So it turns out my car has cancer. Cancer of the transmission.

It’s been showing some signs of a problem for a little while now, so I took it in to get it looked at and to get a general transmission service. They found significant metal flakes in the pan. Which isn’t good.

This is also a known problem for my particular car, so much so that they extended the warranty on it to 8 years and 100,000 miles. I’m at 9 years and 130k miles, naturally. The fix would involve buying a remanufactured valve body, dropping the transmission pan, removing the old VB, swapping over the wiring, gaskets, and solenoids, reinstalling it, then doing some computer shit to it… etc.

Assuming I had the tools and the knowhow, doing this myself would be roughly $1500 at the lowest. Having a proper mechanic do it, I’d be lucky to get away with just $2500. VW doesn’t do the fix directly: they just replace the whole transmission, and it’s even possible the one they put in won’t have the fix done.

So. A ~$3000 fix on a car that KBB puts at $4000. I can afford the fix, but it’s car that’s at 130k miles and quite possibly only a short time away from some other catastrophe. A car that has a handful of other few-hundred-dollar fixes that aren’t critical that I’ve been putting off.

I love my car. My plan had been to eke out another few years until the Tesla Model 3 was out and had the early kinks worked out, and was available in ready supply. But sense is telling me my Rabbit isn’t going to make it, and that I’ll need to get something else to bridge the gap.

I am incredibly depressed over this.