Well, some of you caught this under Wedge's "Changing a Tire" post, but I thought I would post it here as well... mostly because it is taking up most of my non-work thought right now.
I made the cardinal mistake of driving my 2000 Oldsmobile Alero 10,000 miles between changes in oil. For those of you for whom this seems excessive driving, keep in mind I drive at least 80 miles a day just in my commute. Add to that an excessively busy first quarter of 2006, with no free weekends, and you get an idea how I let myself get into this mess. I may have been able to get away with this in a relatively new car, but the car has over 100,000 miles on it anyway. So, as of Friday, it started making a horrible clacking noise. BowHunter - close friend and salesman for BG products - diagnosed the problem as a "stuck lifter". i.e. The thing in the engine that lifts open the valves while you drive was getting no oil due to a clog in the thing underneath it that lifts it and keeps it lubricated. He tried to help me out by cleansing my car's oil system with some magic chemicals, and a new oil change. No luck. So I brought it into a mechanic yesterday. The sales advisor took one listen and started preparing me for a $5000 bill for a new engine. My car is only worth about $5000 by the blue book value, anyway. They are looking at the car more today, and I should have some idea of the "final" diagnosis.
My question for Mod-Bloggers and Mod-Blog readers is this: If I do need to buy a new car, rather than fixing this old one, what car do you recommend? I'd be looking in the $10K-$15K region, and I have a built-in bias towards buying American. (Though if the car is assembled in the USA, I can rationalize that as being good enough.) Wacko has pointed me toward CarMax, but the selection in CT seems a bit lean. Thoughts?
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