The days of a car enthusiast are a mixture of joy, pain and maybe even some embarrassment. Sometimes things go so wrong that you just want to hide under a blanket. What was your most embarrassing moment with a car?
My embarrassing moments tend to come when I’m selling a vehicle. A car may treat me right through thousands of miles, only to seemingly fall apart during a test drive for a prospective buyer. It seems like my vehicles just don’t want me to get rid of them. Most recently, my school bus decided to fail in a spectacularly dangerous manner right before a sale, but that’s no even my worst moment.
No, my most embarrassing moment comes from selling a Nissan Xterra.
I picked up the quirky 4x4 for the princely sum of $500. It smoked a bit under hard acceleration and consumed oil, but I figured those were no big deal to fix.
It seemed that the smoking and oil consumption was caused by a clogged up PCV valve. I cleaned it out and almost like magic, the smoke was gone. It stopped drinking oil and its check engine light extinguished itself. The Xterra then became a reliable daily.
Eventually, I grew bored of it and listed it for sale. At around the same time, the check engine light came back, it started smoking like an old diesel truck and it misfired. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and apologized as buyers bailed left and right.
I sold it to a mechanic for less than half of my asking price. His theory was that the smoking and misfiring was caused by the distributor going bad at a very inopportune time. Well, inopportune for me, anyway.
What was your most embarrassing moment with a car? Ever have a sale just go completely to crap?
DISCUSSION
Turning my motorcycle upsidedown in the HOV lane one morning. I’ve been in small car accidents before, even some that were my fault, but nothing bruised my ego near as much as wrecking my bike. It was in the 30s, the road was cold and my tires were cold and I had just installed new brakes and hadn’t quite got the feel for them yet. Just 10 minutes into my commute traffic on the HOV was slowing down, and I locked up my front brakes. I wasn’t following too closely or speeding or anything, but for some reason I must have overbraked. I say must have because I don’t remember the incident. I remember seeing brake lights ahead of me and telling my hand and foot to squeeze the brakes and the next thing I remember is sliding down the freeway and my bike sliding in front of me with sparks flying off of it. Physically I was fine, I hurt my thumb and had a little bit of rash on my palms and knees but my ego was completely destroyed. I know everyone on 2 wheels eventually goes down but that’s the dumbest I’ve ever felt.