Car Talk

[RVR II]

Went by the mechanic shop this morning and it's still not cranking.. They replaced the Crank sensor and Now it's throwing a Cam sensor code which is in the distributor.
I'm starting to get concerned about what the final mechanic bill is going to be..

[RVR II]

I'm starting to get concerned about what the final mechanic bill is going to be..

$402
For both the Crank & Cam sensors and labor.

[CJones]

Bought a new car today. And by "new" I mean a 2015 Camry. My old car, also a Camry, 1995, died on me a couple weeks back. One of the cylinders cracked its seal, so the car was basically running on three cylinders.

It seems to be a good car. I'm just upset about one thing: I had to get an automatic. My first three cars were manuals. This last car was an automatic, but I didn't have any choice in that car. I had wrecked my 2000 Accord and inherited my mom's old car. This time I really wanted to go back to a manual, but they seem to be impossible to find these days. At least in the US. Everywhere else in the world, manuals are the norm. Or so I've been told. Why does the US always have to be the outlier in every way?

The only manual I could find was a Honda Civic. I'm 6'3", so that wasn't going to work out

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Manual transmissions are OK until the clutch starts to go, I don't miss at all the "fun" of being at a light on a hill and trying to get the car moving with a worn out clutch plate...

[CJones]

Manual transmissions are OK until the clutch starts to go, I don't miss at all the "fun" of being at a light on a hill and trying to get the car moving with a worn out clutch plate...

I've never had that problem. Though I agree, trying to get moving from a standstill while on an incline isn't that great.

The only mechanical problem I've had with manuals is with the clutch hydraulics. I've had that fail a total of 5 times across 3 cars (3 times on the same car). Don't know why that system is so prone to failure. At least twice I had it happen on the Interstate and I had to drift the car into the grass, then walk to a telephone.

[CJones]

Had an interesting run in with the police today.

A cop pulled me over as I was on my way to get my allergy shots. He told me that the car I was driving wasn't the one that was registered to those plates, and one or the other might be stolen. I explained to him that I had just bought this car last week and had transferred the plates from my old car to this one. Apparently the DMV is just really bad at updating their records in a timely manner. I showed him the new registration with the current car and plates and he said everything was fine.

Then I asked him why he ran my plates in the first place and he told me he had a system in his car that automatically scanned all nearby plates and pulled up all relevant info as well as any potential red flags. It told him the car was supposed to be green, when it was actually blue (the old car was green). I'd never heard of such a thing before today, so I looked it up. It's called an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR). I have mixed feelings about this. In my case, I was early enough that being pulled over didn't make me miss my appointment. But that could easily have not been the case. I wasn't doing anything even remotely illegal, yet I still got stopped anyway.

I can see how this could be used to track a person's driving habits, and there are plenty of people who would consider this an invasion of their privacy. And I can't say I disagree.

[RVR II]

Here in SC we don't have vehicle inspections so people are allowed to drive cars and trucks that are literally falling apart so that's plenty of reason for the police to pull you over.
A system like that can pull up all sorts of info about the vehicle and who it's registered to so I can see the benefits but yeah it's a serious invasion of privacy that could probably be challenged in court I would think
https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/automated-license-plate-readers.aspx