After weeks of having no car nearly three weeks, in fact, I thought I would share some of the lessons I learned from driving a Chrysler Grand Voyager. It all started with the first part of our trip through Europe in which it started overheating and having huge water leaks every 200 or 300KM.

We ended up with a £400 bill for a new waterpump which should have been changed a few weeks before when we spent £850 for a new timing belt which normally includes a kit with a new water pump which our mechanic did not bother to install.

Needless to say at the end of our trip we ended up here to get it fixed as discussed in my last blog post.

Unfortunately this was not the end of the story on one of our car trips while about 150KM from home the automatic gearbox gave in, just 5 days after we spent £125 putting in new gearbox oil. The bad news was we had to be back for school starting in September. The good news was our teenage boys wanted to fly back early.

When we originally decided to do this trip it was planned to be over two months long but due to passports taking more than 8 weeks due to Covid. Wiping out nearly a month of our trip. Little did we know that in August we would end up with a car with no gearbox. So we rang my mechanic and he sent a gearbox over from NI at the cost of £250 shipping plus the gearbox.

After two weeks and a lot of stuff, the gearbox finally arrived even if the two driveshafts went missing as they were sent by royal mail instead of DHL. The new gearbox has now been fitted and tomorrow the mechanics will be putting all the bits of the car back together again. Yes, hopefully, we will be back in business.

So you may be asking what are the lessons learned from a constantly broken Chrystler Grand Voyager. And I will share them below.

1. Drive a German car if you want reliability preferably a Volkswagen,Audi or Mercedes and avoid going on a road trip in a Grand Voyager like the plague.
2. If you want to extend your driving holiday by weeks or months while getting repairs done buy a Grand Voyager
3. Bring plenty of spare money for car rentals.
4. Even if your holiday seems to have been shortened to a month a Grand Voyager it will get you that few extra weeks of a holiday extension that you have been looking for. (Or possibly not))
5. The mechanics will do repairs on the Grand Voyager so you can cruise round in your rental car If you have plenty of money to fix the Grand Voyager and want to actually bring your belongings home, of course. You could always take the plane and send it to the scrapyard.
6. A three-ton Grand Voyager can make a Mercedes tow truck lorry struggle to drive it up a hill, maybe that’s why the Chrystler had the same problem over the mountains.
7. On week two I ordered a Skoda Octavia Estate manual while dreaming of buying an Automatic VW Passat Estate, The next day instead of the Skoda Estate arriving a new Automatic VW Passat Estate arrived instead. Put it out there in the universe and it could come to you quicker than you imagined or how you dreamed possible.
8. If you are thinking of buying a Chrystler Grand Voyager for your next trip don’t do it, I have done more work on this car in 6 months than I did in all my previous German cars in a lifetime
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10. Here is our Passat that we rented during the Chrystler Grand Voyager repairs.

Feel free to comment below and share any Grand Voyager tales of woe you may have experienced.

At the moment we are planning to leave Bulgaria on the 9Th or 10TH of September with a planned arrival date in Ireland for 14TH or 15Th of September but of course, with a Grand Voyager, anything could happen.

 

Okay, we arrived back in the Grand Voyager on Monday 14Th September because we were very early we decided to drive on from Harwich to Cairnryan instead of getting the boat from Holyhead to Dublin. This was a bit more tiring but was nothing compared to the drive from Bulgaria through Serbia Croatia And Slovenia in the heat with no air conditioning,

Let’s just say the Bulgarian Mechanic took the car apart to install the new gearbox but forgot to put it back together again. There are wires hanging everywhere in Slovenia 4th gear stopped working but after a phone call with the Chrysler mechanic and a lot of fiddling with some loose relays 4th gear started working again. Unfortunately due to the Covid 19 Scam, I am now in 14 days of lockdown which will be over on 29Th September.

I plan to resume work and business after the 29TH September feel free to message me on social media for advice on your online business or anything related to that.