My Jeep Tried to Kill Me, But Here’s Why I Forgave Her

“Goddamn it,” I thought to myself. “I’m letting her down, I’m sputtering out. How do I tell her my engine is overheating?” I decided the best way to inform my newest owner that my engine was overheating was to make loud cranking noises. When I say loud, I mean incurably loud. I felt her manually roll down the window, listening for other sounds. “Finally,” I sighed, “she heard me.” She began easing her foot off of the gas and handled me gently. She really cares about me—I can tell. Mumbles escaped from her, and I felt content. She led me into the driveway, safely parking me in the exact spot I rest in every day. My underside rested above a pan that collects my leakage daily. I can’t help that I’m getting older.

“Goddamn it,” I exclaimed. My car, my 1999 Jeep Wrangler, bestowed to me as a temporary means of transportation during the COVID-19 quarantine, makes excruciatingly clamorous sounds at the most inconvenient times. Before it was mine, it was my father’s—only to be used during winters and weekends for plowing the driveway of my childhood home and of his office’s parking lot. He warned me to be careful while driving it, and to not go far, knowing my penchant for exploring. The engine was rickety. I was only going forty miles an hour up a hill better suited for sixty miles an hour. I rolled down my window to better hear the noise. Once I reached the top of the hill, I eased off the gas—I knew when a break was needed. Eventually, I pulled into my driveway in a specific spot so that the pan we put down could catch the leaking oil from the bottom of the Jeep instead of staining the driveway. I hopped out of the car, slamming the door shut. I patted the car once.

“It’s a wonder you run at all, Viv,” I said.

A photo of me and my car. Yes, we both look bad.

After stalling one too many times on one too many roads to the point of (what I assumed was) complete engine failure, I wondered out loud what could be ailing my car. I called up the man who has done the most work on my new-old Jeep (tentatively named Viv), Vinney Curran. Curran has been in the automotive repair business for over 40 years and runs his own successful local business, Vinney’s Automotive Inc., in Congers, NY. As the man who handled my own car before it was even mine, I found answers about its finicky ways from Curran quite easily—he was familiar with Viv’s condition off-rip.

A picture of my Jeep’s engine after stalling and releasing smoky odors.

“Okay, well, one of the things originally wrong with the Jeep was that it had a multitude of oil leaks. One of them, which was the oil pan itself that rotted out, had led to oil leaking through the oil pan… so we had to replace the oil pan,” Curran said immediately after I asked about the major things that originally needed fixing with my Jeep.

He continued, “We also replaced the valve cover gasket, which is at the top of the engine. The oil pan is at the bottom of the engine. Replacing a valve cover gasket happens a lot as vehicles get older.”

Curran claimed that once they resolved those problems, they had found a minor leak through the rear banging seal on the engine, thus explaining the need for an external pan to be placed under my car to catch excess oil drips. I couldn’t help but laugh at the inability of an older vehicle to contain its liquids. I suppose the older things get, the less elastic they become.

Driving Viv, I can’t help but smile. Even if driving this Jeep might kill me, I love the feeling of it. It’s a car that is built to be beaten, sold to be broken, and used with power. It’s old, it’s clunky, it has an engine that is so loud I considered investing in ear plugs, but it provides an experience that your brand new 2020 Honda Accord does not—and could not, for that matter.

Riding with the windows down one day, which I manually roll down every time I want a breeze, I lose myself in my thoughts while crossing over the causeway in my town. Looking away from the road and out at the sparkling water surrounding me, I remember all of the hot summers spent driving around and going to car shows with my dad when I was young.

I couldn’t have been older than eleven before he implanted what the value of an older car is upon me. It was when he got his first collector’s hot rod—a six speed, hemi-engine 2011 Dodge Challenger SRT8, complete with impeccable black paint. At its highest speeds, it imitates shadows passing through the street. I can vividly recall a whirlwind of emotions the first time my dad and I raced through empty streets together. It was not fear or any other manifestation of a negative feeling. It was excitement to move so fast. It was tranquil, too, to watch the trees blur into green blobs, the white clouds mix with the blue sky, the only clear thing ahead being the lines in the road. There was something to driving a vehicle more powerful than you could ever be that seemed explicitly beautiful and human to me, even though it’s inherently the opposite.

My father’s passed-down-passion for beautiful hot rods has always left me questioning exactly what it is about the machines that have (mostly men) creating entire clubs revolving around the sole purpose of showing off cars that they barely use. This was the main part of hot rod fanaticism that I could never truly understand. I have deep love for cars, whether it be nice cars, old cars, new cars, sexy cars, big cars—you name it. But I also hold a deeper love for driving them. Most favorably, recklessly (if it’s up to me).

John Ballow, a hot rod enthusiast from Long Island, NY, cleared up this misunderstanding for me. I explained this notion to him, that hot rods deserve to be driven, and how I couldn’t exactly understand why people wouldn’t want to drive expensive and gorgeous vehicles.

“That’s why there are collectors, and there are drivers,” claimed Ballow.

