I Knew It Wasn’t Right 2
November 2nd, 2008 by ComputerBob
Yesterday, I told you how Saturn’s lies to me more than 5 years ago are costing me a lot of money this weekend.
Well, I got my car back from the local garage yesterday about noon. Its new clutch seems to be working perfectly.
The first time I drove it, the clutch began to engage almost immediately as soon as the pedal left the floor, forcing me to be extra careful not to kill the engine. But as I drove it four or five different times this afternoon and evening, doing several different errands, it started to break in a little and now it begins to engage about 1/2-inch off of the floor. The clutch in my wife’s identical Saturn, more than five years old, has always started to engage about 1 1/2 -inches off of the floor. So I have a feeling that after a few hundred miles of being broken in, this new clutch is going to feel just like hers.
When I first got home, I noticed that my car was giving off a strong burning smell. I immediately called the local garage, and the repair technician confirmed what I had already suspected — it’s normal for a new clutch to give off a burning smell for a few hundred miles. I was relieved to note that, by this evening, the smell was already a lot weaker than it had been at first.
And my car is a lot quieter than it’s been lately. I’m guessing that its engine had been running faster than it needed to be running for quite awhile, due to the fact that its clutch was never fully engaged. I haven’t kept track of my gas mileage, but I strongly suspect that it’s going to be much improved from now on.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on how my car behaves for the foreseeable future, but so far, it looks like it was repaired correctly. With the addition of $70 worth of tax, the new clutch and hydraulic system ended up costing me more than $1100, including the cost of yesterday’s rental car. I’m pretty sure that the Saturn dealer would have charged about twice that much for the same repairs.
Time will tell if it was worth it.
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Consumer Info, Engineering, Ethics, Personal