It was January when I started looking into Turo Rental Cars. Not many days later, I found myself on my way to Springfield, IL to look at a 2012 Volkswagen Jetta. An hour later, while driving the Jetta home, the planning began.
With a smoke smell strong enough to kill a horse(or at least render it useless), the ride home with the windows down, was far from pleasant. The Jetta had a lot of work that needed to be done before a guest would consider renting it. Looking through the smoky crust on the dash, I could see that the check engine light, ABS light, and airbag light were on. We dropped it off at our detailing shop and left the doors open all night to help air it out.
We decided to detail it first, to make it more enjoyable to work on. 3 ozone treatments, copious amounts of upholstery shampooing, and lots of all purpose cleaner, made for a total of 26 hours of detailing labor.
Then it was time to take it to a friends mechanic shop where together, we worked on it for over a month. We found many many more problems and tackled them as they came up. This included but wasn’t limited to: Nearly taking the front end off to replace the radiator gaurd, replacing the rims and tires, rewiring the brake lights, replacing the passenger side mirror, re-drilling the hood latch, replacing headlights, fuses, temp sensor, etc. All in all, we both learned a lot and had fun working together on it.
The Jetta made 29 trips in a short amount of time, until its fateful trip up to Chicago… Stay tuned for the story on this in our Newsletter.
