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.
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
There is no graceful way to discover how ABS feels for the first time. Something enters the road. The brake pedal goes down hard. Then, at precisely the moment when calm would be useful, the pedal beg
Finding a hole in the exhaust usually leads to one conclusion: the muffler is rusting away and the bank account is about to become involved. That conclusion is often correct. Exhaust systems live a
A turn signal normally keeps a relaxed, predictable beat. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Then, without warning, it sounds as though someone has doubled the tempo. The arrow on the dashboard flashes furiously
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
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
Most people call it a headrest, which makes it sound like somewhere to relax during a long traffic jam. Its proper name is head restraint, and that description is much closer to its real purpose. T
There was a time when replacing a car battery was a reassuringly simple job. Disconnect the old one, wrestle it out of its tray, drop in the new one and tighten the terminals. If the engine started, t