Friday, October 27, 2006

More Passat Troubles

Today continues the story of "Why in the world did we buy two Passats?" On the positive side the cars have a lot 'luxury' type features. On the negative side they always seem to have something go wrong. And they're not cheap to repair either. Today Ginger's check engine light came on, so we'll be taking that into the shop on Monday to try and figure out what's causing that. Hopefully it won't cost too much to fix, but basically anytime one these things ends up going to the dealer it seems like it results in a significant amount of work. Last time it was still under warranty, so that helped from the cost perspective (it was still a huge inconvenience though), but I think the warranty has expired on it now. Can't say I'm looking forward to the result of this.

As if we didn't get enough bad news today, we found out that one the kids in Catherine's class is out today with chicken pox, which means Catherine may or may not have been exposed over the past two days when the child was contagious. According to the wiki page, people are "highly contagious by air transmission two days before symptoms appear", which means since the girl is in Catherine's class there's a high probability that Catherine may have been infected, but since it "has a two-week incubation period", it will be while before we know for sure since it takes "10-–21 days after contact with an infected person for someone to develop" the symptoms. At least Catherine won't be contagious (if she's actually been exposed and acquired the virus) for another week or so.

For the following photos, I tried going with black and white, but I'm not sure it works. I don't really think the color version works either though. I feel like there's a decent picture in there somewhere, but I'm just not finding it. Unfortunately if you look closely at the bottom picture, you can see where my CCD has started to acquire lots of pieces of dust (all the more reason I need to buy that all in one lens). Does anyone know of someplace that can clean the CCD without having to send the camera away for a month? I really can't imagine not having my camera for that long. But at the same time the dust bunnies on the CCD are really starting to get annoying. Maybe I can convince Ginger to buy me a newer camera so that I can always have one at home when one gets sent back for cleaning (and no, I'm not serious about that).



4 comments:

Curt Sawyer said...

I don't think the Passat has ever been rated very well by consumer reports, and reliability was a big negative rating.

JamesF said...

When we bought them I don't believe they had been around long enough to gather data about reliability.

It's just depressing because this basically means we'll have to be buying new cars much sooner than I would have liked (since I normally like to drive a car completely into the ground, and then some).

Buddy Tignor said...

like the second photo a lot.

....sorry about the VW's

car trouble bites

good question about the camera...if you hear of a local shop I would be interested...I bet wherever it goes they must have to have a clean room.

Unknown said...

It's not unreliable at all. Ours does quite well on the functions that matter, it's just the stupid little things that go wrong and cost mucho $$$. It's also extremely safe, and we've had real-world testing to prove that.

For the check engine light: make sure your gas cap is screwed on all the way.

Also, once you are off warranty, find a mechanic who specializes in VWs and isn't affiliated with a dealership. VW dealers are for the most part scam artists and scoundrels. The ones who aren't are just assholes. Avoid them all.