Yahoo Autos Aaron Robinson: Mistakes Were Made, Investigations Are Ongoing, and Sensitivities Were Offended
From the July 2014 Issue of Car and Driver
GM’s ignition-switch crisis wore out my patience in a few days. Of the 13 fatalities repeatedly cited as indictments of GM’s badly designed, self-stalling cars, nine of them also involved alcohol, drugs, or lack of seatbelt use. If GM is a pack of murderous skinflinting bastards, at least some of its victims have served as able accomplices to the crime. Particularly repellent are the congressional hearings, whereupon the esteemed members fulminate for the cameras at the same supposedly incompetent regulators that only yesterday they were castigating as heavy-handed, antibusiness, and unworthy of funding. It reminds me of the old joke about a restaurant where “the food was so bad . . . and there was so little of it.” Disgusted by the news, I went out to the garage, where the devil always finds work for idle hands. It began with the gnawing feeling that my 1995 Mitsubishi Montero, 121,000 miles, needed new spark plugs. Why? Well, over seven years of faithful, rock-solid service, they had never been changed. There was no evidence that they needed changing, but it seemed like the nice thing to do. I also bought a set of pretty, blue NGK ignition cables that didn’t stay pretty for long.
On the Montero, you must remove the intake plenum to get at the plugs because, apparently, four engineering teams on five continents speaking seven languages designed this truck. Don’t even get me started on the timing belt, which cost me a week of labor and about a quart of blood to change. On the plenum, there are nuts and bolts all over, hidden under blobs of grease and behind brackets and cables and camouflaged like phasmids to disappear in the metal forest. If you dumped a bag of M&M’s on the floor, it couldn’t create a more random pattern.
I unboxed the new plugs, laid them out on a towel, set their gaps, and one by one glided them in on a sticky smear of electrical grease. I routed the cables, attempted to wipe my filthy fingerprints and blood off their blue insulation, and then put the whole clockworks back together. Finally, I started it up and was rewarded with a happy, humming engine. For about 10 seconds. Then there was a gulp, followed by an intermittent rattling from within. “Tick . . . ticka-ticka . . . tick . . . tick tick tick.” I lunged for the ignition.
In the reassembly, there had been one missing bolt and one missing washer, both small. You think you know where this is going, but you don’t because I know exactly where each fastener went astray. The bolt fell into the vee of the block, underneath a water pipe, and no amount of probing with a magnet would free it. Later, to satisfy my own conscience, I dug it out. As for the washer, I had watched it slip from my grasp and fall down the back of the engine, well before the plenum was off. But it never made it to the ground and remains somewhere on the transmission. I’m certain of that. Yet, somehow something incompressible slipped into that engine—into the No. six cylinder, I later determined. After a couple of days of wall-kicking and self-flagellation, I removed the plenum again and poked the magnet down every plug hole and intake tract. Nothing would come up. I levered the engine back and forth, trying to loosen whatever was causing grief in the machine. Nothing. Having no other options short of taking a month off work to pull the cylinder heads, I put it all back together and restarted it. The intermittent ticking instantly became a loud, steady banging, as if .38-caliber bullets were being used for fuel. I shut it off—forever.
Our cheap and tough Montero, in which we had spent many a delightful hour roaming the high Mojave, exploring the Alvord Desert, climbing Lippincott Mine Road, and accidentally discovering Utah’s unearthly Cathedral Valley, was in total coronary thrombosis, felled about 50,000 miles before its time, I figure. It deserved better. I lay down on the living-room floor and let a deep depression set in, akin, perhaps, to what people feel after they’ve accidentally run over their dog.
A planned autopsy stalled for lack of a borescope to look inside the cylinders. What I did have, though, is Craigslist, which instead found me a clean ’98 Montero for $3500. It was the same shade of turf green, but it had the larger 3.5-liter 24-valve V-6, the optional locking rear differential that I have always wanted, and just 111,000 miles. When I showed up at the seller’s house to collect the truck, his children screamed and wept. Monteros get under your skin; a lot of animal crackers were under its skin.
Oh, I’m paying my penance. The new truck also needed a timing belt. More blood. I spent a pile at the dealer letting them do the cam-cover seals and a tranny flush. The old Montero is still here, donating parts, an incriminating corpse glowering at me like Émile Zola silently shouting “J’accuse!” as I walk past. Soon it will be donated to the public radio station for scrap value, thereafter to be recycled as part of the great automotive circle of life.
One good thing about this shameful debacle: I won’t have to testify in front of Congress about it.
You Might Also Like
