but it’s probably accurate. Remember that the first iPhone was similar in that there were lines of people looking to get one and objectively it was not nearly as good as the Blackberries that it was competing against. It was widely ridiculed for not being good at actually making phone calls, there was no “app store”,…

David Tracy didn’t recommend a Jeep?! I’m both shocked and impressed!

Basic troubleshooting should be one. How to check for spark, fuel, and air, knowing which is missing is key.

The check engine codes is the best of these, with bulbs in general also good. Doing a little research before you take it somewhere to get fixed can save you a ton of money. Sometimes it literally is that you didn’t tighten the gas cap. Most auto parts stores will pull them for free but the scanning tools are so cheap…

At some point we’re going to have to come through the “range” and “mileage” issues for EVs. If I tell you a gas car can go “up to” 350 miles on a tank of gas, most will assume that means highway driving under ideal conditions since that’s where most cars get the best mileage.

The key is usually that they have a pump or overrunning clutch on the output shaft so that towing the car will build pressure to engage the clutches or spin the input and have any hope of getting the power to go engine.
Early Chrysler 727 torquflights had input and output pumps and could be “push started”. Later they…

Always called that “knows enough to be dangerous” zone, I probably live in that zone somewhere.

Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this response.

Aside from the “because they are serving their country” aspect, which in some cases should be reason enough, mainly because the government says so and they get to make the rules. The car company doesn’t have to lease to military people if they don’t want the risk (or do business in the US if they don’t like the law),…

I love #1, installed cruise control on my first car because of that. All the wiring was there, just needed four parts from a junkyard car to install or swap out and I had cruise, which is one of my favorite accessories in a car.

Came to post this myself, though in the ODBI days there was no digital display, so the check engine light would flash the code which you had to compare against your secret decoder ring. Luckily they were only 2-digit codes.

It’s fine on the motor for short shots, heat is the big enemy. Worked at a shop where a mechanic would “drive” the car into the bay on the starter motor rather than push it every so often. That extended cranking will really heat things up and then you can shorten the life of the motor, but the short little bursts like…

I think a flatbed would be too steep to get a car like that up the ramp without potentially damaging front fascia, at which point they could try and get repairs from the tow company for damaging their car and I don’t want to know what the repair cost for that minor “damage” would be.

Agreed, not sure I’d specifically seek out a car with it, but I would not turn down a car that had it either. My dad talked my mom into buying their current car with those features simply because they’re not getting any younger, and even though my mom has always been a great driver, her ability to see and react aren’t…

Quade mentioned it below, but traction control is basically just software on most cars today. Other than a light on the dashboard and maybe an extra sensor or two it’s mostly just using the ABS, engine, and transmission control computers while driving as opposed to just while braking. Most cheap versions are more…

People hate changing themselves, any change in corporate culture is asking a lot of people to do so and that takes either lots of time and/or pressure, or new people with the right mind-set. Then you have to get those people to do the same below them and so on down the line, it’s a cascade, and even harder when you…

My first guess is a military person who didn’t come back. Wouldn’t be the first time someone enlisted, used their bonus to buy a dream car before getting deployed and never returning.

I really don’t understand how anyone who is familiar with the complexities of design and manufacturing a complicated electro-mechanical product as a vacuum can think that a machine that is FAR more complicated would be either easy or a good idea. “Hey, we know electric motors and have one product with a battery,…

The key word here is “diesel”. As other’s have commented many semi trucks have 13 gears, and that’s because diesel engines don’t have the RPM range that a gas engine does, and so those gears are MUCH more important to making the truck drive-able. With 2 or even 3 thousand fewer RPMs to play with those gears become the…

I like the concept but you’d have to do it like fuel in that commercial sized tires get taxed differently than “consumer” tires or you’ll have people making their vehicles unsafe by putting on cheap tires that are not rated for the vehicle they are being used on to save the taxes. Because you buy many fewer tires than…