I liked my car more when it had functional brakes.

[hwango]

Sunday afternoon I was going to drive to my gaming session, but when I pulled up to the end of my driveway and tried to stop and look both ways, my car sailed right out into the street, my brakes not really doing anything until I was way out into the road. Thankfully no one was coming either way. I backed up the driveway, and again the brakes didn't seem to be working well. I tried to pull into my parking space, and the car accelerated on its own and I had to shift it into park so I wouldn't crash into the stone wall between us and the neighbors. This was rather upsetting. Actually, it freaked the hell out of me. It was bad enough to feel myself oozing out into the road not knowing if anyone was about to crash into me from either side, but it was damn freaky to feel the car suddenly jolt backwards toward the wall. Fortunately I was already poised to shift into Park in order to stop if the brakes failed again, so I managed to stop in time.

The irony is that I was planning to get my oil changed and get my inspection sticker for the month on Monday. Hah ha. I guess neither of those things will be happening. Instead, it will probably get towed to the mechanic whenever he's got some time to look at it, and we'll take it from there. When I got home from my game (I was given a ride each way, since my car was obviously out of action) I had a note in my dad's writing that my brakeline is broken. I doubt that's something we can fix here, and that doesn't address the sudden acceleration problem, I don't think, so it's off to the mechanic.

Comments

Car

[tankhangen.livejournal.com]

Hey the whole acceleration thing might not be another problem, I believe it all comes from the breaks. Basically for an automatic transmission, when you step on the break you are taking the car out of gear, the reason you accelerated when you hit the break is two fold, one your break didn't slow you down at all, and two the acceleration was from you hitting the break, and it taking the car out of gear, which removes the normal parasitic drag the transmission has on acceleration. So it was like you are backing up, take your foot off the gas, and are just very slowly moving, but as soon as you hit the break again, it removes the parasitic drag, and you gain momentum do to our old friend gravity. Not sure if any of this is helpful, but it does leave me to believe that its just the break line, and nothing more, well I hope so at least.

Re: Car

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Hmm...well, if anyone confesses to cutting my brakes in the near future, I'll ask them if there was any other sabotage involved.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it's just rotted through, and not cut, so it's probably not sabotage. That, or, it's sabotage that was carried out by someone with decay-based superpowers...

...I suddenly regret those mean things that I said to Captain Compost.