Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Everything wrong with my GTI

When you buy a used car of a certain age, you expect it to come with some flaws. Cosmetic flaws you can largely live with. Because if they were a deal breaker, you wouldn’t have bought the car. Minor mechanical flaws - again, if the flaws were major, you’d skip the buying, you have to fix rather quickly. Because presumably you want to keep the car for a bit of time, and you have more plans for it than being a static museum piece.

I bought my one-owner 2019 Volkswagen Golf GTI Rabbit Edition, about 56,000 miles, from Carvana back in October of 2025. The nice thing with Carvana is there’s a seven day money back guarantee. No questions asked, so long as you don’t get into an accident with the car. (At which point - it’s yours now!) Should your used car purchase from Carvana proved too flawed to keep, just drive it right back to one of their wondrous vending machine locations.

Obviously the GTI wasn’t too buggered to need returning. However, there were many fixes that needed doing to get the car up to my personal standards. Here’s a comprehensive list of things I’ve done to the Golf to get it to par.

The front sway bar end links were tattered and making a horrible clunking noise with every up/down motion. The pair got replaced with OEM units from FCP Euro.
Engine and cabin air filter were replaced. I cannot trust when they were last done. The parts from FCP Euro were cheap.
On that same vein, all fluids - engine, transmission, differential, brake - and spark plugs were replaced with proper replacements. The folks at ZTF Automotive provided the labor that I paid for.
Windshield wiper blades front and rear replaced. Again, cannot trust when those were last serviced.
During the reconditioning process, Carvana seems to have fit the incorrect front brake pads. They were plenty meaty, but clunked terribly when going over bumps. A fresh set of OEM brake pads went in. No more clunking.
The front windshield moldings on either side were cracked due to sun damage. OEM replacements purchased from FCP Euro and installed.
Equally sun-damaged was the windshield wiper cowl. An application of Solution Finish did the job.
Tires were mismatched front and rear, with the fronts on Bridgestone that were half worn. The back set was seemingly brand new, but unfortunately a no-name Chinese brand. All four were replaced with a fresh set of Vredestein Ultrac Pro tires.
The new tires were wrapped around a brand new factory set of silver Pretoria alloys. The original set on the GTI were expectedly curbed and trashed. One of the wheel even had a visible bend. Not great!
Armed with new wheels and tires, a wheel alignment check was done to protect that investment. Also done at ZTF Automotive.
The Golf has a great greenhouse full of airy glass, excellent for visibility. What it is not excellent for is heat rejection. All windows sans the windshield got 3M tint applied. GraphixLab performed the work.
The hatch area was missing the tonneau cover and the VW CarGo mat that most certainly would have been sold with the Golf when new. Used items of each were purchased on eBay. The tonneau cover is over $700 if I wanted a new one!
Previous owner appears to be an avid hauler of things, which is commendable because I love seeing cars serving their purpose. However, that meant the rear hatch cover on the GTI was in a mangled shaped; some panels didn’t even fit correctly. A used junkyard replacement was bought on eBay.
Still in the hatch area: the drain tube that leads water away from the multi-function VW badge (it doubles as a hatch handle and rear-view camera) was perished. Gone. When it rained, water was getting inside hatch floor. This is apparently a common issue. At least the part is available and cheap.
Speaking of water leaks, my GTI was plagued with the other common defect: rear speaker gasket failure. After a weekend of heavy rain, I noticed the rear driver-side carpet was soaked, and that was a the culprit. A tube of bathroom sealer did the trick, though in the process of removing the door skin, I broke the handle. A junkyard door skin on eBay was surprisingly cheap: $79.
With over 56,000 miles, you expect a good amount of stone chips on the front end and on the lower sides. My favorite touchup paint manufacturer is Dr ColorChip. The Golf’s Pure White is a solid color, non metallic, so the paint match is exceptional.
The steering wheel leather was absolutely slimy and full of scratches. Even after multiple rounds of cleaning with diluted all-purpose-leaner, it was a dreadful sight. For something that I hold the entire time I am driving the car, the $450 spend to buy a fresh OEM replacement from a dealership was worth the expense.
Carvana recondition team did a horrible job cleaning the interior. Of course the previous owner likely never cleaned it at all, but you the selling dealer has got to do a better job than that. It was so filthy that it took two rounds of deep cleaning to get it to my admittedly high cleanliness standards.

