elocs

I am going to be selling my xA RS 3.0 and one of the things I knew I will be having to do is to take off my plates. Also I wanted to put them in new frames other than the ones that came from the now defunct dealer.

When I bought my car in December of 06 the dealer took the plates off my old Corsica and put them on my brand new xA. So having just paid them $16000 for a new car those cheap a$$es took the old screws from my Corsica and put them on the xA. Since I intended to keep the xA forever I didn't think anything of the plates and in the years since my state has not replaced plates.

So imagine my surprise when I went to take off my plates and couldn't get them off. Well I did manage to get one of the screws fairly easily off the front and the other screw was a total bugger to remove. The back plate, now that was a different story. The head of the left screw twisted right off. The right screw would not come off no matter what and had to be cut off.

I tried everything to get those screws out but they were literally fused in there. Evidently Toyota chooses to use metal clips to hold in the plates and they rust quite nice here in the Great White North where the roads get salted in the winter. I had to take the car into the body shop to get them to solve a rattle in the driver's door so I had them deal with the rear plate screws and they had to drill them out. The owner said he has found the same problem with Mercedes--strange bedfellows.

So check your plates' fasteners, take them off every year at least (wish I had), replace those metal fasteners with plastic ones. Out of all of the problems I anticipated, this is the last one I expected to encounter with my xA.