Our Mazda 626 Is Dead

A week ago Friday, Seattlest arrived at work to discover that our '93 Mazda 626's engine was pouring out more white smoke than a '40s film noir. We dropped it off at the nearest repair place and awaited the bad news: we'd sprung a coolant leak and blown a headgasket. At 192,000 miles, the engine had died.

We flirted with the idea of getting a rebuilt motor, but soon decided we'd rather have a car payment again than dump $5000 on credit cards.

So we were faced with three dilemmas: 1) How do we get rid of our faithful old Mazda? 2) Where do we look for a new car? And 3) What do we drive in the meantime? Because, frankly, we're unable to function for long without a car in this city, much as we wish that weren't the case.

We took care of #3 first, with a trip to Enterprise to rent an oh-so-stylin' red Chevy Cobalt (sans spoiler). The engine functions, but it has manual door locks. It works as a temporary fix.

Getting rid of Madzilla (our affectionate nickname for our old car) was trickier. We ended up deciding to donate the car to KEXP, because we like them better than KUOW. (Sorry, KUOW.) The only hitch: we could not find the title, and Vehicles for Charity required one. Thankfully, the Ballard Auto Licensing Agency was able to hook us up with an official Declaration of Loss of Interest and make our baby smile -- thanks, BALA!

We made a final visit to Madzilla and emptied it of the random crap we kept in the trunk (bottled water for if we're stranded, jumper cables, two quarts of its favorite oil). On Friday, after a couple of phone calls with the towing company, the car we'd had for 9 years left our lives forever. We have secret hopes that it'll fetch enough at auction to put us in KEXP's 500 club, but we're also nervous we'll have ended up making a $0.01 donation to the station.

In the meantime, we'd turned to our car-buying savior: Auto Consultants Northwest. More on them in a future post.