To build a reputation

I think I’ve written on here before that sometimes it’s good to buy from AliExpress. The same item being sold on Amazon is often times more expensive, so why not buy from the source? And often times - because AliExpress seems so desperate for sales - there would be coupons and discounts to easily save even more. The only downside of course is shipping. You’re not getting two days of free with AliExpress. But we can all wait for a solid discount in this economy, can’t we?

Recently I bought a thing of knee sleeves on AliExpress. The item shipped from China in about a week and half. No problems there. However, on the AliExpress app, the order never advanced past the preparation stage. After a certain date, I was to actually get a refund. For an order I actually received.

Being the standup citizen that I am, I wanted to notify AliExpress that I got the item. For orders that actually shipped with tracking, there is a button on the app to do so. But since my knee sleeves never got past the initial processing, that same button isn’t available. I’m too introverted to get on a phone, so I did the non standup thing and left it alone. The refund hit my credit card at the date promised. In my defense, it was only $15 total. How much could it cost, Michael?

It seems AliExpress is hyper protective of its reputation. Even though it features largely disposable stuff made in China, it is very much not a scam. The company really wants to make sure items get to the final destination, and has implemented all sorts of incentives for people to trust it. There’s a cash coupon if an order is delayed beyond the promised timeframe. There’s free returns if an item arrives damaged. And of course, there’s an automatic refund for customers that never receive the product.

Word on the street is AliExpress take customer complaints of vendors very seriously, too. I may not buy often on that platform, but I’ve all the confidence when I do. Due apologies that I essentially stole an item!

The street-side mechanic

I recently learn that it is actually illegal to work on your car when parked on a public San Francisco street. I guess the most you can do is wash it. Any mechanical work is expressly verboten.

Which is crazy because anybody that has lived in San Francisco for a bit have all seen actual projects on the side of the road. I can remember seeing someone perform an actual engine swap, replete with an engine cherry picker, on a stretch of Alemany Blvd. I myself have performed a few oil changes on my vehicles whilst street parked. Never been ticketed, not that I am trying to tempt that fate.

I guess as it is with anything in this city, enforcement is highly selective. Like the rule where you’re not suppose to park a car on a driveway that otherwise blocks any piece of the sidewalk. But you come to my old neighborhood of Visitacion Valley, and you can’t walk one block without being obstructed by a wrongfully parked vehicle. One has to assume enforcement is lax here because people wouldn’t be so comfortable to risk getting ticketed.

Besides, is SFMTA really deploying labor on weekends to look for such infractions? The general public complain enough whenever they release yearly wage statistics for public workers. More MTA employees getting lots of overtime will surely not go over well with taxpayers.

Then there’s the always reliable leftist claim that people of lower income have no choice - but to work on their own cars. And because they are so monetarily constrained, street parking is the best they can afford. The law against mechanical work on street-parked cars is actually discriminatory, am I right? Something something car-dependent society. Driving is a right, not a privilege.

I do understand the rationale. Auto mechanical repairs are incredible messy, and San Francisco does not want that mess - and all the nasty fluids - on its streets. Fair enough.

I am once again asking for competence

As a car enthusiast, one of the pain points is needing a third party to perform service to your car. Which is entirely unavoidable unless you’ve got a garage with all the tools possible. It is a pain point because competence is difficult to find. I’m not even asking for attention to detail; I just want the job done correctly! I don’t expect another person to treat my own car as nicely as I do.

The sad reality is, you live long enough and you’d no doubt been burned by some automotive repair place. I can remember an auto body shop failed to remove a rubber trim before repainting a damaged panel (denied responsibility.) Then there was a shop that scratched up the interior whilst installing window tint. When I recently got the GTI tinted as well, another tint place had to redo the job three times. At least they gave me a discount in apology, which is why I’m not linking to their website.

Because competence is not often encountered, I do well to remember the ones that perform to par. I recently changed the wheels on the GTI, retaining the same set of tires. The tire shop I chose did the job exactly as prescribed. They even filled the tires correctly to the specified pressure on the door jam. And made sure each rubber stayed at the same corners as before, so as to not mess up the wear rotation. When you find capable shops like this, you make sure to continue patronizing.

Some additional shoutouts: the parts department at Volkswagen of Marin has excellent communication. The America’s Tire location in Milbrae has done over half a dozen set of tires for me over the years and has yet to disappoint. ZTF Automotive is the best indy VW/Audi mechanic in the Bay Area.

Unfortunately, we can’t all be Thanos and do it ourselves.

