Monday, November 07, 2005

Adventures with Gundar

Gundar is our beloved 1990 Volvo 740 Turbo station wagon. I'm not quite sure what color he is: copper or gold, maybe? He has more than 270,000 miles on him, mostly from the previous owner. Gundar is the newest car we've ever owned.

But he is a teenager, and an impetuous one at that. Lately he's decided to rebel and spend all of our money. We still love him and we keep financing his habits. Why, just last month I bought him a new tail light and a new timing belt! Somehow that isn't enough for him, and recently he's gone on strike. He's decided that he won't start if he doesn't feel like it.

He's very wiley, though, and like all teenagers, he strives to prove his parents wrong at every available opportunity. Jeff took our naughty boy to the mechanic here in town, who gave Gundar a clean bill of health. He couldn't see that anything at all was wrong. Gundar started up just fine for him!

But over the weekend we went to Kroger, and when we got in Gundar to go home, he didn't want to start. Eventually, Jeff got him started, but it really spooked us. So next week, we're taking him to the dealer. They'll know how to handle him. They know what kind of discipline our rebellious teenager needs!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Intermittent problems are the worst! Carl the Car had this tendency to conk out at random times -- it was DANGEROUS! He was an automatic, and he wouldn't restart until he'd cooled down completely! Never happened ONCE for the mechanic. Scott finally posted about the problem on an online car repair forum, and the majority of responders thought it was some solenoid. Scott took the car to the mechanic, who (reluctantly) disconnected this solenoid at Scott's request, and the problem was solved.

Cars can be really goofy!

Susie said...

I feel your pain. While mine is quite a bit younger (5 years with only 100,000 miles), it is having it's fair share of problems. Now that I am no longer making payments on the car (as of 2 months ago!), I don't mind putting a little money into every few months. Unfortunately, the way it has been going so far is that in the last 2 months, I've spent twice as much as my monthly payments were! Damn American cars...