Our Cars: 1998 Toyota Avensis 1.8GS
14 November 2014: Free car foibles. Bits that work and bits that don't
The Details
| Current mileage | 146,225 |
|---|---|
| Actual economy | 35mpg |
By Martin Gurdon, Contributor
When you drive a 16-year-old car with more than 146,000 miles on the clock, you don’t expect everything to work. Instead you hope the stuff that does is the stuff that matters. With the free Avensis, the balance is firmly in the positive, at least so far.
This means that all the lights function. The car isn’t cursed with furred up earths and lamp holders that result in intermittent or expiring side and number plate lights -just the sort of things that can get you nicked.
When first started, the engine fires up without a rattle, and the ABS and airbag warning lights don’t outstay their welcome. In fact until recently, all the warning lights lit up then vanished on cue –but more of that later.
The heater warms the car with stink-free hot air, and its blower works on all four speeds. With the exception of a bulb behind one of the rotary heat/vent controls all the facia and dash lamps function. This may sound banal, but when these things go, it’s a pain.
Ditto the electric front windows, which slide up ad down freely in their channels. Trying to close a refusenick driver’s window in a winter rainstorm would not be a pleasant activity.
Now we come to the stuff which is either kaput or resting. There’s a glass electric tilt and slide sunroof. When I first got the car I fiddled about with the switch, the sunroof motor made coffee grinding noises, partially opened the roof, which then stuck fast. It took ten minutes of switch pressing and sunroof jiggling for it to free and grind shut once more.
The switch is located in a roof console, opposite the one that works the interior light. When travelling on a traffic-clogged A12 with my wife navigating, I reached for the light switch but pressed the sunroof one instead. The result was a ‘grind/clunk’ noise as the sunroof sank down into its housing, creating a lot of wind noise.
It took several more minutes of button stabbing and roof shoving to get it back into position and persuade it to stay there. I’ve now stuck a strip of black insulation tape over the switch, which if nothing else feels different, so hopefully the problem won’t happen again.
The car left the factory with air conditioning. The green aircon light still twinkles merrily, but the air gets no cooler. Perhaps the system just needs re-gassing, but I haven’t got round to finding out how much this would cost.
Which brings us back to the warning lights. About a week ago the engine management lamp came on. For a tenner, our local garage plugged in a diagnostic kit which revealed one of the two Lamda sensor’s pre-heaters had given up. The sensor itself still worked, but just took fractionally longer to reach operating temperature. The car’s emissions are as good as ever, the problem is not, apparently, an MOT failure point, although I suspect this will change. The sensors seem to go for between £40 to £85.
Again I reached for the insulation tape, and stuck a small strip over the lights. As they might say in an annoyingly chirpy DIY advert, ‘job done.’
« Earlier: How low can you go? Life with a free car Later: An alarming incident »
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