Im very saddened to hear this. I was a faithful listener of Car Talk. At one point I moved to Boston. And I asked friends I had there several questions. One was where should I get my car repaired. I had a VW Rabbit lovingly nicknamed Jumper, not because it was a VW Rabbit, but because it had to be jumpstarted so often. The general consensus was to go to Cambridge and have any repairs made at tthe Good News Garage, run by the Magliozzi brothers. They didnt cheat people, were reasonable priced, and great at repairing all makes and models of cars.. In fact you could pay three ways. You could rent one of their bays and fix your car yourself (fixed hourly rate). You could have them do all the work (very reasonably priced). Or you could stand there and help them fix your car (charged half-again as much because you were looking over their shoulders, handing them the wrong tools, and not being all that helpful, etc). And best of all they were the funniest Car Repair people Ive ever had the pleasure of leaving my beloved car with. And they treated my beloved Jumper with respect and referred to it as the little patient. They even figured out a problem that not even Volkswagen dealers could figure. Volkswagen actually sent their best repair person from headquarters to try to figure out one of Jumpers problems. Frequently when I made a sharp right turn the car would just just off. This happened for over a year. My first visit to the Good News Garage and I told them about this problem that had stumped the best repair people Volkswagen sent to try to figure it out. VW actually sent an engineer from Germany to drive my car and try to figure out why it would shutoff sometimes when there was a sharp right turn. He took my car (they gave me a loaner) and drove my car for over a week, and it did it several times. They checked and rechecked everything, but couldnt figure out what was wrong. The Magliozzi brothers figured it out within an hour. Turns out there was a grommet that wasnt the right size on the attachment to the hole for the antenna. The rain had seeped in from the top and rotted away some wiring. You couldnt see this unless you took out the antenna and looked down. If I took a sharp right turn the assembly moved just enough that it caused the circuit to short and turn the car off. The Good News Garage changed the grommet, got new wiring, and I never had problems with that again. I notified Volkswagen. They checked the cars for my vehicle year and found that someone had misread a schematic and ordered the wrong size grommet for the antenna assembly. Other VW Rabbits had had problems, some with shutoffs, some with things starting up mysteriously. But it all had to do with the water having rusted connectors, or rotted some of the wiring. After I moved from Boston I didnt think about the two Magliozzi Brothers that ran the garage. Then one day I came across CAR TALK on the local NPR station. And, by golly, it was the guys who used to fix my beloved Jumper.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:46:33 +0000
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