Kuala Lumpur December 2023 "The final nail in our plans"
01/12/23 09:59
We are celebrating this Christmas with one of our sons and his wife. Great escapes are planned, holidays by the seaside, visits to special places, I am looking forward to it. Then things start to go wrong. The weather forecast is not good and the weather itself not great. Roads are flooded and there are landslips blocking access to some of the areas we had hoped to see. One by one what we had planned to do gets cancelled and the long journeys that were in prospect fall away. As time goes by we find we are using the car only for local shopping trips.
There are still plans to lend the car to our son so he can show his wife some of the countryside but before he can do so we spot one of the tires is looking a little flat and sure enough there is a 10 psi difference between it and the other three. My wife takes the car to a garage to have it looked at and they confirm the tire has a nail in it but to make matters worse all four tires are life expired and have to be replaced. It was a good job we hadn't had our family holiday as some of the money saved now buys the new set of wheels for the car.
Just a day later my son reports the steering is faulty and randomly gets stuck for a second when making a sharp turn. The car goes back to the garage for a check but they can't repeat the fault. My wife can and that coupled with concerns about the noise coming from the back of the car is enough to get her to take it back for a fuller inspection. She has to get a taxi back as the news is dire and somewhat frightening. Both rear suspensions have failed, the crossarms are broken and the brake pads have worn out. It will cost a small fortune to get it repaired but that is a fraction of what a replacement car would cost. Repairs are authorised using the rest of the money put aside for our Christmas visits.
Just what might have happened had we ignored or missed those symptoms and gone ahead with our planned 500km road trip is probably best left to your imagination. It frightened me when I looked at the pile of parts taken from the car and replaced with new ones. The car has done over 300,000km in the last 20 years and the wear and tear was clear to see. When I reflect back on the circumstances that led to us finding this fault I remember what we had planned and how each of those trips were cancelled due to the weather and finally a nail in a tire. Where had that nail come from? Had it not been for us seeing there might be a problem our son and his wife might well have been touring the countryside on a car destined to fail.
There are still plans to lend the car to our son so he can show his wife some of the countryside but before he can do so we spot one of the tires is looking a little flat and sure enough there is a 10 psi difference between it and the other three. My wife takes the car to a garage to have it looked at and they confirm the tire has a nail in it but to make matters worse all four tires are life expired and have to be replaced. It was a good job we hadn't had our family holiday as some of the money saved now buys the new set of wheels for the car.
Just a day later my son reports the steering is faulty and randomly gets stuck for a second when making a sharp turn. The car goes back to the garage for a check but they can't repeat the fault. My wife can and that coupled with concerns about the noise coming from the back of the car is enough to get her to take it back for a fuller inspection. She has to get a taxi back as the news is dire and somewhat frightening. Both rear suspensions have failed, the crossarms are broken and the brake pads have worn out. It will cost a small fortune to get it repaired but that is a fraction of what a replacement car would cost. Repairs are authorised using the rest of the money put aside for our Christmas visits.
Just what might have happened had we ignored or missed those symptoms and gone ahead with our planned 500km road trip is probably best left to your imagination. It frightened me when I looked at the pile of parts taken from the car and replaced with new ones. The car has done over 300,000km in the last 20 years and the wear and tear was clear to see. When I reflect back on the circumstances that led to us finding this fault I remember what we had planned and how each of those trips were cancelled due to the weather and finally a nail in a tire. Where had that nail come from? Had it not been for us seeing there might be a problem our son and his wife might well have been touring the countryside on a car destined to fail.