We wound up at Southern States in Raleigh. On the whole, I would say that the experience was favorable. They called late morning to say that it was an electrical problem, and gave me the cost before proceeding with the repair. They had it fixed by the end of the day as promised. My co-worker Charles took me back to the dealership in the afternoon, and at his urging they got the mechanic who worked on the car to come up and chat with us about exactly what went wrong and how it was fixed.

The mechanic was able to give us a pretty satisfying explanation. He said that part of the wiring near the engine had come loose, rubbed against a sharp part of the engine which broke it in half, then shorted out on the engine block. He said it was very weird and he'd never seen anything like it before; in fact he was not sure how it could have happened. He fixed the break and re-routed the wire and secured it so it cannot happen again.

He went on to say that in his experience, problems with the wiring harness are very rare. I'm not sure that his experience matches up with the experiences of people on the list, but it was sort of reassuring to hear that, since i was fretting a little that this might mean a future of electrical problems for the SP.

All in all, I liked him and as we were leaving he gave me his card and said to call him anytime with questions, which I thought was a really nice thing to say, and sort of unusual for a mechanic.

Anyway. As you can see, it was actually rather fortiutous that I wound up wandering through the service bay at Southern States a couple of times today, because the most gorgeous Thing was sitting there all day. I got a couple of photos.

I also saw a Mojave Beige NB for the first time, from a distance. My apologies to those who think it's a great color, but, yawn. Beige, metallic or not, is not an NB color.