Adventures!

Yesterday evening I drove down to see Revenge of the Sith with some friends in Woodbridge. While the movie was awesome, and the best part of my evening, it was not in fact the most exciting part. That would have been as I was hurtling down I-95 and suddenly I hear a sort-of-crunching, sort-of-snapping sound that was sort of like gravel hitting my chassis but was off enough to make me go "that didn't sound right..." This was followed shortly by my speedometer getting twitchy and then failing entirely ( as the Check Engine Light of Doom came on )

Further Adventures

Okay, first off, margoeve is awesome. Not only did she take me by the shop where we left the car last night in order to see whether they had gotten a chance to look at it, she also braved the horrible 95N traffic to get me to a Metro station.

Second, when we stopped at the car place, they had taken a look. Those of you who are a bit familiar with the inner workings of automobiles (and their associated price tags) will probably be able to appreciate the way my stomach dropped when he told me, "The sounds you heard are definitely coming from the transmission." Unfortunately they don't do transmission work other than replace them (no opening them up and mucking about inside) so he wasn't able to tell me more than that at the time--and that to replace it with a new one would probably cost about 3x as much as what I paid for the whole vehicle. He said he would call around and see if he could find a used/refurbished one, and I'll be hearing back from him soon.

Further updates as events warrant, but it's looking like this car is done for.

Decisions, Decisions

The place I took the car to said that it would be about $2400 for them to replace the transmission. Another place I called said it would be at least $2000. A third place I called (AAMCO) wouldn't give me an estimate, even a ballpark, until they had done a $40 diagnostic. I can understand their reluctance, since it could turn out that nothing serious is wrong with it. Right?

However, I'm having a tough time justifying to myself the expense of paying to have it towed from the current place to the other place and then having the inspection just to determine whether I want to pay more money on it or not when I could get another working car for the same amount or less than it would cost to repair the current one (I highly doubt it would come up as being less than $1000 to fix it at this point). Especially since doing so would mean I would have to figure out a way to get back to Woodbridge now that I have no car and then get it towed and then wait for them to figure out what is wrong (which would take awhile from what the lady on the phone said) so I'd probably have to make it back here again, and then back down there again to make a final decision (and then back home again since right now signs point to "junk it" so after all that I'd still probably be carless)

Can you tell I'm trying to justify not bothering? I think I've got enough reasons not to... but at the same time, I want to make sure I haven't missed any reasons why I should go through the aforementioned process. The main one I can think of is that it might turn out not to be so expensive after all. Any other input would be greatly appreciated :)