Death’s Icy Embrace May Be Near
I think that I’m dying. As I type this, I can barely breathe, my chest hurts, I’m sweating profusely, and I want to go lie down. No, I’m not sick. I’m just physically exhausted from pushing our car half a mile to our house. This is probably confusing to you so let me start at the beginning.
Our 1994 Dodge Colt has 198,000+ miles on it and has been trying to completely die on us for the last few years. We’ve managed to keep it going by replacing the clutch, transmission, fuel pump, and distributor. Over the past few months, the car has been able to drive shorter and shorter distances each time we take it anywhere. This hasn’t been too big of a deal because the weather has been warm meaning that I could drive my scooter. Now that it’s getting colder in the mornings though, I’ve been wanting to be able to feel my fingers when I get to the office. Yesterday I drove the car into work knowing full well that I might not get home. I was right. It died half a mile from the house.
In the past, whenever the car would die like this, if we waited for a few hours and tried to start it again, we could usually get it back home. Not last night though. Since it wouldn’t start then, I had to push it home tonight. Fortunately, a policeman stopped traffic so that I could push it across the busy street then two people from our neighborhood helped me push it the last half of the distance. Did I mention it was raining? I’m so tired…
The car is acting just like it did when we had to replace the distributor. That was a $160 repair but I was pricing parts and it’s looking like it’ll cost a minimum of $350 now for me to do it myself. That’s of course assuming that I can do it myself and that it’s the distributor that’s gone bad.
At this point, Holly and I are wondering if it’s really worth it to keep beating this dead horse. The Blue Book value on the car is less than $300. It’s going to cost me more than that just to fix. I may be able to sell it for scrap and get half that or I can donate it to charity and get a tax write-off. Suffice it to say though that we need to get a new car.
The car is dead and it nearly took me with it. Now we need to figure out what to do next with it. What would you do in this situation?
blue book value, car, clutch, distributor, Dodge Colt, fuel pump, Holly, House, scooter, traffic, transmission, Work
September 9, 2008 9:46 pm | 
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Greed And Corruption: The New American Way | Stolen Droids — October 23, 2008 @ 7:43 am
[...] out my personal blog, you may know that I had a Dodge Colt with almost 200,000 miles that finally died. Because of it’s very predictable death, I had to buy a new car. If you weren’t [...]