Maintenance...

Drove the Jeep to work yesterday. That's cause I dropped the Rav4 off at the mechanic on the way home the night before. There'd been a soft thump, thump, thump coming from one back tire for a little while and I figured I better stop ignoring it. Their first thought was that it was either the tires going bad, or the wheel bearings needed to be replaced. After the mechanic heard the noise, he thought it might be the bearings, but needed to get it up on the lift and inspect the bearings and the tire itself. Since there wasn't a lift free it would be the next morning before they get a chance to look at it. Diagnosis: Bad tires, but only the two back ones. So we had them put two new tires on the the Rav, up front, and move the older front tires to the back. It's a front wheel drive. The good news is it wasn't the bearings.

While they had it, I had them change the oil and the air filter, and they said the power steering fluid was dirty, so they changed that, too. Other then that, they didn't find any problems. For an 8.5 yr old car (and a Toyota, no less, considering all the recent recalls) that's pretty darn good.

There was one other thing. The Rav came equipped with two cigarette lighter plugs. One traditional "cigarette lighter" plug in the dash and one "12V/120W" plug in the center console. I don't use either one very much. Which explains why I never tried to use the second plug until about a month after the warrantee ran out. That's when I noticed that it didn't work.

Being that the car hasn't need much work, it wasn't until yesterday that Edward reminded me to ask the guys at the shop to take a look at the plug in the console while they had it, but if it was going to be expensive not to bother. They took a quick look and said that they could see the bottom of the plug and it wasn't connected to anything. Someone at the factory forgot to connect that plug, most likely. I told them it was only worth about $40 (an hour's labor) to see if they could fix it, which meant they were taking apart the center console. He thought they could do that, and I said go for it.

When I picked up the car I had two new tires, a new air filter, clean oil and clean power steering fluid... and for the first time since I bought the car... a second working cigarette lighter plug. Now I can plug in both the Ipod and the Iphone if I want to. Sad to think it only took 8.5 years to get it fixed.