The cars will kill me !!!

Hi buds!

Those of you who know a bit about me (or have read my blog) will know that I am a car fanatic. 

During my 'driving life' (9 years now) I have owned several cars. None of which have never let me down…

No, that's a lie…

My very first car the Seat Cordoba tried to kill me… 

After 3 years of loyal service that car suddenly decided to stall every time I would shift gear… and when she stalled the steering wheel would block… pretty nasty!

The New Beetle. Well that car went fine, until my ex decided to drive it down a flight of stairs!! 'It's ok! No damage!' he said… 

After having nearly skidded out of a roundabout and a few near misses with lorries did I take her to a garage. The garage actually called me, in panic, saying that that car had a serious problem and that they had nearly crashed it. Bust steering, bust front springs and shocks. When they asked why, imagine the look they gave me when I told them that the new beetle had been driven down 20 steps!!!

Then, there is evidence of this on this blog, the Ford XR3I. Two times now has she played up! 

But being an very old girl she is excused! Nothing nasty, she just scared me a couple of times!

Now for the recent events.

I was going to write a proper story about this, explaining all my feelings of pain and anger and fed upness! But it's rather complicated. A lot of traveling back and forth with one Jeep or another. When rereading myself even I got lost! So I'll just simply jot down the events in order :)

So, I had 2 Jeeps : the Wrangler 'Frog' and the Cherokee 'Toad'

Never would I have imagined that they would all fail at the same time!

1 - Cherokee brakes down in Portugal.

Second day on our holiday in Portugal, the automatic gearbox broke on the Cherokee. We had to leave it at the Portuguese garage for the rest of our holiday, they had a hard time finding a second hand gearbox! So we rented a Renault Clio to continue touring around Portugal.

2 - Rental car brakes down.

The day before we were due to collect the Cherokee our rental Renault Clio broke down. Suddenly the brakes wouldn't work! We were driving down some very steep mountains! Scary!

Time to get towed again, and spend a morning waiting on the side of the road for a taxi to come pick us up. That was no fun, sitting on the pavement with all our camping gear burning under the sun (it was 40°C). You can guess that I was pretty fed up.

3 - Picked up the Cherokee with it's new 'second hand' gearbox

With another rental Clio we drove down to the garage to pick up the Cherokee. We had to rush back to Morocco because we had already lost a day (because of the Clio brakedown) and had to be back to work the next day.

Only once on the motorway in Spain did we realize that the Cherokee's new gearbox had a problem… it would not pass it's 5th gear. At 120km/h the revs were up in the red and the engine was roaring!

Back in Morocco the problem got worse. The gearbox didn't seem to know what gear it should be in. It would jump from one gear to another. Trying to get the car to climb out of our underground garage was hell!

4 - The Wrangler gets the 'Death Wobble'

After a month or so of the Cherokee being a pain in the a** we finally got time of work to take her back to Portugal (the gearbox was under guarantee). Only problem, we would have to leave her for an uncertain time at the garage, so we had to go there with 2 cars.

Leaving the Cherokee in Morocco we fly back to France to pick up the Wrangler.

On the motorway, in the middle of Spain, we experienced the horrifying Death Wobble. Driving at 120km/h the hole front of the car started shaking violently. We had to brake hard, and virtually stop for the shaking to stop. After that, whenever we drove faster than 90km/h the car would shake. It was terrifying!

Here is video of what the death wobble looks like from the outside… the whole front axle shakes like mad!

5 - The Wrangler goes to the garage in Marbella Spain

Being dangerous to drive we decided to leave the Wrangler at the 4x4 garage in Spain for a couple of days. During this time we took the ferry back to Morocco and picked up the Cherokee. During this short lapse of time, my fantastic spanish garage guy Javier managed to find what was causing the death wobble and repaired it (it was in fact the track bar that was damaged).

6 - The Cherokee back in the garage in Portugal.

We drove both Jeeps over to the garage in Portugal, and left the Cherokee with them so that they could sort out the gear box. We then drove back to Morocco with the Wrangler. 

7 - Time to collect the Cherokee … NOT! 

More than a month later, the garage finally told us that the gearbox had been repaired and that we could come and pick up the Cherokee. It had been war between the garage and dealer who had sold them the gearbox. We drove the Wrangler back to Portugal. The Cherokee wasn't ready when we arrived. We spent the night in a cheap hotel and the garage guys worked on the car until 3 in the morning…

The next morning at 10am we went to collect the car…bad news. Even after having had the new gearbox repaired it still wouldn't pass 5th gear… The gearbox had to be sent back to the dealer…

We left Portugal without the Cherokee…

8 - Still no news about the Cherokee…

It has been more than 4 months now that the Jeep Cherokee is stuck in Portugal… we have no idea when we will get it back. We were fortunate enough to have another car, the Wrangler, not very pratical for towns, but at least it got us from place to place… The garage in Portugal is also more than fed up because our car has been taking up space on one of it's lifts all this time…

9 - And then the Peugeot 206 broke!!!

So, since this summer I split up my ex and he wanted to keep the Jeeps so he brought them off me. I was carless (well only had the old Ford who is very petrol thirsty). My sister being in Canada kindly let me use her Peugeot 206 that she had left over here in France. A nice little car, she had never had a problem with it. One day I heard a weird rattling noise coming from the back… 20km away from my house I stopped to have a look… the exhaust pipe had fallen apart!

So I suppose now you know why I say I'm cursed with cars.

Have you ever felt like you've been cursed or had bad luck with certain events or objects? 

And guess what, I've just brought a new (but old, 2003) one!

Even worse, it's a Renault Megane! I have driven 2 of these Renaults in the past as company cars (smaller engines ones) both of which the engine 'died' at 150000km…

I'm crazy, but maybe luck (cars wise) will smile at me this year! 

 Here she is! I've named her Foxy because of the color ;) 

Fingers crossed she won't let me down any time soon!!!