

The car is what really ticks me off the most. It’s a Honda Insight. If I had it to do all over again I would’ve never bought that car. My wife wanted to go green. I should’ve gone with a Mini Cooper. Now that’s a cool car and the mileage is almost the same.

The thing about the hybrids is that they’re waaaayyyyy too sophisticated. You’re not driving a car, you’re driving a computer. Try driving a computer and suddenly getting the equivalent of the “Blue Screen of Death”. When that car goes down, it’s dead. I mean deeaaaaaaad.

I was driving the car once (thank God not on the freeway), listening to the radio when suddenly every light, on the dashboard, overhead, everything starts flashing on and off. The power steering goes, the lights go out all at once, air off, no gas….NOTHING. I strain the car to the side of the road and it rolls to a slow stop. It was like something out of Star Trek when some alien beam zaps the Enterprise and sucks all of the energy out of it.

That’s just one thing that happened. Every thing on the car is a specialty item. The parts are never in stock and they’re always more expensive than parts for other cars.

Get this! When the car just passed the warranty phase the transmission went out. Normally that’s already an expensive fix but my car is extra special. They tried sticking me with a $7,000 repair bill. I did a quick check on the internet and found others with the same complaint. I went back and told them it was a design flaw and handed the dealer a stack of printouts I had downloaded with the same bitch about the car. I raised such a stink that the VP of Honda North America got involved and I didn’t have to pay.

Give me an old Mustang or Karmen Ghia anyday. At least you can fix those and find the parts. As a society we’re outsmarting ourselves to our own self-destruction. (Did that make sense?)

Update: I dropped the car at the dealer yesterday 8/10/09 They told me Thursday or Friday because they had to get the parts from the distributor in OC ( about 60 minutes away). This morning got a call that the parts are in Ohio. No car till Monday at the earliest. Thank God it’s not our main vehicle. But, what did I tell you?