Midlife Crisis Car: Amateur Saab Engine Repair, with AI Illustration

About six months ago, an old friend (and former boss) gave me a car!

It's a 2006 Saab 9-5. Standard shift. 2.3 liter Turbo engine. Sunroof!

It's a great car for a midlife crisis on a budget.

It's much like this one:

It was pretty damn generous (even if he did owe me money from two decades earlier). When he heard I was having some trouble with the Toyota Prius, he mentioned he had a spare car he'd only used a couple of times. "You know, I never paid you that bonus. You should just take it!"

It was meant to be his "go to the beach" car. Then it failed an inspection. When I checked the odometer against the title, it had only ticked up 40 miles in four years!

I had some reservations. This guy has always been good to me, but he's also the sort of fellow with whom things... don't always work out. (Like that bonus.)

I'm sure you've had similar relationships.

But I love old Saabs, and this sounded perfect--which set my too-good-to-be-true alarms ringing louder.

Did I really want to take on a second car? Especially one that had sat idle for so long? The reject sticker from the inspection station was three years old, and the clear-coat on the hood and the roof was patchy and peeling. One of the tires was completely flat, and it wouldn't start.

But still, the price was right. How could I say "no" to a free car in this market? This model was selling for double blue-book value. It only had 70,000 miles. The leather interior was immaculate. He assured me the heated seats even worked.

I had it towed to a general mechanic. He said, "Yeah, sure, it's got a little rust but it should be fine." It needed an alternator and new brakes, which came to $1700. So I had that done. I went through the hell of registering a new car in Massachusetts (an experience worthy of it's own post, but it's best left to Kafka), and drove it for a few weeks.

It drove...okay. The Check Engine light went on almost immediately, and the Turbo didn't kick in, making the engine laggy and sluggish. The general mechanic wouldn't touch the turbo, so I found a European car specialist. He welded a broken pin back onto the turbo's "waste gate." He also lubricated the sticky gear-shift, and did a few other fancy little things that took an entire month. (To be fair, he did come down with Covid in the middle of it.) It all cost $1400. So I felt it was still a pretty fair deal. And it was finally able to pass inspection.

The Check Engine light came back on the first time I accelerated onto the highway.

But the performance was much better. I already had my inspection sticker, and, well... are there any 2000s cars on the road without the CEL on?

I figured enough was enough. I didn't want to wait or pay for more repairs.

I've been driving the car for about six months without issue.

My transportation strategy at this point is to have two cars that mostly work so that when something goes wrong with one of them, I've still got wheels. It's fun to have a stick-shift when I'm in the mood, and an automatic for the rest of the time. And it's still a lot cheaper than paying on something new.

It's been especially handy this winter. These old Saabs perform great in wintry weather, while the anti-lock and anti-skid systems in my Prius have failed.

For the past couple of weeks, though, the engine has been running rough.

Every time I accelerate onto the highway, it shakes badly enough to rattle the door handles.

Not ideal. And I haven't been able to get through to my specialist. His phone goes straight to voicemail. Google tells me his business is still there, so I'm hoping he's just busy and not dead. (Good workers around Cape Cod have a tendency to overdose. We've lost two plumbers and three carpenters to drugs. So I'm a little worried.) I'll keep checking in. But in any case I'm on my own for now.

Thank God for Autozone. They don't charge to check your engine codes (and don't take tips either, apparently). I was expecting a huge litany of issues after driving for so long with the engine light on, but the only thing that came up was a P1110: "Charge Air Bypass Valve - performance problems."

They didn't carry the part at Autozone, so I headed to the internet for instruction. Turns out the part in question was right up front and center.

I watched a few youtube videos and read a couple manuals and got feeling pretty confident.

And then, as I was inspecting the part to make sure I could order the proper replacement, I noticed a narrow hose coming out of the side. "Better make sure this is something I can reconnect," I thought. I pulled on it gently and discovered -- it wasn't connected to anything at all!

Turns out this narrow vacuum hose had fallen off. Instead of an expensive part, I just needed a few feet of replacement hose.

This guy on Youtube recommended Silicone. Nobody local stocks it so... Amazon.

It arrived yesterday. I put it in today. While feeling around in the guts for the nipple, I discovered a second nipple with no hose attached. A second length of hose had also fallen off, between the throttle body and the firewall. So I replaced that too. Looked around the rest of the mess of tubes and wires and gave the engine a fatherly knock on the head.

Seems solid to me. Let's go.

No more violent engine shake.

What a difference. It also corrected this weird power-pulsing that had plagued the car since the beginning, which had me thinking the transmission might be going. So I'm even more relieved.

It takes off like a rocket now. And that turbo-needle on the dash actually goes all the way up to the redline. Whee!

I pulled the fuse that clears the check engine light, and then took the car out on the highway.

There's still a little vibration; maybe it's just used-car rattle, maybe it got damaged from driving without those vacuum hoses for all these months. But I only really notice it when flooring the pedal, which is not how I usually drive.

Best of all, the Check Engine light stayed off.

So now that I'm feeling a little more confident about this car, I'm wondering if I should order the replacement hybrid battery for my Prius and dive into that project.

What's the worst that could happen?

There's no limit to the number of half-assed things I can kind of do that work out some of the time!

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^{Unless otherwise stated, images are the work of the author, sometimes assisted by a bucket of algorithms he keeps under his desk. Feel free to copy, remix and share images from this post according to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International license.}

^{Signature illustration by @atopy.}