I love cars and if you’re reading this, I’m sure you do, too. But it’s an addiction for me, as I always want to add more to my collection the same way I collect Hot Wheels. Long story short, I bought back my last car, a 2001 Suzuki Wagon R from the friend I sold it to nearly a year ago. (Has it been a year already…?)

My Wagon R in mid-2017, shortly before I sold it.

I bought the car back for plenty of weak reasons. First, I got it for a good price, given that I’m partially buying them back for the set of Advan Rally wheels I sold with the car. Second, I figure the mechanical issue it has now (more on that later) could be fairly easily fixed. Third, I figure I could have a bit of fun working on the car. Finally, well… I’m stupid.

I’m pretty stupid for a multitude of reasons. On the day I bought it and handled the name change, I was stupid because I tried to take the toll road and the car ended up on the side of the road. Even though I knew there would be potential engine trouble from the previous owner, my mechanic and I still took the high speed road, taxing the engine and potentially causing whatever is wrong with it to overheat, shutting the engine off completely. While it probably would have been fine if I had simply waited a few minutes, the highway roadside assistance company came by to set up signs so we wouldn’t get hit on the side of the road. They asked us to contact JAF to have the car towed away.

JAF (Japan Automobile Federation), for those not familiar, is equivalent to an Automobile Association that offers towing, roadside assistance, discounts, and other services. Membership is around 4000￥ ($37 USD) a year, a huge savings if you even need to use the towing service once, as I found out that day. A mere 8 km in towing off the toll road down to the interchange exit cost me, unbelievably, 28,000￥($250 USD).

Lesson learned. Sign up for JAF (or whatever your local country’s AA service is), because you’ll be glad you have it when you need it the most.

So, I managed to drive it down a few days later without further incident on a rather long 2 hour local road drive down from Fukui City, proving the car is actually pretty operable and that I was a moron for trying to take the high-speed toll road.

You know, the three Suzukis look pretty good in front of my apartment.

Now that it’s back at home, let’s take a look to see what is wrong with the car. My assumption is that the car has some overheating issue, causing it to shut down at extended high-speed driving. We hooked up a diagnostic tool to the OBD2 port and found two errors. P0325 is related to a knock sensor and P1910 is a problem with the VVT system.

So, what’s next for this little Wagon R? Let’s take a look around the car and assess the condition before we start doing anything else...