Log 15: When 4 became 3.
Remember the previous log when I mentioned the Polo didn’t quite like it down south? Yeah I really think it doesn’t like it down south, because while still pondering the mystery of the intermittent oil level light, another interesting escapade occurred.
Like any good story, it started off with a fairly mundane morning. I was just leaving uni after a boring dreary lecture, on the way to lunch. The roads were empty and the roads were just a tad damp after a light sprinkling of rain. To wake myself up, I decided to give the Polo just a little squirt on these empty roads to let a minute amount of adrenaline flow.
So there I was, giving the accelerator a brief poke and watching the revs climb when the Polo just went pop! And the dash lit up like a Christmas tree. The check engine light was on, the EPC light was on, the traction control light was flashing; it was like my dashboard was doing an impression for the skyline of Vegas.
The Polo also became painfully slow — the seriously can’t merge with traffic slow.
Luckily, having just departed from uni, it wasn’t that difficult limping the Polo the three minutes back home. However that was the least of my problems, my bigger concern was when a car goes POP and multiple warning lights light up, it could only mean one thing — big bills ahead.
So while I was inwardly (and outwardly) cursing myself for making such a stupid decision to buy the damned Polo, I consulted the all-knowing Internet to try to find a (cheap) solution to my woes.
All this while trying the tried and tested turn-it-off-and-on-again technique, which to my dismay didn’t work.
The internet wasn’t my lord and saviour either as after a couple of minutes on it I still drew a blank. Luckily (for me) however, I did have the foresight to consult the VWOCM Facebook group and ask for recommendations on independent VW specialists, which at a time like this certainly came in handy. Google also provided me with the contacts of the nearby Volkswagen authorised service centres. So after a handful of calls, I had an appointment with Edge Performance Services in Mount Austin (more on them in the next log). From the brief conversation I had with the mechanic from Edge Performance, the Polo’s symptoms were analogous to ignition coil failure, meaning the Polo was still safe to drive… albeit on all three of its four cylinders to get the Polo to the shop.
However like all things in life, there was a catch. The catch being that shop was on the other side of Johor which is a close to a 40 minute drive from the sticks where I was stranded. Driving the Polo on three cylinders the three minutes from uni to home is one thing, driving it 40 minutes to the other side of Johor to get it fixed is another. And this was a 40 minute drive on a highway, with fast moving traffic, in a car with a dash full of warning lights, drives like a bucking bronco and is slower than a moving glacier.
Safe to say that was the scariest drive I had to make in my life (to date anyway).
Editor’s note: In hindsight, I should have called for a tow truck and any reasonable person would ask why didn’t you just call for the tow truck anyway? Well the answer was quite simple, I was/still am dumb. Being young and naive (and dumb), you tend to forget your insurance covers towing services in the heat of the moment. All that is running through your mind was how much is this repair going to cost and if I call a tow truck how much is that going to cost on top of this already potentially expensive repair?
It is near impossible to fully explain the feeling of fear, trepidation and worry when driving a broken car across the breadth of a state alone through a wide variety of traffic and road condition (I should know because I rewrote this section about 25 times and still can’t fully convey the true pant shitting experience) but I’ll try to anyway.
Just try to picture the scene where you are on the left most lane of the highway. Cars, and more scarily trucks and buses, are screaming by you while you are trying get up to a reasonable speed so the lorry doesn’t rear end you.
You want to give it more gas but there are two problems with that:
The first is that there is only so much power that can be generated from an engine running on three of its four cylinders — which equates to the power generated by a wheezing asthmatic pulling a heavily laden cart… in mud; and the second being that the mechanic only said that the ignition coil is the most likely cause of your woes so it could be something worse and in moments like this the pessimistic mind tells you that if you step on it more, you’re going to nuke the engine and you’ll go broke and live in the woods etc. The constant reminder your car is broken due to the permanent display of warning lights only reinforces these deepest darkest fears. So you are left playing this delicate dance with the throttle while silently praying to whichever and whoever up there that’ll listen and put you out of your misery.
Worse is to come, as the highway is only the first level hell. The boss level is when you encounter stop-start traffic or horror of horror — the intersection. It is at these situations that the severe lack of power (alá the wheezing asthmatic) and the bucking nature (attributed to the misfires) really makes you wish you have made better choices in life.
Because although it did take an age for the wheezing asthmatic to get up to speed on the highways, once you do eventually get up to speed, you maintain a constant speed so there was some form of calm after the initial fear of getting flattened by a lorry carrying instant noodles because you’re actually doing a speed that is acceptable on the slowest lane. Driving in the city however, instant get up and go is key, and it was this that was missing from the misfiring Polo.
The place where the lack of instant get up and go turns from being a nuisance to down-right lethal is when you are traversing a two-way junction. The normal procedure for traversing a two-way junction is to wait for when there are no cars in both directions before squirting it a tiny bit to make the move. No fuss, no drama and its all over in a second. When driving a glacially slow car however, the standard operating procedure was: wait till there are no cars in either direction, floor it as much as one dares and pray really hard that in the 10-15 seconds it takes to traverse the two lanes that one won’t be sideswiped. And hence this was the reason why my knuckles were white and my pants (figuratively) brown when I eventually limped my way to the garage.
Being the positive soul I am (not really but you got to end with a happy ending), I did manage to eke out one good thing(?) from this debacle of a journey, other than maybe calling a tow truck the next time it happens and that is that journeys like this is what makes one become a true petrolhead and makes you love your car more.
This does sound totally masochistic and this crazy thought was dreamt up during the brief moments of calm when the car was not a slow moving death trap on the highway, but throughout the drive when I was not thinking about the impending doom, I was enjoying it and willing the little Polo to go on, not as a machine but more as a friend who is on his last mile in a marathon. Yes the car is unreliable but this trait makes it more human.
That’s why, as the prophet Jeremy Clarkson once said: You can’t be a true petrolhead until you owned an Alfa Romeo, that is because Alfas being unreliable means that they develop personality and soul, and the same feeling is being forged here with the little Polo — taking me on the journey to become a fully fledged petrolhead, one breakdown at a time.
0 — 100:
Flashing lights + No power = Big bills ahead.
Symptoms indicative of ignition coil failure. Urgh.
First though, we need to get the Polo to the workshop, which was an interesting drive, to say the least.
But hey that is what makes one a petrolhead I guess, albeit a totally masochistic one.