Orange Light of Impending Doom

Cars have personalities ... They really do.

One element of that is their feelings, you can hurt a car's feelings and they do sulk. Honest ! This is a certified (hey ! who said "certifiable" ?) MEng Electronic Engineer talking.

Do Not Upset The Ghost In The Machine !

Ok ok, enough ramble, time for the "what is an Orange Light Of Impending Doom ?" answer. Since they kicked out the old mechanical solution for keeping an engine working right, there's been a light that tells you when the Engine Management Unit isn't happy. There can be any number of explanations for that, from loose connections to broken bits to sensors that are lying.

The Orange Light Of Impending Doom started coming on (when it shouldn't) on Tuesday. No discernable difference in the car's performance and all the dials are in the midline, looked and sounded ok under the bonnet too. So I let it go for a day or so to see if it would go away on its own. No such luck Wednesday, no such luck Thursday. Which, with my driving profile (about 10 miles a day), isn't too much of a risk with a possibly failing engine.

Thursday evening was when I got off my backside to start getting active on sorting out warranty stuff, although I started ringing a bit too late cos the warranty people had gone home. Probably a good thing because Orange Light Of Impending Doom was a no-show today.

Huzzah !

How about this Car Personality thing then ?

I've been getting bored with this car for a while now. After the Puma, it's bigger, heavier and about the same power to weight. Which means the Go Power is about the same but bigger and heavier means it's not so good at going round corners. Ho hum. Probably a bad choice to go for another performance car after the original one, maybe there's a good reason why I always go Cushy - Fast - Cushy - Fast.

My mistake this time was to mention the boredom while in the car ... Car's have ears, if they feel unloved they'll let you know.

How did I fix it ? There's the olde philosophical superstition argument here too :-) I was checking out how much it would cost me to change car last night. The Prius I'd go for is the T4 model, about £20,000 new. Toyota's site says their finance stuff would be looking for a £7,000 deposit and £200 a month over 3 years. Guaranteed Future Value thing would mean a further payment of £9,000 after the 3 years (or you start again on another new one).

Very curious :-) Although with 20 months left on my car loan, it would cost a couple of hundred pounds more to pay off the loan than I'd get in part exchange. And it would also throw away the guaranteed servicing deal and warranty I have. So I keep my current car for another year and a half, which gets me more time to get more Green Stuff and more time for Prius Mk3's new now to get older and cheaper.

Hopefully the Orange Light Of Impending Doom (OLOID ?) will stay away for the 8 months to the next service.

PS I reckon it was Speed Bumps upsetting something. Cos the schools are back, I've been forced to divert to Plan B route to get to work, which in infested with speed bumps.