Yeah, I loved my Saturn so much. When I went shopping, I even looked around for a similar one, but never was able to find another one with a manual transmission anywhere local. I can count the problems I had with it over 5 years on one hand, only one of them was anything major.
More spoilers as it's a long, ranty post.
1. the overhead upholstry started to drop down. Had that fixed for a couple hundred bucks.
2. The plastic cover to the right of the driver's right leg refused to stay on. (Just pulled it off and threw it in the trunk.)
3. The windshield wipers had a couple of weird quirks. They'd always work fine... just sometimes they wouldn't stop working, requiring me to pull the fuse from the passenger side footwell fuse box. It was annoying, but I just dealt with it. Sometimes they would just start up, or go once for no reason, or for making a semi-sharp turn, or for hitting a bump in the road.
4. The shifter linkage went out on me one day as I was backing out of my friend's driveway. The thing got stuck in reverse. That was about $200 in repairs and parts and another $50 in towing costs. Annoying, but nothing major.
Other than that, and normal maintainance, I'd never had a problem with that car. Part of it though, I think, was that there was not an extra, or automatic feature on that car. Manual locks, manual windows. Only perks were AM/FM radio (with a tape deck) and an A/C. There was almost nothing TO break.
On the other hand, my cavalier had a couple of problems right off the lot, and has developed a few more.
To start:
The dash is cracked, severely. I can just lift chunks of it off. Sun damage, I'd guess, but I'd never seen a car this young, this bad.
The AC had a weird problem. At first it would only blow on my feet, no matter what setting I had it on.
A couple weeks after I got the car, I was driving home one misty night, and rolled my window down, because it had started to fog up. As I rolled it back up, something snapped and the whole pane of glass just dropped down into the door. It was completely loose, the little bit I could reach I could actually grab and slide back up, but it wouldn't stay. So, I took it in, under warranty, paid $100, got it and the AC fixed. (They wanted to charge me extra for the AC, but I never approved the work, they just did it anyway, so I got that for free.)
After a while, the switches on both the e-brake, and the reverse position on the shifter went out. The daytime running lights usually won't go out when I put on the e-brake and my backup lights won't turn on when I shift into reverse.
Most recently, just a week or two ago, my AC started making weird sounds, like something's stuck and going clack clack clack clack, constantly any time I turn it off of "recirculate". Normally, I could deal with that. and for now it's fine, in the summer. But for some absolutely stupid reason, they made it so you can't turn off the AC compressor if you have it on the recirculate setting. So, once winter rolls around, I won't have an effective heater in my car and as it is, I have a choice between either, burning extra gas with the AC and being cool, or sweating with the windows down and the AC completely off.
Honestly, the Cavalier just feels like it's meant to fall apart on me. Only good thing I can say is that it does drive reasonably well, not fast, but smooth. Then again, there's so many "automatic" things on it, I'm just waiting for something major to go out. Particularly worried about the power steering. Family and friends have had that go out on them before. I know how hard it is to turn without it. (Yet my saturn had simple rack and pinion steering, and I was completely happy with it.) The rest would generally just be an annoyance, like the windows. And the locks, luckily can by cycled manually if needed.
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Topic: The Car Thread (AKA The Anti-Deadmeat thread) (Read 1924 times)