As you may know, my car is a complete and extraordinary piece of crap. It’s much more interesting to list the features that it doesn’t have than what it does have, so I’ll just do that for you here:
Power windows
Power mirrors (in fact, the mirrors that came standard weren’t adjustable from the inside of the car, and you instead had to roll down the window and adjust the mirror itself. This was great fun in the winter.)
Cruise control
Power seats
Variable intermittent windshield wiper speeds (I have two speeds: “on” and “on fast”)
Low Fuel warning light (if it actually exists, it’s never come on)
Interior gas tank release
Interior trunk release
Tachometer
Tripometer (resettable odometer for trips and such)
Floor mats
Clock
CD or Cassette player (The car was sold to me with a radio. Just a radio. It had been Frankensteined into the dashboard. A CD player was the first thing I installed.)
Speakers (Yes, the car came with a radio, and no speakers. We had to cut upholstery out of the doors to install the front speakers, and when we moved to the trunk to install the rear speakers we found solid metal where a speaker-mount should have been. So I have no rear speakers.)
All of this, of course, goes without saying that I don’t have a sunroof, alloy wheels, leather interior, or any luxury like that. A car with those features is the Shangri-La of automobiles that exists only in my imagination. I know the best I’ll ever attain is a car that has cruise control and, dare I hope, it’s own speakers.
The point of this belabored introduction is to not shock you when I explain that my speedometer doesn’t work in the winter. Well, it doesn’t completely not work, it’s just not very accurate in cold weather. For example, sometimes it stays stuck at five or ten miles per hour until I get up to about 30 or so. Or it’ll stay stuck at 30 or 40 when my speed has decreased to well below that. The most amusing is when I’ve come to a complete stop and the needle on the speedometer is only just then beginning to slowly drift from whatever speed I was previously traveling to the zero. If the traffic light is short enough, sometimes it never even reaches zero.
But all of that only happens while the car is still getting warmed up. Once the car gets warmed up a bit the sticking stops and the needle on the speedometer behaves just as it should… almost. The problem once the car is warmed up is that the speedometer starts making a horrible grinding noise between 10 and 60 miles per hour, so almost the totality of my commute. Further, when I’m cruising along at an even speed, say, 60 miles per hour, the needle will woggle up to ten miles per hour in either direction. It’s like stepping on a scale and watching the numbers bounce back and forth before they eventually settle. The thing is, though, that the needle in my car never settles. It just keeps bobbling back and forth between 50 and 70, occasionally pulling itself even on 60 and shivering there like a strand of wheat in the wind for a moment so I have some idea about the rate of speed at which I’m traveling.
I talked to my mechanic about it a while ago and he told me he’d never experienced a problem quite like that before, and he imagined that it would cost me a few hundred bucks to dig around and find out what the problem is. I told him that it works well enough the way it is, and he said he figured I’d bring it back when it would need to be replaced, which would probably be cheaper.
The good news is that if a cop pulls me over in the winter I can honestly say that I have no idea about how fast I’m going, but the bad news is that a judge would probably spank me for driving an automobile with a defective speedometer. The other good thing is that my car is like it’s own Groundhog Day; once I know how fast I’m going, I also know spring is on the way. I didn’t mean the whole day repeating thing, but that might be cool too.
Oh, and just to be clear, my car wasn’t built in the 60’s, or the 70’s, or even the 80’s. It was built in 96. It’s only 12 years old, and it runs like a dream. A dream surround by a hulking shell of dilapidated shit.
