A few weeks ago, I got my first-ever parking ticket. It was actually the first ticket of any kind I have gotten the entire time I have been driving. This was traumatic to some extent. My perfect record was gone.
This includes a couple of years when I was driving professionally, first as a messenger/delivery driver in San Francisco, where all the other drivers had speeding and parking tickets eating into their profits. I took it slow and was careful where I parked. I made decent money and did not have to pay any back in fines or higher insurance premiums. This job was followed by brief stints as a cab driver and a blood lab courier. All with no tickets.
The closest I ever got to a ticket was down around Monterey as I was heading to a delivery. I had misjudged a “dip” at the end of a driveway and was going a bit too fast. Hitting the dip must have cracked one of my headlights. It was not quite dark yet, but my lights were on. I had not really noticed the problem yet.
I saw a police vehicle approaching in the oncoming traffic. He did a U-turn after passing by and pulled me over to inform me I had a bad headlight. He must have been able to tell it had just happened, and clearly, I had not intended to disregard vehicle codes even though my truck was in pretty rough shape otherwise. He gave me a fix-it ticket. Those don’t count unless you ignore them. And I did not ignore this one.
I could not ignore the parking ticket either.
I really had thought I had plenty of time on my meter. Some of these LCD display meters are evidently a bit touchy. Although it looked like I had 42 minutes on the meter, it turned out to be more like 12. I will never actually know, though. What I do know is that I took my time in Peet’s that day, never thinking that I would be in any way late getting back to my car.
When I left to continue my errands, there it was under my wiper to greet me.
I am not saying that this ticket in any way informed my desire to get rid of this car. That was totally a coincidence. It just worked out that way.
My car was a nearly 10-year-old Prius. It was doing fine as far as anything I knew, anyway. But with a hybrid and its multitude of electronics and computers, how would I really know? The truth is, it was starting to make me nervous.
You always hate to hear noises you cannot understand. Some of the noises, I had even asked about. I was told to ignore it; it is not important. I could still hear this noise, though. It can’t be good if you still hear the noise, whether or not you are told to ignore it.
A Prius makes some noises that are totally different from any other car, and that’s normal. It is the additional ones or the lack of the normal ones that you have to worry about. It was not just about the noises, though.
At ten years old, things start needing replacement that can add up to a bit of money. This is a bit more disconcerting when you are dealing with a car that is more complex in its basic engineering than a typical non-hybrid car. Plus, they have all the other stuff to worry about that a normal car has. It is a double whammy. No way to win, especially when mechanics tell you that the noise you wanted him to check is nothing to worry about. Does he know any more than I do? Really? It is not his car. He will not have to pay for the repair, no matter what the noise turns out to be.
The tires were pretty much done, also. And I never liked them, so anything I found to replace them would have been even more expensive than they were. And with my luck, a few months after buying a new set of tires, that noise I was trying to ignore would turn into something catastrophic. Or I would just decide to buy a new car anyway. Then the new owner of my trade-in would have a tired older hybrid with great, low-mileage tires and a few other fixes. But it would still be making that noise no one else cared about.
You can see the dilemma I faced. I had to replace it before it got beyond repair.
I bought the new Prius on Saturday. I drove by the dealer’s used car lot the following Monday morning, and there was my old Prius right out in the most prominent spot in the lot. I have to say, it looked pretty good. It was clean and polished. The fogged-over headlight covers had been cleaned up. I could not tell if they had replaced the cracked fog light. Both the cracked fog light and the foggy headlight lens were known defects in some 2004 Prius cars. The problem with mine was that they did not go bad, even though the dealer would still have had to fix them. I wondered about the various noises and whether the mechanics had realized they could easily make them go away, so the new owner would not ask about them. Maybe it was not really such a tired old Prius after all. I was tempted to stop in to visit, at least to see the asking price. But I had already passed the entrance. On the way back would be better. Maybe I could find the entrance in time, going the other way.
I guess there must be quite a market for used hybrids. A few hours after seeing it on the lot, on the return trip, it was already gone.
If the new owner of my old car is out there, I hope that your new/used Prius serves you as well as it did me. And I hope that the noise I was worried about was as minor as they told me it was.
It was really not such a bad car.
Memory is the Key 