Not Singing in the Rain

It's been a bad week.

Thursday was a very bad day, owing to the layoff situation. Friday was far too exciting (in a bad way). Saturday was tiring. And Sunday is nerve-wracking.

I already wrote about Thursday. 'Nuff said.

But let's talk about Friday.

Friday was a good day to spend with the family. I only went into work for a couple hours (most of the workday hours were spent remotely) for meetings which added absolutely nothing to my knowledge-base. Friday evening was our monthly scheduled Game Night.

It was a dark and stormy night, and we arrived at the place (the house of the friends who host the Game Night) right after the rain started. We didn't get too wet, though.

Mostly, Game Night is a way for Adam to get in some quality game time. I'm not into games at all (probably lost too many of them as a kid), and most of the other kids are blasé about the whole thing; but there's a group at the office who get together once a month to play some serious board games, and Adam fits right in. So we all go as a family to support his gaming habit!

On this particular night, the games went well, but right around ten o'clock, Dad and the girls were getting tired, so we decided to leave the boys -- who were right in the middle of a hot game -- and take the girls home, and Dad would stay with them.

So Cheryl and the girls and I got in the van and drove home. In the rain.

We only got a few miles down the road.

When suddenly ...

The power steering stopped working.

And the water temperature shot up.

We pulled over when the temperature 'idiot' light went on. No fools are we! Not sure what to do, since it had come on so suddenly with no big noise to warn of something broken, we sat by the side of the road (in the rain) trying to figure out what to do.

Finally we just started up the car again and drove for a few additional minutes to see what would happen. When the water temperature started to rise again, Cheryl (who was driving) found a well-lit parking lot and stopped, and I got out to look at the engine - as if I could figure out what was going on!

(Stop laughing. Miracles do happen, y'know...)

Took me a few seconds to spot the problem, but when I did, I couldn't believe it. The belt had fallen off.

The car is nearly ten years old, with well over a hundred thousand miles on it. This kind of thing has never happened before. And the only thing that could've caused this problem was that we had the car in for service about a month ago and they replaced the belt because the old one had started to get noisy.

Looking at the pulleys and tensioner and everything else associated with the belt, I couldn't figure out how the belt stayed on. The tensioner did not have a rim around it; in fact, it was curved inward, as if it didn't care whether the belt stayed on or not. This fact probably helped when I put the belt back on, because I basically pulled it up and over the edge of the tensioner pulley until it popped back on.

With the belt back on, we drove very carefully and cautiously back home. And then Cheryl (the Researcher) got onto the web and started searching.

And found a treasure trove of information about the serpentine belts on Dodge Caravan / Plymouth Voyager minivans. All bad.

First, two of the pulleys are not rimmed, which means that any slight misalignment of the belt/pulley system will cause the belt to slide off one of those pulleys. Second, any amount of moisture (rain, snow, spillage from somewhere in the engine) will cause the belt to slide off one of those pulleys. Third, there is no warning light to indicate that the belt has failed - which means there is no warning to the driver that critical systems (steering, electrical supply, and cooling) have failed.

And even though the car continues to run, the engine will experience permanent damage within a matter of minutes. If the driver survives the sudden loss of steering control.

Apparently it is one of those very bad design errors that the manufacturer refuses to acknowledge or fix. That is, there was never a recall, and you can't go to the dealer and demand that it be repaired. The only serious fix, in fact, is an after-market kit which replaces the smooth pulleys with ribbed/rimmed pulleys so the belt absolutely cannot come off.

It's a serious safety problem. And this problem has been known for several years.

Except by us.

I find it difficult to believe that a flaw of this nature with a standard American car - doesn't every family own a minivan?? - hasn't become common knowledge. We've owned this car for nearly ten years, and this is the first time we've heard of it.

And we've driven this car for ten years with no problem, until a recent belt change coupled with a recent rainstorm combined to form the perfect set of events to cause the failure.

Is it really a problem with the pulley design? Or is it simply a badly-manufactured belt?

We don't know. We ordered the kit, and I'm going to put it on. I don't trust the pulley design. And I don't want to go through the same experience all those other people on the web forums did, putting the belt back on in the middle of a rainstorm (or merely when the roads are wet).

I want a car that's safe to drive my family around in.