Tag Archives: car

Pimping my ride with high pitch painful sounds

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I got my car back from the repair shop on Friday following it’s run in with the less pleasant residents of Auckland, with all the ignition and dash repaired.

Unfortunately the whole incident costs me at least $500 in excess payments, not to mention future impacts to my insurance premiums, so I’m not exactly a happy camper, even though I had full insurance.

Because I really don’t want to have to pay another $500 excess when the next muppet tries to break into it, I decided to spend the money to get an alarm installed, to deter anyone trying to break in again – going to all the effort to silence an alarm for a 1997 Toyota Starlet really won’t be worth the effort, sending them on to another easier target.

(I did consider some of those fake stickers and a blinky LED, but a real alarm does mean that if you hit the car, you’ll quickly get a chirp confirming there is an alarm present. Plus I get one of those chirpy remote controls to unlook the doors! :-D)

I do really hate car alarms, but it’s worth it to have something that will send anyone messing with my car running before it wakes up half the apartment complex.

I wanted to get a decent alarm installed properly and ended up getting referred to Mike & Lance at www.carstereoinstall.co.nz who do onsite visits to install which was really handy, and totally worth it after seeing all the effort needed to do the installation.

Car electronics spaghetti! Considering this is a pretty basic 1997 car, I'd hate to think what the newer ones are like...

There’s a bit of metal drilling, cable running, soldering, un-assembling parts of the car’s interior and trying to figure out which cables control which features of the car, all up it took two guys about 2 hours to complete.

Cost about $325 for the alarm and labor, plus an extra $40 as they had to run wires and install switches for the boot, which is pretty good when you consider it’s a 4 man hour job, would have taken all day if I’d done it at noob pace.

Would recommend these guys if you’re in Auckland. As an extra bonus, Mike turned out to be an ex-IT telco guy so we had some interesting chats – NZ is such a small world at times :-/

Grand Theft Auto

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Had a wonderful wake up this morning with a call from my property manager, advising that thieves had attempted to steal my car.

Apparently a tenant called in 111 around 7am in the morning, finding my car with the lights on, engine running and door open.

Once the property manager figured out that it was my car, they called me, but after a 4am coding session, I didn’t end up waking up until around 10am.

After running down and checking it out, I made the decision to try and shutdown the car, considering that the police weren’t appearing any time soon and I didn’t want it to a) burn all my fuel and b) risk the engine overheating.

Unfortunately my car knowledge is about as good as most people’s computer knowledge – I get in, turn it on and drive, which meant I wasn’t totally sure on the correct step – I figured that removing that battery would do the trick, but wasn’t totally sure if that was the right move.

Ended up calling AA, who were pretty pathetic and told me that I can’t get any callout as “it’s a vandalism problem”, making me wonder why I even pay for them at all and offering no other assistance.

My insurance company AMI wasn’t too useful at first, saying if I needed help, they’d send a first-responder service out and charge me. A subsequent call had one of their staff confirming that disconnecting the battery would be the correct step to take.

Once disconnected, the car then stalled and thankfully stopped, although I made sure to drop it into neutral before turning off the engine (automatic).

Left running at the complex entrance, fortunately other cars could just get around it.

Ripped up dash :'(

Bye bye beautiful :-(

The weird thing about the theft, is that after going to the effort to start my car, they then stole nothing but some change and my laptop car charger, ignoring my decent car stereo and of course, the car itself.

After reviewing the camera footage, it turns out that they stole my car simply to have something to open the security gate with, whilst they drove out with a specific car that they were targetting.

I guess they really did decide my Starlet was too uncool to steal… sadly they didn’t think it was uncool enough to leave alone entirely, probably due to it’s simplicity and no alarm making it easy to steal.

Pretty rough job (but not uncommon apparently) as they butchered the drivers lock and then tore apart the dash and ripped off the light control column, leaving it in a right mess.

Took about 7 hours for police to come out, not really my greatest first impression with police involvement, but the officer & forensics person were both friendly and easy to deal with and I now have a case number with them and a case number with my insurance company to have to chase up with them on Monday.

Not sure at this stage whether it’s going to be a repair or a write off – the rest of the car is in excellent condition and it’s a great unit, but it’s only valued at $4k.

Thankfully I do have insurance… although I’m sure AMI don’t love me, seeing as I just moved my car to them only two days ago, and it’s really going to fuck my no claims bonus. :-(