Only When You’re Not at The Mechanic
An investigation into the most consistent and least explainable phenomenon in Somerset West motoring
The noise started on a Monday.
It was coming from somewhere in the front left. A rhythmic sound, present at low speeds, absent at high speeds, consistent enough to be alarming and specific enough to be describable, which is important because you are going to need to describe it to someone who will not be able to hear it.
By Wednesday it had developed a secondary component: a faint rattle on acceleration that was not the primary noise but was clearly related to it, in the way that supporting characters in a film are clearly related to the main plot without being the main plot.
By Friday I had named it. I call all car noises Gerald, for reasons the regular reader will understand.
On Saturday morning I drove to my mechanic andré, in Somerset West and explained Gerald to him in detail. The rhythm. The frequency. The conditions under which it appeared and the conditions under which it didn’t. I had prepared for this conversation. I had notes.
André listened carefully. Then he got into the car. He drove it around the block. He came back.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said.
Gerald was silent. Gerald is always silent at André’s.
THE SCIENCE
We put this phenomenon to Meneer Swanepoel, who despite teaching driver’s education rather than mechanical engineering has strong views on most things automotive.
Meneer Swanepoel’s theory is that car noises are temperature-sensitive and that the short drive from home to the mechanic changes the thermal conditions of the relevant component sufficiently to stop the noise. He said this with conviction and then added that he is not a mechanic and that we should not quote him on the technical detail.
We have quoted him on the technical detail. We believe his theory is plausible.
An alternative theory, offered by Fanus Botes at the Engen, is that cars are aware of mechanics and perform accordingly, in the same way that a child who has been unwell all week is visibly healthy by the time you get to the doctor’s rooms. Fanus considers this less a metaphor than a genuine parallel and says that machines, like children, have a survival instinct.
We do not endorse Fanus’s theory. We cannot entirely dismiss it either.
THE DESCRIPTION PROBLEM
The deeper challenge is description. A car noise must be described to a mechanic in terms the mechanic can use, which means translating a sound into words in a way that conveys frequency, rhythm, location and character.
This is harder than it sounds. Or rather, harder than the noise sounds.
The Helderburger Motoring Desk has, over the years, offered mechanics the following descriptions of car noises: “a sort of clunking,” “more of a clicking than a clunking but with some clunk in it,” “a whirring that becomes a grinding on left turns only,” “like a loose thing but hollow,” and, memorably, “you know that sound? That sound. Like that.”
André has been our mechanic for eleven years. He has the patience of a man who has been told about noises that don’t exist for his entire professional life and has concluded that the noises do exist, somewhere and that his job is to find them before they find the owner.
He has found most of Gerald’s predecessors eventually. Usually when we brought the car in for something unrelated and the noise, no longer on its best behaviour, finally introduced itself.
CONCLUSION
The noise will return on the way home from the mechanic. It always does. It will be exactly as it was — rhythmic, specific, alarming — and you will feel simultaneously vindicated and exasperated, which is a combination of emotions that only a car noise can reliably produce.
Our advice is to record it on your phone while it is happening, play the recording to André and accept that he will listen to it with an expression of professional neutrality that communicates nothing except that he has heard many recordings and that recordings and actual noises are, diagnostically, not the same thing.
Gerald, as of this writing, has not reappeared. We are choosing to regard this as either a resolution or a strategy. Time will tell.
André asked us to note that he did eventually find the source of a noise we reported in 2022 and that it was the cup holder. We stand by our original description of it as “mechanical in character.”
THE HELDERBURGER
Motoring Desk
Kobus Liebenberg
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