Sometimes you find that a choice you made turns out less good then one hopes. When I was picking my leased car about 1 1/2 year ago, I was pretty convinced that my sporty looking Fiat Stilo was a good choice. After all: it feels pretty sturdy, has good driving abillities and it didn’t seem as flaky as the older Fiat’s.
The combination of the design and all the electronics it has on board (built-in GSM cellphone, GPS-navigation, CD-player, 7″ color screen etc. etc.), made me choose the Stilo over a Citroën C5, and the Peugeot 307. This last car became the #1 bestseller later that year and now you can’t drive around with at least seeing half a dozen drive by every twenty seconds or so.
But I digress; back to the story.
So now I’m about 2 years further down the road and my Stilo now has some 47.000 kilometres under the belt, which should be peanuts for a 4 cillinder 120 horsepower diesel engine. But it is already showing some signs of wear and tear. I never had any big problems with it so far. Ocassionally I would start the car and the computer would start to complain about “alternate fail”. But whenever I restarted it – or maybe I should say ‘rebooted’ – it would be fine. Hmm, I hear you think: “kinda like Windows”. Well, yeah…
However, just before my 40.000 kilometre overhaul (say 38k) I suddenly had some big problems with the turbo. I was driving down the A10 ringway around Amsterdam. That day I had driven back and forth to Eindhoven and my car was doing fine. Once I hit the A10 my engine suddenly lacked power and a omminous “engine fail” appeared on the board computer. It turned out that some mechanical part that lets the air into my turbo had died. So the enigine went back to some failsafe setting, leaving me with some 60hp instead of the 120 I was used too.
Anyway: that was fixed in a week and a half (which took 5 days longer than my garage told me, but again: thats another story). However, my garage forgot to reset my computer, so once my car hit the 40k mark, it started complaining that I needed my scheduled overhaul. Annoying but not a biggie.
Then in december 2003 while I was on vavaction in Florida my interiour mirror just dropped off the window. So my brother-in-law just glued it back and that was fine until some months ago it dropped off once more. I had it fixed by my garage but two months later it just dropped again. A big pain in the ^%%#@ !!
Sure enough after that happened my A/C started to act up: sometimes it would just act like it had its own mind. Left and right are working separately from one another. So if the passenger on the right wants it a bit warmer then the driver, you can turn the knob and up or down it goes. Well, whenever it happens it would just give hot air left and ice cold air right. And no matter what I would do, it would not stop. So I would just turn the A/C off.
To top things off: my front lights went out. No big problem you’d think. Wrong. They build so much shit into the engine compartment that you fysicially can not change the lights yourself!!! It is a bloody shame but you need to take it to the garage and have them fix it!!! In fact they have to take the wheel of the drivers side to get to that particular light! Oh my god! ENGINEERING HELL!
So there I was: driving a Stilo without a proper interiour mirror, a computer complaining about the 40k engine overhaul and an A/C with its own ideas about heating or cooling the interiour.
This morning I had most problems fixed by my garage. Most, because I still need to go back to get my mirror fixed.
Anyway: it still drives excellent. But all the other stuff really has me ticked off.
Years ago they had a joke about Italian cars (Fiat, Lancia and Alfa Romeo). The saying was that those cars were so poorly build that they would already develop rust spots on the body while they were still in the brochure 😉
Well, maybe it doesn’t develop rust that easy anymore, but it sure as hell still has flaky electronics! Guess thats Italian engineering for ya in a nutshell.