What If Repairs Don’t Let you Stay In Your Vehicle

Yesterday’s blog was about having a 5K mile service on my Tacoma and finding out my oil pan drain hole was stripped and I needed a new oil pan.

This resulted in the service manager telling me;

“We have to keep your Tacoma overnight.  We can have the oil pan overnighted and finish the repair tomorrow..”

And my response:

“I live in my vehicle.  It’s my home.”

Ther service manager actually understood my dilemma and jumped through hoops to find and use a non Toyota part to get me back on the road the same day.

But what if I was at an oil changing service or in a small town where my oil pan replacement was a few days away?

(Picture is a good web search for an oil pan for a V6 Tacoma engine like mine.)

What could I do?  What are my options if this happens to me someday?

1. My first option was to ask the dealer if they had a loaner car.  If so I would have grabbed 2 bags.  One with clean underwear and the other my shaving bag and I would have found a economical hotel for the night.

But the Gem Show was going on and all the hotels were booked out!

(Picture is a Travelocity search of available hotels for the night in question.)

2. My second option would be to see if they had a loaner car and I would grab my trail/bug out backpack with tent, camp mattress, sleeping bag, and other items and would have gone to BLM land in Tucson and camped the night.

3. On to the third choice.  If a loaner car wasn’t available I would have called one or two of my vandwelling friends that were in town to pick me up and bring me to the BLM land and bring me back to the Toyota dealer in the AM.

4. I would toss the backpack on and head out to find a piece of land nearby to sleep on.

I initially felt venerable with the conversation about not having a place to go for the night.  After thinking about my situation, I felt lucky that I had options.  Some vandwellers have very few options if this was to happen.  They may not have had $650+ for repairs.  Many vandwellers use small garages in remote areas and they  may not have the connections to get parts delivered quickly.

Sometimes things turn out in your favor and in my case I lucked out.  It may not be the case the next time, and I know many a vandweller has had to deal with being homeless from their vandweller vehicles

If your vandwelling you need to have a plan to deal with such a situation.  What are your options?

Brent

macaloney@hotmail.com