QOTD: When Have You Thrown In the Towel?

Old, beloved cars can easily consume every last minute of our spare time while draining every last cent from our wallets, but not everyone is as fastidious as you might be. Often when a little thing goes wrong, we just let it slide. Sometimes the vehicle’s age, mileage, and accumulated repair costs mean our intervention’s no longer worthwhile. It’s time to throw our hands up in the air and say, “Screw it, I’ll just live with it.”

Yes, it wouldn’t take much to pull that dent or buff out those scuffs, but it there really any point anymore?

Usually, when car/owner relationships reach this point, the vehicle in question is not long for this world. Like a horse that’s run its last race, the glue factory beckons. And yet a friend of mind once spend countless hours applying endless layers of filler and primer and paint and clearcoat to his ’03 Altima’s bumpers to eliminate a number of stubborn scratches. Meanwhile, the sedan’s undercarriage resembled the Titanic (circa 2017) and the engine and transmission had clearly used up their borrowed time. For some, the quest for outward perfection never ends.

What’s the biggest nuisance you let slide?

I can think of a couple of afflictions that plagued my ’89 Prelude in the months before a failed clutch cylinder finally landed it in the classifieds. Certainly, the subsequent Camry you’re sick of hearing about had no such flaws. It was, in a word, flawless. The sexy red Prelude Si, on the other hand, eventually decided I need more elements in my life. Elements like air and water.

The driver’s side window eventually stopped its upward motion four inches from the top of the frame, and made sure to do this while I was strapped for cash. In the middle of a particularly brutal winter, no less. Rather than pull off the door panel and tinker with the pane and lift mechanism in a frigid, wind-swept driveway, I just pulled the pane up into place, hoping that, against all odds, it wouldn’t just plop back down after I gingerly shut the door. It rarely obeyed. That heater got a workout that winter.

Then the power moonroof decided the front seat occupants faced a risk of dehydration, so it unsealed the cabin from the outside world, dumping cold water on us whenever it was left parked in the rain. It was a hit or miss affair, as some rainy overnights wouldn’t result in six to eight ounces of chilly water cascading onto out heads after reaching the first stop sign of the trip. A perpetually saturated carpet became the norm. Try as I might, I couldn’t resolve that pesky leak — nor was I willing to spend much money trying.

So, think back (maybe not all that long ago), and share your stories of automotive ailments you couldn’t be bothered to fix.

[Image: David B. Gleason/ Flickr ( CC BY-SA 2.0)]