Oil

For those who didn’t realise it, my starting to write about the car is bound to mean a stream of tales of woe and stupidity. They might have even thought that changing the instrument panel would have been the end of the story. It isn’t, of course.

When I started it up yesterday, I noticed it was idling at nearly 1500rpm instead of the more sensible 900. I wasn’t particularly concerned, but then on the motorway, cruising at an apparent 5550rpm, it dawned on me that the tachometer must be counting ignition pulses and the six cylinder engine is sending more than the tachometer I took out of the 4-cylinder version is expecting. I drove on, smugly dividing the reading by 1.5 and thinking about fixing it later.

In the meantime, I’ve opened all the windows due to the overpowering smell of oil, and they stay that way until I remember that I didn’t reconnect the oil pipe to the back of the instrument cluster properly. As a consequence, oil is leaking from the connection and following a complex path leading to a point directly above my left foot. Nothing in these cars happens by accident, and I’m sure the German engineers rigged this on purpose – since it’s an automatic they know exactly where my foot is going to be. Their plan worked anyway, and I’ve reconnected the pipe as they intended it.

On the plus side, my trainers came out of the washing machine cleaner than before. They stink of oil still, but that’s an improvement on the previous odour.