Our oldest car is 15 years old. But it has low mileage and looks like new except for the normal dings from car doors, rocks, etc. But a few days ago, it got dinged in the rear by another car. From a distance, you can barely notice it, but the estimate to fix it was over a thousand dollars.
That got me to thinking…. about cars and costs and stuff like that. In 1972 we bought a brand new Corvette. Shortly after we bought it we started preparations to move to Manila in the Philippine Islands.
The headlights on Corvettes were/are “hidden” until they’re turned on and then they pop up to reveal the lights. From the day we bought the car, one of the headlights would creep open if the car was parked for an extended period — like overnight. Every morning when we approached the car, it looked like it was winking at us — or was hung-over after a bad night. We tried, and tried, and tried to get it fixed at the dealership with no luck.
We drove across country on our way to the Philippines and shipped the car to Manila from Los Angeles. On our cross-country trip we stopped in Oklahoma to visit my parents and my Dad’s favorite “best mechanic in the world” looked at the car and told us that he needed to order parts and a good part of the car need to be dis-assembled to install the new parts to correct the headlight issue. Since we only had a couple of days, we just didn’t have time for this “extensive repair.” So we drove to Los Angeles with the creeping headlight.
The car arrived in the Philippines a few weeks after we did. It turns out that when the car was being unloaded from the ship, it was dropped on the dock — I don’t think it fell very far, maybe ten feet or so. But it broke a switch that allowed the car to start only in neutral or park and somehow poked a hole in the muffler. Of course it still “winked” at you every morning.
We took to car to the local Chevrolet dealer to be repaired. The mechanics were very excited because they had never worked on a Corvette before. They were told to replace the switch and muffler and to take a look at the headlight — but not to spend too much time on the headlight as it was apparently a very complicated problem.
We got a call the next day that the car was ready. When I went to pick it up, the bill was something like 100 Pesos — I don’t remember the exchange rate at the time, but the total bill was less than twenty dollars. I asked them what they’d done… they “fixed” the switch, “patched” the muffler and took care of the headlight problem. I asked the about the headlight problem and they said they only needed to clean a valve.
Well, I figured with those kind of “repairs” the car would constantly be back to the shop or it would continue to have problems. We were in Manila a little over three years and we never had another problem with the Corvette with the exception of having to replace the battery a couple of years after we got there.
So much for high-tech cars and ace mechanics. Philippine mechanics still repaired cars instead of just replacing parts. Wonder how much it would cost to have our current cars’ dings repaired in Manila?
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