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BigAl

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Does this sound familiar?

I bought a new car a couple of years ago. I washed it weekly, used premium oil and filters, waxed it regularly, sprayed the panels with rustproofing, studied the service manuals, made up a spreadsheet to track maintenance. This baby's going to last me forever!

Two years later: The car has a couple of minor parking lot dings and scratches. The carpet is starting to look a little dingy. The wheel covers are curb-scraped. I wash it when it gets really dirty. The oil gets changed with whatever's on sale. All the maintenance is done on schedule, but with no enthusiasm. Yawn, it's just another transportation appliance. Sheesh, I'll probably be stuck driving this thing forever!

Am I the only one that goes through this routine EVERY time I get a new car?

hornets_nest.gif
 
Not me..I stay picky and hard to please throughout the ownership, but I've gotten in the bad habit of trading much sooner than I should. My 2004 Mazda 3 had a whopping 14K miles on it when I traded it off in April. I'm a maintenance and appearance fanatic so my cars look and run showroom new, even if I keep them for years.
 
Well, I'm still very picky about maintenance and won't let anything stay broken for long. All the nicks get touched up, and my cars really DO look better than most. I finally sell them off at about 150K though, and people seem eager to buy anything I've owned. They seem to still run well a long time after I've owned them.

It's not that I stop maintaining the cars up like a fanatic. The post is more about the loss of enthusiasm than sliding into neglect.
 
Quote:

I live in Normal, Il LOL

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My wife went to college there, and I lived there one summer when I interned for Caterpillar in Morton. (It was the closest to normal I've ever been.) I like the area. Gotta love cornfields. We've often talked about moving back to Central Illinois.
 
Hu...LOL... sort of funny I even said that and never knew you were from this area. Yeah..I like it here, accept the housing market and taxes SUCK...
 
Yep. Grew up in Joliet, (the city, not the prison) and went to college in Urbana in the late 1970's. I visited Urbana last weekend with one of my daughters, looking at grad school programs. Man, I'm gettin' old. We still have friends in Bloomington/Normal, though we don't communicate with them that often anymore.

Housing and taxes can't be any worse than in the People's Republic of Wisconsin. . . . and it's supposed to SNOW here later in the week!

How's the employment situation there? Any growing manufacturers that might need an engineer? Those beautiful flat cornfields were sure calling to me . . . .
 
Quote:

With the exception of the oil change routine - that is ME exactly. I guess 32 years of cars does that to a fellow.

You should see the wife's 2006 Ody - FILTHY!

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Apparently Honda needs to add a maintenance "C" for Pabs to the OLM to remind him to wash the car. I bet you if they did that you would follow it.
 
This is me to a "T", now anyway. I think I just plain burned myself out on 'car stuff' over the last few years. I got so obsessive about car care it sucked all the fun of having them. Traded cars in a couple three times way earlier than necessary. Now have an almost 1 year old Civic and I plan on following the manual for maintenance, and keep up with weekly checks etc. Will probably Nufinish it in the Spring, a now yearly ritual.

I just don't sweat it anymore, and I think I'm a lot happier. And now that I'm not completely anal I bet it will be impossible to kill.
 
Quote:

Does this sound familiar?

I bought a new car a couple of years ago. I washed it weekly, used premium oil and filters, waxed it regularly, sprayed the panels with rustproofing, studied the service manuals, made up a spreadsheet to track maintenance. This baby's going to last me forever!

Two years later: The car has a couple of minor parking lot dings and scratches. The carpet is starting to look a little dingy. The wheel covers are curb-scraped. I wash it when it gets really dirty. The oil gets changed with whatever's on sale. All the maintenance is done on schedule, but with no enthusiasm. Yawn, it's just another transportation appliance. Sheesh, I'll probably be stuck driving this thing forever!

Am I the only one that goes through this routine EVERY time I get a new car?

hornets_nest.gif


Click to expand...


One of my favorite quote comes to mind, "eat right, exercise daily, still DIE"
 
Quote:

Does this sound familiar?

I bought a new car a couple of years ago. I washed it weekly, used premium oil and filters, waxed it regularly, sprayed the panels with rustproofing, studied the service manuals, made up a spreadsheet to track maintenance. This baby's going to last me forever!

Two years later: The car has a couple of minor parking lot dings and scratches. The carpet is starting to look a little dingy. The wheel covers are curb-scraped. I wash it when it gets really dirty. The oil gets changed with whatever's on sale. All the maintenance is done on schedule, but with no enthusiasm. Yawn, it's just another transportation appliance. Sheesh, I'll probably be stuck driving this thing forever!

Am I the only one that goes through this routine EVERY time I get a new car?

hornets_nest.gif


Click to expand...



Heh, you live in Wisconsin.....it happens to the best of us
laugh.gif
 
especially after you wax it and make it all nice, then it rains and storms the next day. I do obsess over the interior though.
 
You bought the wrong car if you can't keep up the enthusiasm for more than two years. Or maybe you're just not a real 'car guy' after all.
 
If you can fight the humdrum of owning the same car for a long time, you can not only save a lot of money, but hang on to a car that may later become interesting. The three cars I own I've had for 4, 17 and 23 years.

On another note, I get a chuckle from some of the posts on this board, where owners want to know what to do about corrosion that starts to appear on their car. It may be only one spot this year, but this is something that grows exponentially. Next year it's five spots. The next year I can only suspect that the owner has give up and simply does't care about the looks of his car anymore. For a variety of reasons, it's an incredible amount of work to keep up on the corrosion of a car.... certainly more than the average car owner wants to engage on their daily driver.
 
Well, it's the northern states that wreck cars with the salts. Down in Va, where we get some snow and salted roads a time or two every winter, I haven't had corrosion on the body or undercarriage on any of my cars after the 79 model year. It just seems the Asian auto makers figured out faster that eliminating the dissimilar metals, using lots of plastic and electroprocessed metals make the bodies last longer. My 92 Hyundai, Ma's 84 Toyota Corolla had NO rust anywhere, and the Hyundai was on the road here 15 years. The Toyota is still being driven by my sis to this day. No rust. My Pop's Plymouths and Chevys were shot through the quarter panels in four years back in the 60s, 70s and 80s, even.

All that said, I did an OCI, wipers, air filter, and aired the tires on my cousin's 97 Honda Accord, and everything on the undercarriage is quite rusty. front end components, tie rods, ends, struts, all with heavy rust, and the car only has 65,000 miles on it. The body itself is rust-free, but the hard points under the car have heavy rust. The engine components of aluminum are pitted, completely bereft of and gloss from the original finish. Doesn't help that the dealer never reinstalled the splashguard back under the engine at some long-forgotten service visit.

This stuff would be impossible to keep up with, and continual replacement of the under-body hardpoints would drive the cost of maintaining the car beyond what it's worth at some point. Consequence of Massachusetts winters and snow-removal technique.

She's retired, doesn't drive it much, but it DOES run great. I would once have been thrilled to buy this car from her if she bought a new one, but now that I've seen the rusting that's taking place, I'd not touch it. The wiring, fuse links, really the very "bones" of the car are or will soon be suspect.

Corrosion IS a monster. And in severe environments, it's very, very tough to keep up with.
 
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