Bloody euro-trash

As many of you are aware, one of the idiosyncrasies of my car is that it kind of loses acceleration at times - mid journey. You can have your foot to the floor and its not having a bar of it - slowly decelerating.

Now this is of course fixed by turning the car off - and then starting it again. I used to pull over to do this (arguably safely), but I worked out that if you have enough momentum built up, you can flick it into neutral, turn the key off, and then start it again, flick it back in drive and you're good as gold. Well unless its a cold morning, and then you're good as gold for about 500m - when in all likelihood, you'll have to repeat the exercise. And even then its been known to do it as many as four times in a row - but after that - you're good as gold.

This usually leads to a mixture of reactions from passengers. Either they've been in the car before and are blase about the whole thing, they find it funny, or they're reaching for the door handle - preparing to commando roll outta there.

But the other night, a colleague from Auckland came down and we were taking my car to a function. Predictably, after sitting all day the car did its thing not 200m down the road from her hotel. But instead of carrying on like previous passengers, she said - "Oh! Your car does that too?!? I used to have a Peugeot 306 - it did the same thing!"

Finally, someone who understood. So we had a great yarn talking about the pitfalls of buying European cars (unsurprisingly, she drives a Toyota now). What worried me though, was that she said spending the $2000 to fix it was a waste of time, as it made no difference. Her advice - drive it into the ground and sell it on to some other un-knowing schmuck!