This morning I got a call from my son and his partner in some degree of distress. Their car had conked-out* (broken down) at the height of peak hour on a MAJOR arterial road (Punt Rd cnr Swan St for those who know Melbourne). :eek:
Now Punt road at any time of day is a royal pain in the arse, but at 7.45am on a weekday it’s horrendous. There’s no ‘emergency’ lane as you’d find on a freeway, so my poor kid & g/friend had to push their car into a bus-stop, to the chorus of tooting horns, abusive yells, and creative hand gestures. The bus drivers were not impressed either being unable to pull into their designated stop-lane, but at least they didn’t hurl abuse.
Anyway, the tow-truck arrived and hauled their car away…I picked them up from the t/truck depot and got them home. By then there was much laughter, a dramatic change from not 1.5hrs before.
*Car hadn’t been on the road for a while, so was given a full service two days ago. Alas, it seems that the mechanic had forgotten to check such simple things as the water and oil, both of which were totally empty, resulting in a cracked head. A human head is likely to roll as well. :: rolleyes ::
So, where or when was your most inconvenient breakdown? Not that any breakdown is convenient of course, but some spots/times are definitely worse than others.
Yeah, of all places, that’s pretty bad! [ETA: kam, that is. I know little of Compton, but it’s meant to be rough, right?]
I have to nominate “on the freeway” as the worst spot … because the RACV guys won’t come and help you, your only option is to get a tow.
The really annoying thing was, the particular thing that was wrong, it probably would have been okay to start again if we’d just left it half an hour before trying. But we had three tired kids in the car, and didn’t know that.
The worst place I ever thought I’d break down was in the Ringwood Tunnel (two-lane freeway-to-freeway link, no emergency lane). I’d been keeping my foot on the brake to keep from going over the speed limit on the downslope, then as I was trying to accelerate up the other side it was still slowing down … I was muttering “no…no…no” - pure panic. Before realising I hadn’t actually changed to the accelerator pedal :smack: :eek:
Flat tire in the middle of a tidal flooding rain was very bad. Flat tire at 3:30 am in a very rough neighborhood was worse. The absolute worst, though, was when the VW Beetle just absolutely died when I was almost at the top of the hill going over a bridge… It went from “I think I can, I think I can” to “Nope!” about 20 feet from the top. Suddenly, I was rolling backwards, no brakes, no emergency brake, no head/taillights, trying to avoid cars coming up behind me, and weighing my options. I finally (And by “finally,” I mean probably a very few seconds into the ordeal, but it sure seemed like “finally,”) realized that my safest option was to back straight into the bridge abutment to stop myself, avoid oncoming cars, avoid going in the marsh at the base of the bridge.
Did I mention that I have only two real phobias? Bridges, and heights? And that this was a pretty tall bridge? :eek:
Had to google but yeah, Compton sounds like a jewel of a place.
Maybe in future posts, if folks are talking about specific places etc, could ya give a brief synopsis of why it’s a bad place for those of us who live in different parts of the world?
I was about 25 miles off the road in the California desert in an old 1970 VW squareback. I hit a hard bump and both my upper control arms came off the torsion bar. I tried everything I could with no tools and couldn’t get them back in. For some reason I put the car in reverse and they both popped right back into place. I think that was the most I have ever felt relieved.
The worst place was Charlotte NC on the busy, fast section of WT Harris Blvd. The area where the speed limit is 55 between Milton Rd. and UNC Charlotte, but people quite often blow past me at 70 mph plus. I was right at 55 and went to brake for traffic, but when I pushed in the clutch pedal it broke off and dropped to the floor. I think I went through about five years worth of panic in that next half second. Those who have driven a manual transmission car know that braking without depressing the clutch pedal first is a bad, bad thing. Unfortunately, I was headed downhill at a high rate of speed and there were other cars ahead of me, so I had to do it anyway. The car came to a bucking, loud banging stop not long after in the driveway of Central Piedmont Community College’s Cato Campus. Leaving it there was not an option. Did I mention that I was way too broke to afford a tow truck bill at the time?
