That's My Bix!

I’m going to warn you right now, this is going to be boring as hell, unless you really like talking about cars.

It’s official: my Nissan Murano is now the most annoying vehicle that I’ve ever owned. This is quite a feat when you consider the vehicles I’ve driven in my illustrious two decades (holy shit I’m old) as a driver.

For instance, I started with a red 1976 Chevy Monza that looked, in the immortal words of my beloved, like a “red colostomy bag” and during its 30k miles in my service, required something like three times its purchase price ($800) in repairs until it managed to completely shit the bed at 82K miles and was sold to some rando from the neighborhood for $75. During the most famous Monza meltdown, I had broken down about thirty miles away from my college town (and 230 miles from GB) in November, forced to walk up a lumber road to find a phone and yet, the guy I was dating grudgingly agreed to come and get me but made me wait until he finished cooking and eating a box of macaroni & cheese, which necessitated his prompt kick to the curb, heralding the beginning of the Esteban Epoch.

I probably would have continued to pour cash into the Monza but Esteban hated the car so fiercely that he bought me a $550 1984 Nissan Sentra as bribery (what, we were 20 and broke). The Sentra was a great little car, in that it had a reasonably satisfactory radio and allegedly had air-conditioning. Esteban had gotten a great deal on the car because the driver’s door had been crunched in an accident, but he bought another door at a junk yard and did amateur auto painting to match the original steel blue mist. Well, it matched, but the gloss top coat wasn’t exactly factory Nissan, so depending on how you viewed the car, the door was either darker or lighter than the rest of the body. This became a non-issue later when some thieves broke the window on the passenger side door, and since the previous attempt at reseating the driver’s window had been such a pain, and the car was such a beater that Esteban just slapped another junkyard door on it and didn’t bother to go through with the motions of trying to match the color. The brown passenger door on a blue body gave the car a somewhat vaudevillian air. The Sentra was a monster of a worker, though, despite the fact that the carburetor was going out, sometimes the car would start fine and then when you had gotten just far enough away from wherever you were leaving that it would be annoying to walk back, it would stall. I learned to carry a small can of gasoline which I would then pour directly into the carburetor so that I could prime the well, so to speak. This was a good workaround, until one time the stupid thing caught on fire with my 80-year-old great grandmother in the front seat. The fuel pump also gave out in the coldest day in November, stranding me in another town, requiring another walk down a lonely road to a phone, although this time Ward dropped what he was doing right away to drive the 40 miles to fetch my frozen ass. The car also started losing various little semblances of sanity: for instance, the driver’s seat broke at one point, meaning that whenever you stopped the car, you would find yourself falling backwards into the lap of the poor sucker who happened to be sitting behind you. And did I mention that it was a fucking stick shift? Which meant that at the end of a hard night working whatever shit job I had at the time, I then had to perform a series of coordinated hand and foot gestures to appease the persnickety clutch. Even with all of this, we still view that car as one of the best we ever owned, as it was amazing in the snow, got incredible gas mileage, was oddly roomy (five very tall people with no problems) and at the end of its four-year tenure with us, we sold it for a clean $500.

Then there was the white Pontiac 6000 that was anointed with cat pee on Tilly’s inaugural voyage and then smelled like cat pee for the next two years, despite several professional car detailings and an entire weekend with a deionizer (or some magic No-Pee-Smell machine) running at full speed (we solved the problem by trading in the car for Esteban’s Chevy truck). That was followed by the black Pontiac 6000, the previous owner of which had apparently needed to drive up and down gravel roads at high speeds, absolutely pitting the corners and edges of the car with paint chips and deterioration and much to my chagrin, was built like a tank and was still running perfectly when we drove it to the junk yard after letting it sit untouched in our driveway for three years (probably more annoying than the six months I spent driving it with a shitty muffler and no stereo).  Then there was the Monte Carlo but that was hardly a speck of irritation, as its only annoyances were the fourteen foot long doors and its association with NASCAR.

But the Murano has beaten them all. It’s got a lot of little irritations, things that you would never notice on a test drive. For instance, the passenger seat doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that the driver’s seat has, but it’s also slightly less padded. It’s fine at first, but after about two hours in the car, you realize that you’re really fucking uncomfortable. It just sneaks up on you. I think that the angle of the seat is just wrong and there’s literally no way that you can fix it without the controls afforded to the driver’s side. Also, the Intel key is very cool, but the buttons are kind of flat on it, making them easy to accidentally press, a fact that plagues my husband who throws his key ring into his pocket and then accidentally sets off the alarm when he bends over to pick up something. Ok, that’s mildly humorous, but there’s another option on the Intel key too: if you hold down the Unlock button, it both unlocks the doors AND unrolls both the front windows, which is AWESOME when you walk outside after a rainstorm and realize that Esteban’s ass rolled the windows down again. Also, the angle of the doors are just a little bit weird, and we’re constantly hitting our heads when we get in and out of the car. Not a glancing bump, either, as both of us have nailed ourselves so badly that we’ve seen stars and once I thought I was going to have to take Esteban to the hospital with a concussion.

And then there’s the broke crap.

It’s the first brand new car I’ve ever owned, so maybe I have unreasonable expectations. I tend to think of cars almost like animals, and there are no bad cars, only bad owners.  When things went wrong on previous vehicles, I would always suspect that it had come from a bad home, hadn’t been properly trained, or maybe the guy who owned it before had been reefing on the steering wheel too much, or riding the brakes like an asshole. With my Murano, I know damned well that its problems are out of the blue. For instance, about six months after we bought the car, the driver’s window would go up, hit the top and then come back down. Of course, this happened in January. Then the driver’s seat started having mysterious rocking, and a panel came off. Then the cool little center console door broke, meaning that it’s always popped open, so the driver ends up jamming their arm on the side of the door instead of having a nice arm rest. And then there’s the gas bitchiness.

You see, the Murano is a size queen about gas pumps.

Some are too big. Some are too fast. Some are just fucking Shell stations, which won’t do at all. Sometimes you’re filling what you know is an empty tank and the Murano would say “Uh uh, I’ve had just enough of this shit right here” and pretend to be full at 4 gallons. I had given up and whenever possible, get gas from a full service place because Adam (yes, I know his name) knows how to stick it in right and how to deliver the payload (oh my god, that’s just too easy). But two weeks ago, the Murano had gotten into full gas meltdown mode and was puking back petrol every four or five ounces of gas. We took it to the dealer, where thank GOD we bought the extended warranty, and they explained to us that there are phalanges or something inside the gas tank and one of them probably needed to be replaced. Awesome. They did it up righteous and the Murano was accepting of any hose, Shell or not, for a beautiful two fills, and then the third time, had a complete meltdown again. This time the dealer wanted to replace the entire gas tank, as apparently there were more phalanges inside the tank to prevent sloshing? Something? I don’t know, I stopped listening. Meanwhile, the extended warranty place said “Oh bullshit you are.” and wanted to send someone over to look at the gas tank. Two days later, they realized that in order to see what was going on, they’d have to cut the original gas tank in half (requiring a replacement anyway), they gave up and approved the $1K repair. And that was on top of the repair for the stupid arm rest door thingy.

I will never buy a new car again. It was so expensive! And I’m going to be stuck driving it forever, because we assumed that we’d get so much more use out of it due to the fact that it had zero miles on it. Stupid stupid stupid! And that despite the fact that I KNOW that a car is the worst investment you can make because it’s nothing but depreciation and heart ache.

Now I totally understand why that Papa John’s guy put up the quarter of a million dollar bounty for his old gold and black Camaro, because I kind of wish I had that Nissan Sentra back right now. Maybe not with the weird ass doors, though.