Everybody has car trouble now and then. It's just part of owning a car, right? But knowing that doesn't make it any less painful when you're having a shitty car day, or in our case, a shitty car couple-of-months.

C and I have a Volkswagen. Her name is Carmen. In general we love her. But occassionally we hate, hate, hate her. (I'm so sorry, Carmen, but you know that sometimes you are a fickle, fickle girl.)

Carmen has a gutsy V6 that gets us from stop to go with a satisfying efficiency, and a seductive growl that takes hold of your heart . . . and your groin. More than just regulating the flow of gas to the engine, her accelerator can even quicken the libido, regulating bloodflow to vital body parts. Even despite the multiple dings and dents from living in a city like DC, Carmen's still a sexy beast.

Driving Carmen, you feel comfortable making that left turn across four lanes of traffic into oncoming traffic. You feel comfortable downshifting while doing 65 out on some two-lane highway west of Tucumcari, and passing that line of eight cars stuck behind the slow-moving RV.

She's got heart. She's got guts. She's got chutzpa, and she's got it where it counts. But in all those smaller, seemingly less important places, she's got a nasty habit of falling apart. She's like a hall-of-fame running back in that way. The breaks don't keep her from scoring touchdowns during the big game. But when the game is over, it leads to more time in the bath, more attention to wounds, more TLC.

And did I mention giving TLC to a VW is an expensive proposition?

For instance, the spark plug wire replacement we had to make earlier this month was a whopping $450. Part of the reason for the high price tag was that spark plug wires, as it turns out, are just plain expensive. But the other reason is the labor. Here is a general law of the VW universe: Any repair on a VW is a time-intensive endeavor. VW seems to pay their engineers to find the least convenient mode of assembly, the apparent goal being to make the proper repair of any given part, no matter how small and insignificant, require the dismantling of the entire car first.

I first discovered this when I casually gave the nod for Alexandria VW to fix the glove compartment door latch a couple of years ago. How expensive could it be? Turns out it could be as expensive as $300. The glove compartment door hinge? A friggin' piece of plastic? What the hell?

When you own a VW, not only are you sure to pay a hefty sum for any cosmetic repair involving broken plastic pieces, but you're also sure to pay that sum to a certified VW dealer, because no other mechanic knows the secret forumula for re-assembly.

Back in February, the automatic window mechanism broke and, due to a set of circumstances out of our control, we could not bring it to a dealer for repair. It was wet, it was late, and you don't leave car windows open in our neighborhood or you wake up the next morning with no car stereo, and a funky smell in your back seat. No, we didn't want to wait until the next day to bring it to the dealer, and besides, the other mechanic, who was open late, said he could fix it. And, well, we were stupid enough to believe him. To make a very long story short, we wound up bringing the car back to this mechanic three times and the window never operated correctly after any of the repairs he made. Not only did he not repair the window, he actually caused physical damage to the door in trying to get to the broken part. Then he tried to simply cover up the damage he caused with duct tape, as if we wouldn't notice or something. Finally, we had to break down and bring it to the dealer to get it repaired correctly. They basically had to re-do all the work the other mechanic did, at the same great price of $400. (We were able to get some of our money back from the other mechanic after filing a contest with our credit card company.)

What really gets me is when you need to make some routine replacement on a VW, like a battery, or a headlight, you will weigh your options and usually decide it's easier and will cause less mental anguish if you just bring it to the dealer, even though these are technially things that you should be able to do yourself under the shade of a tree somewhere. But this rationale all falls apart when you discover the most direct way to achieve either of these tasks is to remove the entire engine first.

We knew we were going to have to replace one of the headlights this weekend, and ignoring every alarm going off in our heads C and I were actually going to attempt it ourselves. We'd done it once before, amazingly. Sure, it took us two hours, but we got a lot of satisfaction out of doing it ourselves instead of paying VW $35 to do it. But this time we had a secret weapon: Al. Al has a way with mechanical things. And he has the remarkable, superhero ability to flatten his hand down to the thickness of a piece of paper. He was able to replace the headlight in under twenty minutes, which I'm pretty sure is a world record.

I could go on about Carmen. And on. But I'm already exhausted just thinking about it. I will mention that the other thing we had to do yesterday (so that we could get out to superhero Al's secret location in the first place) was replace our rear passenger tire, which had a neat little gash in the side of it, either the result of a knife, which would be distressing, or some internal defect, or possibly just from hitting it against the curb one too many times.

Even changing the tire was an epic ordeal because, due to the type of metal used on VW's and Audi's the wheel sometimes gets fused to the axle and doesn't just come off nicely. We discovered this after removing all the bolts and pulling on the wheel only to find it caused Carmen to wobble precariously on the jack. Luckily my brother had AAA and we called a guy out who had a better, more secure jack. He was able to slide under the car and pound on the tire with a hammer without the fear (or with minimal fear, anyway) of the car crushing him. Carmen now has a lovely brown wheel on back. Hopefully we'll get her old wheel back later this week, but we've already spent enough time fixing Carmen this month.

I mean I love her. Our car. Carmen. I really do. But she's definitely high maintenance.

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