A parked car should understand the concept of being parked. The engine is off. The keys are inside the house. The garage has been quiet for hours. Then something beneath the car begins to hu
Automatic stop-start has a peculiar talent for irritating drivers both when it works and when it does not. At one traffic light, the engine shuts down the moment the car stops. At the next, it keep
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
An electric car is sitting in the driveway with 200 miles of range showing in the app. The large battery beneath the floor contains enough energy to move two tons of metal across an entire county.
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
Select Reverse, walk behind the car and one white lamp comes on. The other stays dark. The rear light clusters look symmetrical. Both contain clear and red sections. Surely one bulb has fail
A cold engine starts, and a pale cloud rolls out of the exhaust. The sight is particularly dramatic on a winter morning, when the plume hangs behind the car as though the engine has chosen a new caree
Red goes to positive. Black goes to negative. It is the sort of rule that feels too simple to forget. It is also incomplete. When jump-starting many modern cars, the final black clamp is not suppos
Opening the hood and finding a low coolant reservoir seems like a straightforward problem. The liquid inside is pink. The parts store sells pink coolant. Buy bottle, pour liquid, close hood. Unfort
A dead battery is annoying in any parking space. It becomes considerably more awkward when the car is nose-first inside a garage and the tow truck needs it in Neutral. The brake pedal feels normal.