rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about five mechanic secrets that you
should know, because even if you're not going to fix your own car, knowledge is
power and if you know more about your car, you have less of a chance of getting
taken advantage of when your car needs repairs
you get warning lights on in your dash, let's say your check engine light comes
on, your ABS light is on and your track light all come on there all three shine
and while you're driving, well in many modern cars it has to do more with the
software and the design of the car than actual problems, on many cars especially
Toyota's Lexus, if you have a problem and your check engine light comes on
automatically that will turn off the ABS and traction control systems, it's a
computer safety thing, so you'll have these three lights you think, oh all
these things are happening in my car but, in reality the only real problem is the
check engine light, so in that case have it scanned and see what the check engine code
is and have that fixed first, I've had more people before they met me spend a
whole bunch of money having working quotation mark done and other mechanics
only later they come to me with the same thing that all those lights are on and
it turns out that they got charged for ABS work, traction control work,
that probably wasn't even done on the car because there was another problem that
the mechanic didn't fix right so they all came back on again, so if your check
engine light comes on, and the ABS and the traction control lights are all on at
the same time, don't have a fit, first find out why the check engine light is
on and fix that, that often fixes the whole thing, now the next has to do with
the maintenance required light, as far as I'm concerned the maintenance required
light that is one of the biggest scams out there, manufactures put them in to
scare people to bring the car to the dealer
those stupid lights on most cars will just come on at certain mileage
intervals some cars will come on every 15,000 miles, what you want to do is of
course maintain your car correctly change the oil when you need to, but
learn how to turn that maintenance required light off yourself, because
often the only thing the car needs when the maintenance required light comes on
is an oil change, do what yourself or have it done somewhere, just Google for
your own car turning off maintenance required light and you'll see there are
certain buttons you have to push in a certain sequence and you can turn it off
yourself, don't freak out and go running to the dealer and get some gigantic bill
for things that you really don't need to have done at all and the next mechanics
tip is this, on any normal car don't waste your money on expensive additives
to stick in the engine or the transmission or the gas tank
now of course companies make the stuff so they want to sell it to you and let's
say you bought a used car and it's a real junker and it's got something
leaking or it burns a lot of oil, you can try some additives to attempt to help it
a little bit, but in a normal functioning car that you take care of it's a waste
of money to buy that stuff, modern gasoline it's got plenty of additives
especially in the United States by law, the stuffs going to burn perfectly fine
you don't need to put anything else in it, it works great the way it comes from
the refinery, and the same thing goes for engine oil, engine oil works
really good its well-designed it's much better than it was when I was a kid
all the chemicals that are added to the oil to make it last longer, to make it
not burn, to make it not pollute and vaporize they're in there from the factory, you
don't need to add a bunch of packages yourself you just need to change the
stuff regularly, that's what you need to do not put additives in, change your oil
when it gets dirty, if your car's heater doesn't work right, maybe it's lukewarm
maybe doesn't work at all, a lot of times it's because of one simple thing and
that simple thing is this, if your car is low on coolant often your heater won't
work right, now this may sound counterintuitive but it's true
your car's heater core that the hot water goes through and then the air blows and
puts hot air on you, is inside the dash most of the time it's usually the
highest part of the cooling system and as crazy as it sounds, the heater core only
works with hot water inside, it doesn't work with hot air, so if your cooling
system is low on coolant, since the heater core is the highest part, it gets
filled up with air and the liquid goes back down into the engine, and hot air
won't blow into your car, it has to be full of hot water that dissipates the heat through
the fins and your fan blows the hot air in your face, so if your here is not
working this winter, hey just check your coolant level it might just be low, I
have picked hundreds of cars that way over the years, now the last mechanic
secret has to do with car batteries, believe it or not car batteries are kind
of like eggs, they really have a sell-by date, now when I was a young mechanic in
the 60s, batteries were completely different, in the back of the gas station we had
empty batteries that were vacuum sealed, when it was time to put one in a
customer's car, we got an ice pick we broke all the vacuum seals, then we
filled the battery with acid and charged it up with a battery charger, so in those
days the batteries had a pretty much indefinitely off life there was nothing
in them, but modern batteries are filled with acid at the factory, it's just a new
production thing, but once they're filled with acid, they start to deteriorate and
batteries and cars are made to start your car, discharge a little then
the alternator recharges it, then start and stop, if you fill them with acid and
put them on a shelf and they sit there for months on end, they start to degrade
then they lose a lot of their lifespan, and the worst ones I ever saw were these
Delco batteries they were making them in South Korea, then of course they put
them on a ship and they send them to the United States, well who knows how many
months it takes them to get here, I used to buy some of those batteries and I had
hundreds of them go bad for my customers, way before they should have, some of them
only less than a few months or a year year and a half, so when you're buying a
battery for your car, pretend you're at the grocery store, demand to see the date
of the battery and try to get one that's less than a month old, because they don't
deteriorate that much in one month, but don't go to one of those big box stores
where they got batteries all piled up in a giant pyramid and buy one there, who
knows how long that thing's been sitting at the bottom of the pyramid, always get
a fresh battery when you buy one, so now you know five mechanic secret that'll
keep you from wasting money on your car needlessly, now I've been a mechanic for
the last 51 years, but one of the main reasons I became a mechanic was because
I didn't trust anybody fix my own car, so even if you're not
going to fix your own car, realize a little bit of mechanic's knowledge can
go a long way for saving you money, so if you never want to miss another one of my
new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!