Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Stalled

On the commute home from work today, The Wife calls and asks me to pick up a pizza order for dinner, as it's a Girl Scout night and there's not much time for dinner otherwise. So I get into New Braunfels and exit I-35 onto Walnut Street, and stop at the stoplight as I've done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.

And the engine in my car stops.

Just like that. No go anymore. No sputter, no coughing. It just shut down as if I'd turned the key. Now, I've been having problems with the cooling fan, so my first panicked thought was that the engine'd overheated and died on me, but this wasn't the case. Water temp was still relatively cool, which makes sense since I'd just exited the highway. Cranking was useless. The engine would turn over, but it wouldn't catch. There was more than a quarter of a tank of gas left, and plenty of battery power, so it wasn't the alternator gone bad.

In any event, I had a lot of irate people behind me at the stoplight. I get out and push my car through the intersection into a parking lot, and wait to have it towed (cell phones are nice in this situation). I leave the car at the garage, drop the key in the drop box and pull all the important stuff from my car as The Wife drives me home.

I'm hoping whatever's wrong with the car is a relatively simple (ie inexpensive) fix, such as a burned out distributor cap or somesuch. I'm not holding my breath, though. Seems like whenever something goes bad on a car I drive, it costs half the value of the vehicle to get it fixed...

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