The good news was that I wasn’t too far from my Dad’s place and could call him for help. The bad news was that the part we needed was on the other side of the county and had to be removed from a parts car we kept stored there before it could be put into mine. Nobody had a clutch pedal for a '93 Mazda 323 in stock a six o’clock on a Saturday evening. Inconceivable! Anyway, we were out there until almost 2 AM making Bob the Wonder Car II drivable again.
First traffic light entering town from a 55mph highway, a 3-way intersection down the hill from a college as classes were getting out.
I had a brilliant idea to push it to the shoulder and wait (as it had done this before and would usually restart in 10 mins or so) that resulted in an asthma attack, getting dragged by my own car for 1/2 a block and said car rolling away, down the gently sloping street into a gas station and demolishing a pump.
I got a cracked wrist, banged up knees, a “pinch mark” were the back tire nearly ran over me and arrested for profound bad luck with aggravated stupidity.
So if I understand you correctly, the Mazda’s clutch would not release? If so why didn’t you just drive it home without using the clutch? It is not hard, and is really not too hard on the car.
Both of mine are pre-cellphone. Since you mentioned time also, I’d just done the week’s grocery shopping and loaded them in the car—which wouldn’t start. I trekked the baby across the large parking lot to the Hardees nearby and called my husband at work. We only had the one car so he had to call around till he found a friend who could come out to help. It took well over an hour (two?) and I worried about the milk etc. going bad. We couldn’t just call a mechanic or get a tow because we barely had enough money for the coke I nursed while we waited. But things worked out.
“Place” was on the interstate close to the off-ramp, not too far from home. I popped the hood to show, you know, distress, and nobody stopped. And nobody stopped. And nobody stopped. Kids in the car, too. Finally, some guy pulled over to see if he could help. He was an out-of-state salesman and took the phone number I gave him, got off the interstate and made the call. Thank goodness for him and so much for down-home chivalry.
One more, weird, late ‘70s. Ran out of gas on the back road to my parents’ farm. I walked to the house of a farmer we knew and he pumped me fifty cents worth. (A lot of farms had their own tanks for field machines.) The next day I mailed him the money. At some point later my step-father mentioned that _____ had dunned him for gas I had borrowed, which he paid. When I told him I’d paid for it, too, my step-father was livid. Caused a falling out they never did repair.
If running out of petrol counts as conked out, then the middle of Sydney Harbour Bridge would be it. With a date in the car.
But I got incredibly lucky; the car behind had a spare can of petrol in the boot and he willingly gave it all to me. I tried to pay him, but of course only had notes that were way to big, or small change. I pressed the change on him anyway.
Not bad=dangerous, but bad=assholes trying to take advantage of me.
I was traveling from Indiana to Florida on I-65 one winter, so there was snow on the ground, even in Alabama where I stopped. Because of the snow, I decided to drive thru a carwash to knock some of the salt off and generally de-crudify my poor little Datsun B-210 (this was in 1978, I believe.)
To further set the scene, I was 24, traveling along in an obviously jam-packed car having out-of-state plates. The attendant of the carwash undoubtedly heard a loud “chaCHING” which prompted him to jam something into my right rear tire. Just as I pulled out of the wash tunnel, he came over and “helpfully” pointed out that my tire was hissing but the adjacent garage could fix me right up in no time.
I pulled across the street to a vacant parking lot and assessed the situation. Then I dug out my owner’s manual, unpacked my totally crammed-full trunk, and changed my tire (back in the good old days when you got a real spare tire!) First time I’d ever changed a flat, and there I was, in the middle of Alabama in the middle of winter doing it all by myself. I wonder what the carwash guy was thinking/saying…
When I got to Pensacola and got settled in, I took my damaged tire to be repaired. Surprise, surprise - it was a big ol’ puncture. I’m sure it was just a coincidence… :rolleyes:
I’ve never heard of doing this before. How do you shift gears and stop the car in a reasonable fashion? I was about an hour long drive from home and there were some pretty scary, twisty back roads between me and the house. That car was very particular about shifting. Clutch pedal down or forget about it.
