When I was a teenager it was commonplace to see groups of young men gathered around a car, the bonnet raised, gazing in apparent rapt attention at the engine. Back then you could actually do things with engines. You could take out the spark plugs, check the gaps, play with the carburetor, and do other stuff beyond my ken. I remember my father teaching my brother the dark arts of car mechanics. Later, my brother taught me how to tune the engine of my motorcycle
But that was then.
Modern cars are run by computers. Heck, you don’t have to learn to reverse-park, or do a hill start – or even engage the hand brake when you stop. And then there’s all those nifty things so you can answer your phone hands free and get directions to where you want to go. It’s all wonderful.
Until it isn’t.
It all started on Sunday. We’d been to the shops on Saturday, the usual uneventful run in our Rav 4 hybrid. Late Sunday afternoon, I tried to back the car out of the garage. I pressed the button to set my driving position, which it did. Then, foot on brake, I pressed the start button. After a few seconds’ thought, a message appeared saying something like ‘parking brake unavailable’. Peter had a go, too. The car was dead. It was only 7 months old.
Through past experience we’d always thought roadside assistance was available for any new car. But when we rang for help from Toyota we discovered that in these straitened times one is expected to register for roadside assist (for a fee, of course).
Pete rang the dealership. The car is still under warranty and in due course (late Monday) a mechanic turned up. Well gosh, he couldn’t start the car, either. No matter. They’d send a tow truck to take it away. Remember what I said about the car automatically engaging the hand brake? We couldn’t put it into neutral and push it out of the garage. We were interested to see what the tow truck driver would do to get it on his truck.
As it happens, the tow truck driver had seen this issue before – many times. He explained the battery at the back of the car that handles all the start-up functions had died. He managed to put some life into it with jumper leads, enough to get it out of the garage. The car remained at the dealership for three whole days.
We’ve had only one car for a few years now. We really couldn’t justify having two with our lifestyle. It very quickly became apparent how much we rely on a vehicle. We’d planned to take a trailer load of stuff to the tip. We couldn’t. We’d planned on picking up some cyprus pine mulch for the garden. We couldn’t. We’d planned on buying a new printer. We couldn’t. These are all inconveniences – but if we needed to go to the doctor, or hospital, or even a chemist for essential medicine, we’d have to take a taxi or one of the infrequent buses.
We asked Toyota to provide us with a loan car while they diagnose what was wrong with ours. In fact, I would have thought that would be a given under the circumstances. Seems I was wrong. No loan car. We finally got a phone call late on Wednesday telling us that the battery had been recharged in our car and the mechanics had no idea what had happened.
I think we’ll expend some money and register for roadside assist.
One positive thing, though – I’m glad it happened when the car was in our garage at home, not on the road – or even worse, while we were on our recent trip to Victoria.
And here’s a sunset to finish. The cloud layers were incredibly complex.
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