After detailing a story to me about what it was like to be a teenager and drive the ever-popular and always-coveted 1963 Corvette convertible during the “muscle car era” in the late 1960s, it was clear that even when driving cars that were essentially made to show off—not drive—something about driving these cars elicited a powerful and nostalgic feeling.

“That car, to me, was the marking point where I was like ‘Wow, one of these days when I grow up, I’m going to get a car. I’m going to get something like that,’” Ballow said. And that’s exactly what he did. He currently has a 1994 Mazda RX7 with twin turbo that can go from 0 to 60 in 5.3 seconds—easily fulfilling his fast-car-owner fantasies.

His closing sentiments about that story reminded me that for many people, the obsession with older cars is not necessarily because they run well, or better. In fact, they usually don’t run any better than newer, standard cars do. Cars naturally rot with age, and like anything else, things begin falling apart. Steve Koch, a general contractor from Long Island, NY, is a man who spends a lot of his time fixing up old hot rods. I asked him why he considers cars his passion project.

“Well, I started playing with cars when I was 16, really. When I got out of high school, teachers told my parents, ‘Don’t worry Mr. and Mrs. Koch, he can’t read or write, but he can fix a car!’” Koch joked, “And two weeks later, that’s what I started doing. So I am a general contractor who might or might not help you with your car problems!”

After asking him what, exactly, the main issue with older cars is, Koch simply stated, “Rot! Rot, man.” He continued, “it’s rot and rust.”

Koch went on further to explain that rot and rust negatively affects the body of the car and how it may look over time.

“You can always get a car to run well, even if the car looks bad. A car can look great, too, but run like shit. Things rust out, they fall off, and then they’re not safe,” Koch added.

I explained to him the ongoing laundry list of problems with my Jeep, and even detailed the moment where I drove my car for about a mile and a half back to my house before it completely stalled in my driveway. “I had to turn it off and back on in order to simply get it up my driveway,” I told him. “The check engine light has been on for weeks, and my father and I have tried tinkering with quite a few different things to fix this. What are we missing?”

“Well, there’s several ways to fix that, but the way that I did on my truck—which is a much newer vehicle—I actually did not have time to fix it myself,” he explained. “The dealer, they charged me only $800 for a new oil pan, and another $1,500 to put it in, which is just sarcastic. It’s just infuriating, because the part itself is made out of about ninety-eight cents worth of steel, and there’s no labor involved other than attaching it. Dealers screw you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at such a simple, yet honest claim. Car dealers are notorious for price-gouging since fixing cars is not exactly an easy skill to acquire, and it can be hard to find an auto repair shop you can trust.

“But regardless of that, your Jeep probably needs new brake lines and new hoses. You’ve also got one of several choices when it comes to the engine. I would say the reason why it’s stalling is probably because nobody’s ever changed the fuel filters on it. Change the fuel filters, and look for vacuum leaks,” Koch stated.

A photo of me, my dad, and the cursed Jeep. Generational fun.

I have yet to do either of these things, but I plan to soon. My Jeep, Viv, is essentially undriveable as of right now. This is not for lack of professional advice and help, but mostly because it’s not really like I have anywhere to go right now, given the current state of the world. The main purpose of fixing it is to grant myself the sense of freedom I’ve always felt when driving around aimlessly. And, after talking to three men who share my interest, I know I’m not alone in this expensive habit. Plus, I never used to understand the obsession around driving older cars, hot rod or not, but now I get it. Not only does it make you feel like you’re in a low-budget indie movie, but there is an overwhelming nostalgia to it. For them, it encapsulates a longing for a different time—a simpler time. For me, it’s evocative of something I’ve never known, but always craved.

I can’t help but think about how a person’s car, whether they realize it or not, reflect parts of their personalities. For example, driving a Prius speaks of a sensible nature. It’s insanely difficult to articulate how an inanimate object whose only purpose is to transport you from one place to another can elicit such strong emotions from people, or any emotions at all. I’ve owned and shared three cars in my life, each one having a different meaning to me. My first car was a brand new 2015 Honda Accord that I loved aggressively. That car, to me, represented independence and freedom—it was the first car I owned. The second car I had, a 2004 Lincoln Towncar, I shared with my father. It was my grandfather’s. He recently passed, but driving his car that still smells like him reminds me of when he would drive me and my family around, and it makes me feel close to him. And now I have a murderous Jeep. Yet, driving and owning this Jeep feels like owning a golden retriever that’s going blind—she means well and is just frustratingly clumsy.

I originally wanted to write this from the perspective of my Jeep because I thought it would be humorous in a particularly dark time to use a car as a mouthpiece, but it took a different turn. The more I talked to other people, sharing laughs and stories about cars, I realized that there was more to a car-loving lifestyle than what initially lets on. At its core, this shared passion between young and old, men and women, rich and poor—it’s about freedom and individualism. It’s also about brief reprieve. Like any other hobby that grants people peace, it can serve as a temporary escape from the multitude of problems that may weigh you down throughout the day.

Because the construction of this article took the turn that it did, I learned more from it. I’m glad I went along with the ride…

…And yes, I did feel obligated to make a car pun, and no, I do not feel ashamed for doing so.