Car Troubles – A DIY Dilemma

DH’s car has some issues. Well, that’s an understatement. DH’s car has some areas in which it works perfectly. In all other possible areas, it’s seriously messed up.

Here are the issues as of today (tomorrow more might be added to the list, but as of right now….)

• The battery goes completely dead during the drive-in movie, when all we’re doing is listening to the movie over the radio.
• The AC only works when the outside temperature is less than 50 F.
• The heater only works when the outside temperature is greater than 90 F.
• The passenger’s door only opens from the inside.
• The breaks pulse really hard when you try to stop (as though the anti-lock feature is always on).
• The automatic transmission can’t pick an appropriate gear until you get up to about 50 mph on the highway.
• It leaks about a quart of oil over the course of 3 months.
• The antenna, because it is a luxury car, after all, has a motor to make it go up when you turn on the radio and makes it collapse into the car when you turn off the radio. However, the motor is broken, so instead, the antenna stays up all the time and the motor makes a terrible racket for about a minute and a half after you turn on or off the radio. (Update, DH informs me that the motor has given up the ghost and no longer makes the racket. However, it can’t go through an automatic car wash because the antenna is now only hanging on by a thread.)
• There are no interior lights except for one next to the mirror hidden in the passenger’s visor. Fortunately, there is still a mirror to accompany it.
• As of yesterday, big black clouds of smoke billow out the tailpipe and the hood.

Although we’ve been talking about fixing these items ourselves, and even took a peek at the brake pads and rotors just to make sure they weren’t shot (they are fine, it’s a different problem, possibly with the computer?), we can’t do much about the transmission. We just don’t have the tools, skills, or time to invest in seriously messing with it, and DH can’t really afford to have his car up on blocks while we accumulate the tools and skills over the amount of time it would take us to do so. I think the black smoke coming out of the hood really scared him, though, because we’re paying a mechanic $120 just to do an evaluation of all the little problems with the inner workings of the vehicle. I’d be interested in hearing advice on what you’d do in this situation, whether you have no experience fixing old luxury cars, and perhaps even more so if you do.