A car sits empty in the driveway, engine off and doors locked, yet all three brake lights are glowing as though an invisible driver has a foot planted on the pedal. It looks like a wiring problem. Pos
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.
Replacing windshield wipers used to be one of those jobs that made everyone feel mechanically competent. Lift the arm. Turn the blade. Unclip it. Spend several minutes questioning the little plasti
Neutral has a reassuring name. It sounds harmless, disconnected and mechanically impartial. Put the selector in N, release the parking brake and the car can roll. Surely that means it can also be towe
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
The engine is off. You push the brake pedal once, then again. Each push feels a little firmer than the last. After several presses, the pedal barely wants to move. That sensation can make it s
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
They run around the edge of almost every modern windshield: a solid black border that gradually breaks into smaller and smaller dots before disappearing into clear glass. Most drivers have stared t
Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive need little introduction. Then there is B. It sits on the shifter of many hybrids looking important but refusing to explain itself. Battery seems like the obvious