Last legs?

For the past nine months we’ve carried three cars. Stephanie’s 1993 green, four-door Ford Taurus (which Stephanie bought used from a Ford dealer while my family and I were in France in summer 1997), with more than 220,000 miles, I have been driving mainly. We don’t use the right rear door, I knocked off half of the back bumper at home, and the floor on the right rear side has started to fall through. More recently, the car stalls in the morning, when the weather is cold (and some other times when the engine is cold), and – as of this week – the passenger side front door is locked shut and won’t open and the trunk won’t stay closed. Our car with the fewest miles is a 1990 red, two-door Acura Legend, with 170,000 miles, which we bought used from Mo, the parent of a basketball teammate of Vincent, in Minnesota. It’s got Minnesota rust and a complicated switching system, but otherwise runs well. However, neither the Ford nor the Acura have working air-conditioning systems (both would cost $1,000-1,300 to fix assuming we could find the parts), and now the power windows in the three of the four Acura windows won’t work (I dislike power windows). That is, the last few times we lowered the front two windows, they felt like they weren’t going to go up. And so we don’t tempt fate by opening the windows, lest they stay open and we’re stuck if it gets cold, it’s raining, or we’re trying to park the car somewhere. The cool March and April so far has been good for this. But, as you can imagine, as the temperature have headed up even into the 70s, especially after we’ve had to park the Acura in the sun (with its black interior) have made it pretty uncomfortable in there pretty quickly. The Acura does have a sun roof, but in the middle of the day opening this only makes it hotter, because the hot sun steams in, along with a little breeze. One of the back windows works, and this saved us on the trip to and from Murray, when it got hot.

Amazingly, we’ve had since the end of last June a third car. Penny and Serge, facing maintenance problems with the 1993 brown, four-door Nissan Maxima, which my father and then I had turned over to them in December 2001 (with a great deal of family strife over this gift), and trying to find a car that gets even better gas mileage, them having moved way out to a rural town some 15-20 miles outside of Charlottesville, gave me back the Nissan, on a crazy 48 hours in which I flew to Baltimore, drove a rental car and got lost in Northern VA, spent a whole day – partly with my friend Chris – waiting to try to get an emergency passport, spent four hours in metro D.C. traffic, visited with Penny and Serge and Jacob in Charlottesville for a couple of hours, then drove all night with three hours rest in West Virginia back straight to work in Louisville, where I finished a very important project and got ready to get up at 3 a.m. the next morning to go on a mission trip to Guatemala with my family that I was helping lead. Since then we have not titled, tagged, or insured the Maxima, but I have started it up and moved it around the driveway once a week or so since then. This has not entirely worked, as I had to buy a new battery from AAA and they have had to replace it twice. Plus, at some point even with the new battery the car wouldn’t start, and so we got it towed down the block to Jim Hendrix Automotive and with some help we paid $1,300 for repairs – probably the repairs that Penny and Serge were trying to avoid doing. As we picked up the car originally, it smoked and leaked oil and wouldn’t start after it had rained. Plus the speedometer doesn’t work. This car has more than 200,000 miles – and whether we should have picked it up in the first place or gotten it fixed is an open question. It’s the one of our three cars that has working air-conditioning – although Penny herself said she wouldn’t trust driving it to Florida. Having spent all of that money to fix it, we may shortly take the Taurus out of service and start using the Nissan. The offices to do all the title transfer and license tagging are open late only on Wednesday, when we have Children’s Fellowship, and so I may wait until I can take a day off from that. This Wednesday Vincent and Stephanie or I have a Denmark exchange program meeting.

Pondering fixing the Acura is also a vexing problem. We’ve talked with a free-lance mechanic about using used power window regulators and motors to fix it, but have had no luck finding used parts. Having the Acura dealer fix the power windows with new parts will cost about $1,300 (meaning fixing BOTH the windows and the air-conditioning would cost about $2,600 (and of course the latter is way more than the car is worth).

In principle, I like keeping cars running until they really die, but now we have a surplus of poorly running cars. Mom has also flirted with the idea of buying a brand-new car and my sister isn’t enamored with her old car’s gas mileage and so we might be in line for that one. But we still would need a second car. But which one of these three? Presumably the Acura, but as the temperature rises it faces the most acute needs and a large bill to fix them.