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The transmission on my vehicle (a 2003 Ford Explorer) just died. This was our "family" car, meaning that it was what we drove whenever we took Abigail out. Since I'm with Abbey most often, it was mainly "my" vehicle. Now, I'm stuck at home, with cabin fever nonetheless, and without a vehicle until we can figure out what to do from here.
Mike and I had known that it was starting to have some transmission problems for awhile now and it does have slightly high miles (approximately 109,000), but I'm still upset that it happened. We bought the vehicle used in 2007 and had it paid off shortly thereafter. I was really hoping to get more miles out of it, but at least I can say that I really did run it into the ground.
Mike is hesitant to fix it because of a few other issues it has. (I wish I could tell you exactly what the problems are, but I'm hopeless when it comes to this sort of thing. It has to do with the rear suspension....or something.) He's worried that we'll dump the money into the transmission only to have something else major go. At that point, we'd end up dumping more money into the Explorer than it's worth.
Luckily, we do have three other vehicles that we can use to get by: one is Mike's Pontiac Firebird that is currently in storage for the winter, a plow truck, and a Saturn something-or-other that Mike uses to drive to work since it gets fabulous gas mileage and he has a long commute. Since the Firebird can't be driven in the winter (and it's a standard so I can't drive it even if I wanted to) and Mike needs the Saturn, it looks like I'll be driving the plow truck - with the plow itself taken off, thank goodness, or I'd never be able to park it - for the time being.
Since his dad owns several car businesses, Mike will most likely attempt to sell the Explorer as-is at a dealer auction that his dad often frequents. At least then we should be able to get some money for the darned thing without having to put more money into it. We'll probably start looking for another "family" vehicle shortly afterwards as well.
Ugh. This is so NOT the way I wanted to go about buying a new car.
