Car troubles
I drive to work most days and I have a usual route: leave the neighbourhood, get onto the highway, merge into some lanes here and there, arrive at work. This morning was no different, except that I added a stop at the gas station to pick up washer fluid.
Surprisingly this added barely any time to my ETA - I thought maybe I'd missed my small window where I can get to work in under 20 minutes and it balloons to upwards of 30, but nope! ETA was ~17 minutes. Perfect.
But shortly after I merged onto the highway, after the first downtown exit, a warning popped up on my dash simultaneously with the check engine light:
Engine power is reduced.
I also felt said power reduction immediately - there was a noticeable shift where it seemed like the engine down shifted. I didn't panic, but I also didn't want to be That Guy whose car stalls in the right lane on the highway.
Thankfully I was just a few hundred metres from the next downtown exit and I hopped off the highway. Also useful is that the public parking lot at the police station is literally right around the corner from the offramp, so I had an easy place to pull off the road.
I called the usual car dealership we use for some repairs1 and the service advisor assured me that as long as the engine light wasn't flashing it was safe to drive the rest of the way to work. So I turned the car back on and headed back onto the highway.
Everything proceeded pretty well. Shortly after I got off at my usual exit that warning came on again and I felt the same shift, but I think it shifted back to regular power later because the car felt like it was handling normally.
Tonight I'm going to avoid the highway to get home, just in case I become That Guy. I would rather be stuck on a side street than on the highway.
Reply by email Share this post Mastodon Bluesky
We have an independent mechanic that we prefer to use. Less expensive and we trust the work. The dealership is for warranty work - and our car is well out of warranty. It's a 2018 car with only 105k KM on it.↩