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Legend of the Shitvette: I bought a used Chevrolet Chevette in the 1980's, when I was in high school. It came in the standard, boring metallic light blue: a nondescript hatchback assembled from unremarkable lights, handles and grilles. It didn't last a year.
Connecticut's the sort of place where you'll drive fifteen miles to the next town for a shop. I'd found my tribe on a local computer forum so I was doing that all the time. I'd got the car as a last-minute replacement for a station wagon I never put oil in. I was a busy VHS filmmaker and my social network was a dial-up BBS so ya gotta forgive my ignorance of auto maintenance.
Our online crew had magnificently blossomed into pizza parties in Orange, and the Chevette got me there from Cheshire one Saturday without incident. It was almost dark later, when I stepped down from Jim's farmhouse on Grassy Hill and climbed into the chilly car. I turned the key in the ignition and was greeted with dead silence. I tried again. Nothing.
Half an hour later I had a tow truck lashed up to the battery but it made no difference. Soon I was riding shotgun in the dark, smelling machine oil in upholstery and trundling back to a garage in Cheshire.
The next morning I got the call to pick up the car, and they'd charged me nothing. It had simply started up when they turned the key and no one knew why it had failed. With only moderate worry I got back to my life and got back to Orange and was promptly stranded again.
I felt like the boy who cried 'wolf'. The car was always dead enough to tow but repeatedly live enough to drive home from the garage. I was filled with dread: I could never leave home in the car knowing if I'd get back the same way. After three or four of these disasters, at last a mechanic cracked it.
When a twentieth century car key is turned, electric current flows from the battery and a motor momentarily spins: copper wire, spooled tightly round chunky metal magnets. The starter motor on the Shitvette had a bad spot, and every time it spun I played a kind of Russian Roulette. If the motor came to rest with the bad spot facing the electrode, current just wouldn't flow next time the key was turned. Worse still, the starter motor hovered lightly in its magnetic field and shifted slightly while the car was being towed, so the car would start up on arrival.
After repairs, I made my peace with that boring Chevette until one fateful day, when I taught my sister to drive. It wasn't an especially legal thing for me to have done and sure enough, she smashed up the front end at an intersection. I quickly swapped places with her before the cops turned up but later, in a wash of emotion, I confessed the deception to the authorities. The damage to the car wasn't obviously dramatic but nevertheless the Shitvette had been totalled – and I was glad to see the back of it.
'beeblePete' Fagan