The car feels perfectly normal around town. At 35 mph, nothing rattles. At 50, there may be the faintest tremor. Reach highway speed and the steering wheel begins a steady dance between the driver&rsq
The tires were set perfectly that morning. Then, after a long stretch of highway, the pressure display shows every one of them sitting several pounds higher. Out comes the gauge. Sure enough, the d
The tire-pressure warning light is not one of the dashboard’s more mysterious creations. It looks like a sagging tire with an exclamation mark inside, which is a fairly direct way of saying, &ld
There is something wonderfully unhelpful about the traction-control symbol. It shows a car wriggling across the road, which makes the button beside it look like the obvious thing to press when the roa
The sticker inside the driver’s door says 35 PSI. After an hour on the highway, the dashboard says 39. Four extra pounds of pressure sounds like a problem. The tires were set correctly that morn
A lot of drivers know the badge on the back of their car. AWD. 4WD. Maybe nothing at all, which usually means front-wheel drive and a salesperson who did not have much to brag about. But
Your car hates summer more than you think. You feel it the second you open the door after it’s been sitting in the sun. That little blast of oven air. The seatbelt buckle that wants to br
Trading in your car feels like it should be the easy part. You show up, they take a look, someone disappears for a few minutes, and then they come back with a number that sounds official enough to
A lot of bad car advice survives because somebody said it with confidence. Maybe it was a dad, an uncle, a neighbor, or the guy at the quick-lube place who slapped a sticker on the windshield and t
Most people learn car stuff the same way they learn everything else in adult life: badly, on the fly, and usually five minutes after the problem starts. Nobody hands you a guide called How Not to B