Driver's Door Issue

I was very excited to get the car back on Friday. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

They were able to determine that my transmission woes were due to a bad shifter, which meant the transmission had no idea which gear was selected. Replacing the part (which runs ~$1600) cleared the codes and supposedly fixed the issue.

Why “supposedly”? Because I couldn’t get into the car to drive it. (sigh)

As mentioned in the previous post I was also having an issue with the driver’s side door not opening. They were not able to reproduce the problem, but apparently I was.

It takes me around 90 minutes to get to the shop from home, so once I had paid for the repairs I told Kevin, my support specialist, that I wanted to visit the restroom. He offered to go out to the car to get the air conditioning running (it was a very hot day) but I told him “no” as my philosophy is that the top goes down unless it is raining.

He walked out with me anyway and I used the remote to lower the top before getting into the car. It is a pretty neat future which lets you release all the hot air before you sit down. After the top was down I went to open the door.

It wouldn’t open.

Kevin reached around and opened it from the inside, and after that the door would open and close as expected, but when I used the remote to put the top back up, once again the door wouldn’t open.

We kind of looked at each other a little uncomfortably until he asked if I wanted to leave it with them to work on the issue now that it can be recreated. I just laughed and asked if I could still have the loaner.

So, I drove the 90 minutes back home in the loaner and will have to wait a few more days to get back in the Banana.

I once thought that it would be fun to collect a bunch of cars. I’m not a car nut in the sense that I want to go fast or be loud; I just think that they are examples of rolling art. I would love to have a Cord 812, for example.

At the moment that desire has cooled, well until I hit a big lottery jackpot. We have four vehicles: my toy car, a big pickup for the farm, an SUV and a sedan I use to drive around town and to the airport. They’ve all needed something in the past year including new tires, and I kind of have maintenance fatigue.

I had been told that if you own a car like a Mercedes and you do the maintenance it can be relatively cheap to own, but that hasn’t been my experience. I spare no expense on the Banana and still it has issues.

I can remember the first time I got our SUV, a Toyota, serviced. It was $80. I asked the service person “aren’t you missing a zero?”

I would love to get back to that.