Third Owner Syndrome
I'm just laughing.
The older a car gets, the more small fixes and big maintenance items get left behind, undone by subsequent owners. In premium brands, this can be catastrophic, as expensive repairs can lurk deep inside the car, waiting for the next owner—i.e., you— to discover them. Timing belt tensioners, head gasket faults, and entire suspension overhauls, oh, and surprise! It’s an air suspension!1 These repair quotes are what used-car nightmares are made of.
The more subsequent owners a car has, the higher the chance that a previous owner has gotten a scary quote from a shop and decided it was time to go shopping for a new car instead of pay a shop to do some work.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t buy a used car, but it’s probably wise to pull that CarFax or vehicle history report on cars older than about 5 years, and run from anything that has had multiple owners in a short amount of time. A ten-year-old car with 160,000 miles and two owners is probably a better buy than a six-year-old car with 90,000 miles and four owners.
Our Buick seems to be in pretty good shape, even though a vehicle history report shows something like six previous owners.
There are a few telling signs of Third Owner Syndrome, all the same. The tire-pressure guide sticker is missing from the driver’s side door jamb, for example. There were a bazillion window stickers near the driver’s A-pillar, alongside the left side of windsheild, enough that I was losing small cars in the sticker-blind-spots. The oil was low, the washer fluid was nearly out, the transmission fluid is a bit dark and probably should be changed, and the tire pressures were an assemblage of PowerBall number picks—37, 36, 31, 32— rather than a set of properly inflated tires.
When I spotted the previous owner’s hack to keep the hood prop in place because the plastic retaining clip is missing, I had a hearty third-owner-syndrome chuckle:
This is an irresponsible fix and so I quickly corrected it and replaced the plastic bag tie with a Harbor Freight magnet.
The Buick is serving us very well, despite my joking. Just yesterday, it got us to the Big City Hospital with zero problems and more comfort than you’d expect from a 10-year-old car. It’s exactly the right car for right now in our lives.
Although I still miss my BMW.
Read: expensive.
"and the tire pressures were an assemblage of PowerBall number picks—37, 36, 31, 32 . . ."
Cleverness like that is the mark of a good writer. Love it!
Laughing is good for you 🤣