WOW. I'm alive and writing this. I was traveling 70mph and all of a sudden I lose power steering, power breaks, and power (gas pedal). WOW? Can you say myself and passenger could have died because of this engine failure?

I just happened to be in the "slow" lane and managed to physically pump the brakes and wheel slowly enough to get off to the shoulder without crashing into anything or anyone crashing into me. As a teenager, I had driven a car once that had dead power steering, and I knew about pumping the breaks manually from lessons from my father years ago... WOW. I'm alive still.

You know, I had vaguely heard or read that timing belt failures on this model car were a problem at around ~50k miles and you should probably replace the belt at that point. But, you know, the modus operandi of a layperson taking car of their car parts wearing out is that you replace Part X at the shop when it breaks. Preventative maintenance -in my mind- generally falls into the categories of tires, oil, batteries, and breaking systems. Timing belt? That's not exactly something my oil change team at Goodyear suggests to me I do as an upgraded service; and my regular mechanic never suggests elective work for me either (they're good guys!)

At some point I had mentally just decided to wait and see when "mine broke", because I mostly do short city drives. Of course the timing belt would break for the random drive 3.5 hours from home. After getting towed, taxi to a train station, I was $250 lighter in my pockets (train tickets for 2?) just to get home.

Now, the car is sitting in the lot of a repair shop, 150 miles from home, and, like everyone else here, even though 73k miles on a car shouldn't be "that much" these days for a car that I generally was "gentle" on, this is still just a crappy Daewoo with a Chevy sticker on it.

Meanwhile, of course, I had scheduled this car to go in for Daytime Running Lights recall repair NHTSA Recall #A140093... like a week after the timing belt failed. Where's the NHTSA recall for timing belts? I'm sure my DRL module was a lot less dangerous than a snapped timing belt at 70mph on the highway.

With all the city ding marks on my bumper, this is a "total" loss repair.

I noticed it leaking after i pulled out of my drive way, that's when i saw the huge spot on the ground. I ignored it, and when i came back home the oil light came on. So i knew i was screwed. I had to put more oil in it and drive it to the mechanic the next day. Now on oil leaks it is very hard to find the origin of the leak. So first they replaced the oil pan which is only a 200 dollar fix or less. That is where we hoped the oil leak was because it needed a new oil pan anyways. Sadly they found that the leak was the "rear main seal" which is why it was leaking so bad. That fix is about 800$. So it all would have cost 1000$. Luckily the mechanic didnt charge us for the oil pan since it was his guess on the oil leak location. But still that a lot of money to fix a rear main seal. The reason it cost so much was because to get to the rear main seal you have to remove the transmission! It sucked!