Car Fixed!

Our Jetta has been so good to me for so many years now... it's been 9 years since I got home from my mission and we stopped by a car dealership on the way home from the airport to "pick up a car part"... actually a graduation present for me from my parents (I graduated before my mission). It was so nice to have a car in graduate school, no car payments, and good reliable vehicle that I drove all the time until we bought the van. And now it ferries Kevin to and from work.

Nine years... and it's really got to last 3 more! In Tooele County you don't have to do an emissions test to register your vehicle. So we weren't too concerned with the check engine light, when the mechanic told us it was the catalytic converter, and shouldn't affect our driving much. Now we're in Salt Lake County though, and they take these things much more seriously!

To try not to elongate a kind of boring story.... we took the Jetta in to get a new catalytic conveter to pass emissions. They told us there were 3 major things wrong with it that needed to be fixed to pass, plus a bunch of little things to fix it altogether. Since the bill added up to $1500, we got a second opinion that confirmed that the oxygen sensor and the catalytic converter did indeed need to be fixed, but the computer might not need to be replaced-- it could possibly be coding because our battery was sooo low. The second place couldn't even come close to the bid the first place gave for fixing those items (they said, wow, we'd like to know where they are getting their parts too at prices like that!).

It's good we got a second opinion to find out more about the relationship between the battery and the car computer, and to realize we weren't getting ripped off at the first place. Even though we spent the majority of last week ferrying each other back and forth between auto shops dropping off cars.

The result: we replaced those two items, we passed emissions, and we are good to go... for another year. And Kevin can work on those other minor fixes. And hopefully the Jetta can go on much farther than the 147,000 miles it currently has on it! Thank goodness Kevin works much closer to home now and only puts on 10 miles a day most days.

So, if you need a place to get your car fixed, we highly recommend World Class Auto Service in American Fork. They told us which parts are good to buy aftermarket and which parts they have had trouble with when buying aftermarket. Their bid for replacing a catalytic converter was less than half of the price we got from calling around to 4 other shops. It was well worth the drive to save over $600! They were nice and took time to test drive the car to make sure the problems were all fixed, and even made sure the car passed emissions before it left their shop the final time, even though we had actually paid to have the emissions test done at a place much closer to home at the start of this ordeal. Finding a mechanic is such a pain, we were so happy this recommendation from Kevin's coworker worked out so well for us, I thought I'd pass it along.