Stay put and wait

With AI companies buying up all the world’s memory chip supply, it’s tough out here for the average Joe buying or building computers. Our combined economies of scale cannot begin to match a batch order from the likes of OpenAI. So of course you have entire chip companies saying they are bowing out of the consumer business altogether. There’s more than enough money serving B2B. Because fuck us, that’s why.

Just today the base model Mac mini is marked as unavailable at the Apple Store. Too many people are buying them to run LLMs locally. Higher tier models with increased memory and storage are backordered for months. Other manufacturers have computers to sell you immediately, but they’ve raised the pricing tremendously in response to the chip shortage.

It’s simply not a good time for the computing enthusiast. First was the GPU pricing squeeze from years back, and now another critical component is seeing highly inflated prices. If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, other components will surely be affected as well. These companies cannot swallow increased logistics costs for very long. Amazon Prime free shipping might go from two days to four.

As I type this out on my 2021 MacBook Pro, I guess numerically speaking I can use an upgrade. But the current aforementioned computing landscape is so constraining that I reckon it’s prudent to keep waiting if possible. Thankfully the first generation of Apple Silicon chips remain eminently powerful and efficient, even some five years later. I have to say it was smart of me to have the foresight to spec for 32 GB of RAM when I bought this laptop. Even as successive macOS releases use more and more resources, this M1 MacBook Pro is still not running out of memory space.

The memory chip shortage is also affecting memory card prices. I’ve been looking to buy higher capacity SD cards for my camera, but the pricing has ballooned 30 to 40% in the past month. I guess I don’t need the additional space anymore! I rather offload the camera more often than pay the inflated pricing.

Staying put and waiting is the play right now.

Say no to black wheels

One of the famous lines from the cult movie The Fast and the Furious is: “…overnight parts from Japan.” As if it were really that easy and quick to get car parts. Perhaps it indeed was back in those days, but in our modern tariff-filled turbulent times, the wait can be excruciating. And you’ll pay more for the product, too.

Unless of course you took advantage of Black Friday deals like I did. On the day after Thanksgiving 2025 I bought a set of wheels for my then new-to-me MK7 VW Golf GTI. It wasn’t anything special, just the same exact wheel as the original set that came with the car, but painted silver. The factory wheels were painted in black. I absolutely detest black-colored wheels, and don't understand why it is the current fashion in automotive-dom.

You look at the wheels of most new cars on sale, and the wheels are likely painted black. Why spend the R&D money at all on intricate wheel design when it all gets lost in a black circle. Worst, after a fresh coat of brake dust, black-colored wheels look like a decaying, rusting piece of iron. No thank you.

That was why I was determined to get different set of wheels. Thankfully Volkswagen sells the same design in silver, so that was the obvious choice. I am too old to be fussing with fitting aftermarket wheels. OEM is the best. They’ve certainly spent the most money developing the parts.

It wasn’t until last week that the wheels I ordered back in November of last year, arrived and ready for pick up. Five freaking months of waiting, because the wheels are made in Germany, and these days importing anything from outside the U.S. seems to be a hilarious crap-shoot. Overnight parts from Japan in 2026? It’ll probably get stuck in customs.

I don't have money

These days I am seeing a lot of FL5 Honda Civic Type Rs on the road. It’s a real curiosity because one, Honda does not produce many, and two, the Type R is rather expensive. A cool low $50K when it’s all said and done (got to pay the tax man, you know), and then there’s the super high insurance premiums. (Thanks to the totally not a war in Iran, gas is not cheap either.)

How are folks affording these cars?! The demographic of Type R buyers skews young, mind you. This isn’t a case of boomers buying cars they can easily budget for. I myself can mathematically afford an FL5, but I simply would not be comfortable plucking down that much money on mere transportation, even if it looks and performs awesomely.

Perhaps I’ve aged out of being irresponsible with money vis a vis cars. I’ve done it, thankfully financially recovered from it, and have no desire to do it again.

Or, my mother would say: “Everybody has money. It’s you who don’t have money.” That’s probably true. Sure it’s easy to run credit and get into debt in America for shiny things, but the fact is there’s also statistically a lot of people out there with money. The median income in the San Francisco Bay Area is mathematically apparent. So it actually should not be a surprise that I encounter a large concentration of FL5 Civic Type Rs on the road around here.

It’s just frustrating sometimes that my better financial senses are restricting the possible experiences that I can pursue as a car enthusiast. That is why, out of spite, out of jealousy, and simply as a cope: I’ve stopped watching YouTube videos of cars I cannot begin to afford. Another unobtainable special edition Porsche 911? Watching about it only brings sadness.