Driving With a Shattered Steering Column

I was talking in an earlier post about how problems with your house can seem mysterious, obscure and hard to solve. As often happens when I make such a statement, I then recalled a case that suggested the same could happen with cars. I remembered a problem we once had with a car, that could also have been much more dangerous in retrospect. There were just two of us (my partner and I) at that point and we had a yellow Mini. Our previous car was also a Mini but had been wrecked by a BMW driving slowly into the back of the car behind us in a traffic queue. The Beamer driver was just bending down to pick something up with his brakes off. His car pushed the car behind us into our mini's boot and his insurance didn't match the quality of his car. To fix the dented boot would have cost more than the car was worth, so we gave it to a scrap metal merchant for twenty quid.

So the next car (another Mini) we got was a bit nicer and more reliable, except after a while you could feel it pulling the steering wheel a bit to the left as you drove. You could keep pulling it back and it didn't seem like a bad problem because the car still ran alright, but we took it to the garage several times trying to get it fixed. The garage tried wheel tracking and replaced the bearings and said it would be OK, but it wasn't. We must have been driving it for six months or so after first noticing the problem when we took it back in again and said the things they had tried so far had not worked. They looked again and this time said they had found that the head of the steering column was shattered. After we'd let it sink in we felt relieved that we'd kept trying to get it fixed!