"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
1 December 2007This stuff is exhaustingIt's a fair distance from Gwendolyn's exhaust manifold to her two-stage muffler, and along the way are no fewer than three catalytic converters. Somewhere on the far side of 90,000 miles, I had to replace the front tube, where the pre-cat lives, followed shortly thereafter by the center cat, and after handing over my Visa for that second replacement, I ruefully asked the service manager when I could expect the rear unit to fail. He said he'd never seen one of those go bad. I suppose, though, it's probably a lot like this:
[T]he item to be "fixed" was exhaust (all three catalytic converters) — and they could fix it in a couple days, and for the cost of the parts. (plus, I got the good muffler and the OEM parts) So I get someone else to do the labor, and I still get the good parts. Not a spot of rust on the "old" stuff, by the way. I mean, surface rust, but not one thing rusted through.
However, one amortizes this in the expected fashion:
Guess I can't expect that cat to run for 300,000 miles. I expect to drive this for at least another 150,000 miles and at 1500 bucks, that's about a penny a mile.
I'm shooting for 200,000. Maybe I'm insufficiently ambitious. Then again, I drive only about 11,000 miles a year, which means I have a bit less than nine years to go. (And really, I just want to beat the mileage on my old Celica, retired at 194,500 miles.) Posted at 8:53 AM to Driver's SeatI once owned a 1971 Celica that had 412,500 miles on it, and looked it. But it was structurally sound, needed nothing but a lot of cosmetic work, and still ran like a top the day I gave it to a local teenager in thanks for his having mowed my lawn for several years. Three days later he wrapped it around a telephone pole. Sic transit gloria mundi. But I've been an admirer of Toyota's engineering and quality assurance ever since. Those little four-bangers were bulletproof, possibly even grenade-resistant; they weren't especially fuel-efficient, but they didn't have to haul around ginormous amounts of mass, which helped immensely. (The first-generation Celicas weighed in at around 2300 lb, which was hefty for a Toyota but downright tiny compared to Detroit trundlers of the era.) Posted by: CGHill at 12:14 PM on 1 December 2007 |