BOY AND THE HOOD
Our intrepid reporter goes hand-to-hand with a broken engine
S OMEBODY told me that I live a onepercent lifestyle. I can’t remember who it was, but clearly he or she was referring to my job as a motoring journalist. And after mulling it over I realised that they were right. Because in terms of perks I think I’ve probably got the best beat in the wordsmithing business.
Every week a shiny new car arrives, fuelled to the brim and insured against the apocalypse. I drive it for seven days and then give it back to the powers that be. All I have to worry about in that time is filling the tank and making sure it returns sans dings. Then write about it. It’s a sweet deal, all right. A deal that insulates me from the foul residue that can sometimes cake the real-world motoring experience. Poor after-sales service — what’s that?
Well, just the other day, between sampling a criminally fast BMW M6 and the new Peugeot 208 GTi, I received a rather unpleasant reminder; a good old-fashioned bitch-slap from The Life Nazi. The Opel Corsa Lite that I inherited from my grandmother, the one she expertly scraped down the side of Hyde Park shopping centre, suddenly went on the fritz. Which is odd considering that it has only clocked up 14 000km in the past 11 years. It decided to go all Alfa on me just 24 hours after I had lent it to my colleague, Oliver Roberts. His Citroën had been hospitalised with a blown cylinder head.
“Dude, you’re not going to believe this but the Corsa has broken down on my way to work,” he explained over the phone. “It started to lurch and stall. And then after restarting it for the umpteenth time, there was a loud banging noise. I think the exhaust has exploded. So I’m standing on some windswept street in Bryanston. We’ll have to call a tow truck.”
This was all I needed. The biggest swindlers this side of Paris — a rendezvous with one of these street vultures was to be avoided at all cost. Assessing the situation from the comfort of my Honda CR-Z, I told Roberts to dig deep and try to make it to the Hyde Park dealership that has been responsible for servicing RJT 576 GP since the day it was born. And after another hour of banging and clanging and stalling and calling, this is what he did.
Later that afternoon, an upbeat service consultant rang up and told me I needed a new coil pack as well as a set of spark-plug leads. At first I was surprised at how cheery she sounded. But once she read out the quote, the penny dropped. I was looking at R6 500 for genuine GM parts or R3 000 for the Fong Kong knock-offs. “But I must tell you,” she said with a degree of patronising caution, “we really don’t recommend those because they don’t last as long.” Yeah, I bet they don’t.
So here I was, on a Thursday afternoon, being held ransom by a car dealership demanding ridiculous amounts of money for two relatively basic parts. It felt like I was being scammed — like the time I made the mistake of visiting a revue bar off the Moulin Rouge. Except this time I wasn’t going to stand for it. So I used some initiative and contacted a place called Goldwagen in Randburg. Although the quality of their phone line was not very good, their prices certainly were. For less than R900 they hooked me up with everything I needed. The only catch was I’d have to install it all myself.
My father, who for some reason wouldn’t entrust me with anything but a size-14 spanner, thought this was a terrible idea and advised me against it. “I wouldn’t if I were you. It’s just going to turn into another episode of the Gay Olympics,” he warned. “Do you even know what the coil looks like?” Of course this lack of confidence in my mechanical prowess only fanned my determination. So the next morning I arrived at the Hyde Park dealership with my cargo of “pirate” parts. And what happened next was an inspiration for bush mechanics everywhere. After parking the Corsa around the corner from the dealership (between a patch of dead kikuyu and a curious street vendor), I popped the bonnet and stared into the abyss. Using Google and bit of common sense I isolated the offending parts and set about replacing them with the shiny new ones.
And it all took less than 10 minutes. The hardest part of the operation was trying to
My father advised me against it. ‘It’s just going to turn into another episode of the Gay
Olympics’
remove my new 20-piece screwdriver set from its impenetrable plastic packaging — something that resulted in lacerated knuckles and the use of some colourful language. Fortunately, this irritation (and blood loss) vaporised the moment I twisted the ignition. The little Opel growled back to life and idled as smoothly as the day it left the showroom floor. Then after a spirited test drive through the streets of Craighall (to make double sure that all was well), I shot back past the Hyde Park dealership to flip them a middle-fingered salute of defiance. A well-deserved one at that. Not only had this exercise saved me R5 500 (excluding labour), it also proved to my friends and Twitter followers that a bit of inventiveness can go a long way in overcoming the seemingly inescapable clutches of the evil Automotive Parts and Service Monster.
Which is why I’m now sharing it with you. Obviously I’m not suggesting that you go anywhere near the hermetically sealed innards of your Mercedes-Benz S-Class. But if you own a car that’s more than a decade old, out of motorplan and still relatively simple in design, don’t be afraid to tinker.
If it starts playing up, get a workshop to diagnose the problem (many will do this for free) and then review your options. Use the internet. Trawl YouTube. Chat to people on forums. Invest in a Haynes manual that covers everything from everyday maintenance right through to general troubleshooting. Shop around for quality generic parts. Because, as the pharmaceutical industry has already proved, they’re normally as good as the real thing, only significantly cheaper.
Be smart, think savvy and you’ll be able to save your cash-strapped wallet from an automotive whipping. If a spoilt one-percenter like me can make it happen, anybody can.