Waste of Money

When we were stationed at Fort Lewis, our Honda Accord finally died and we needed a new car quickly. We didn't spent the years I spent researching the Toyota and we had heard good things about Saturn, so we bought a Saturn LW 300. It has been nothing but a headache. While the car had less than 10K miles on it the tires started splitting. Then one thing after another went out. It was supposed to not need major servicing till after 100K but they changed that to 60K. Of course our warranty was out at 60K and the repairs found were in the thousands. I called Saturn and they picked up half of the tab because I was furious. Since then it is still causing problems and we are just holding it together till it dies. DH drives it back and forth to work and occasionally I run it to the gym or something. This hunk of junk now has over 116K miles on it--I NEVER thought it would make it this far. I took it in today to get my oil changed (which I used to do every 3K miles religiously until I hit 60K and had all those repairs). I also needed a state inspection so I had them do that as well. Of course the service guy comes in with a list of things that I need to have repaired.

The radiator leaks and that would be almost $1K. I told him it had been leaking for almost 20K miles and I wasn't going to fix it because I could just keep on adding water to it. Then he said the air conditioner fan was broken and when you idle it would not blow cold air only when you were moving and that was almost $1K. I told him I wouldn't slow down long enough to idle at all and that I spent over $2K repairing the entire ac system about 2 years ago or so. I'm not making anymore major investments in this car. If I didn't need a state inspection and an oil change (that's the other clincher you have to take it to the Saturn dealer for an oil change because they have a star shaped wrench to remove the oil filter and none of the other places have it) I wouldn't have taken it in at all. It makes me sick to think of all the money we have invested in this car, but DH and I consider it an expensive lesson. Oh well, it will be interesting to see how long it lasts.