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The Malibu Saga – Part Deuce

~ randyaa ~ 3 Comments

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailSo the Malibu is back. After only 5 months of ‘away time’. She’s a little worse for the wear but we’ll get to that in a minute.

The deal was $600 for a Head Gasket but it would take some time. Not bad considering we were almost ready to go to one car anyway and everyone else wanted $1,200 for the repairs. Who cared if it took a while. After 5 months and what turned out to be 3 major redos (and no phone calls) they wanted $900. A few calls later and we settled on $700. That was the condensed non-emotional version.

So now she’s back, for better or worse, and we have 2 cars again. Kind of.

Problems the Malibu now has that it didn’t before:

  • It needs a new front left shock
  • When turning right it makes a horrible metal on metal scraping sound. Seems linked to the shock issue.
  • While moving it smells like it’s leaking gas.
  • It hesitates at first, likely due to the gas leak.
  • It’s burning through fuel like it’s going out of style. Likely related.
  • Rust has started to rear it’s ugly head.
  • Still slightly blowing smoke/steam when accelerating.

Only really 2 main issues (shock and gas leak) that are probably causing all the issues, still frustrating.

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At least it’s not blowing smoke anymore.

Anyone want to buy a Malibu?

A Vehicular Crossroad

~ randyaa ~ 5 Comments

Rachel’s car has finally hit that point.

The point at which we need to choose to keep it till it falls apart or get rid of it now.  For the second time in the roughly 60,000 miles that we’ve owned it, it needs a head gasket.  The car is a 2000 Chevrolet Malibu with a 3.1L v6.  From what I’ve heard this is an extremely common problem with this engine.  Awesome.

So, our dilemma…

The car is paid off.  Irregular maintenance has not yet turned into regular maintenance, so monthly costs have been negligible for the better part of a year.  It’s in good mechanical condition (besides the recent development), although it’s in extremely poor cosmetic condition.

The cost of repair is approximately $1200.  We can safely assume if we were to buy a new (to us) car to replace the Malibu we’d be looking at payments somewhere between $200 and $400 a month and a minute trade in value.

At those costs it would only need to last us another 3-6 months before the benefit of repairing it outweighs the cost of a new car payment.  Of course, this assumes that we don’t have any other major issues with the car in that 3-6 month time period which is big possibility.  On the other hand, we haven’t had to do anything to the car (and it’s been paid off) for almost a year, so really it’s already earned the new head gasket.

It’s a gamble, we either bet on our car to last another 6 months or we bet against it, and move on with our lives without the complication, but with a little added cost.

One last thing to consider: We only drive 1 car on a regular basis as I ride the bus to and from work.  Therefor; having one unreliable car has been something we’ve been prepared to live with for a while.

What would you do?

We haven’t decided but if someone decides they want to give us an offer… let us know in the comments.