rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about five things that you should never
do to your car you don't want to have any problems, now I've been working on
cars for 51 years and believe it or not I've seen many people do many of these
five different things over the years, so I'm going to warn you why you shouldn't
do them, now the first thing is never jump start your car backwards, learn
which terminal is positive and in which negative this Toyota is pretty easy it's
got a big plus on the positive and if you pick this up you can see there's also a
plus on the battery right here, it says plus so you know that's positive and the
opposite side is negative and it's got a negative on the battery, they're not all
this simple that's why you need to learn which is positive and which is negative
and here's why jump-starting it backwards
can really cause problems, using this voltmeter you can see how many volts the
car battery has, now in this case it's almost 12 volts this battery is a little
bit low, it's eleven point six eight and like all modern cars the positive wiring
goes to all the wires and switches and the negative goes to the body of the car
and to the engine all the metal in the car is negative electricity and that's 12
volts negative electricity, unfortunately since cars are all computerized many of
those sensors work on a five volt reference signal, so a lot of the electronics
and especially the computer itself runs on five volts, now that's five volts on
the power side if you jump start a battery backwards and put positive on
negative and negative on positive you're making the ground now go to power
so instead of the ground being negative electricity
you're now having positive 12 volts going through there, that will feed right
through any of those computer parts on the ground circuit and go right to the
computer with 12 volts instead of five and it will fry the computer, so never
jumpstart a car backwards, and as a corollary to that, if you're working on
the electronic system, make sure you know the voltage of what you're working on, is
it regular 12 volts or is a computer circuit that has five volts and you
should never put more than five volts into that circuit, now the next thing I
don't advise to do, is to add fuel engines to your fuel, now this isn't going to
hurt anything, except your wallet your waste
money in most cases, modern fuel at least the United States has many
additives required by law, cars run perfectly fine with the stuff you get
out of the pump, if you buy good fuel, take care of your cars
you don't need additives, now I know some people are gonna say, well Scotty those
GDI gasoline direct engine cars they get carboned up don't they need cleaners in
the fuel tank and the answer to that is no, because if you put them in a fuel
tank of a GDI, the GDI injectors spray them right into the engine they don't
go over the intake valves, so the intake valves still get crud on them and they don't
get clean because the inside of them only has air and oil from the PCV valve
system going in, the only way you clean those is by either spraying it into
the intake where the air goes in or paying a mechanic like me who has
pressurized cleaning machines to clean it, now the next thing not to do is to put a
heavier weight oil in an older engine that might start to be burning a little
oil and you think, well I'll put heavier oil in and it will make it better, you really
don't want to do it in any modern engine and here's why, you can see this is a 12
year old matrix and it says use 5w30 oil and some modern ones say even to use 0w
20, it's very light oil and you don't want to make that light oil
heavier most of these variable valve systems and they have to have thin oil
so the oil flows really fast gets into the VVT system if you put a heavier oil
in, when you start the engine up, it won't flow right you'll get wear in that VVT
system and if it's really heavy it won't flow right through the VVT
system and the variable valve system won't work right, it won't accelerate right
it might put the check engine light on, I see that a lot of people put too heavy
oil in the modern car, so don't do that stick to what it was made for and the
next thing not to do is, don't waste your money filling your tires with nitrogen, a
few years back they were pushing that and they're trying to sell guys nitrogen
concentration machines cuz realize the air were breathing in now that's like
80% nitrogen already, so all these companies are trying to sell guys like
me nitrogen enhancing machines that could
turn that 80% nitrogen into almost 100% nitrogen to fill the tires with and yes
nitrogen is an inert gas and it keeps its pressure a little bit better, I
believe they use them in big jets because they're up
in the air where it's really cold then they got it land really fast and they want
the pressure to stabilize exactly but for normal cars just driving down the
street, you're wasting your money paying somebody
to fill your tires with nitrogen because of course over time most tires lose a
little bit of air, so you'd have to keep going back and paying them to add a
little air, you couldn't be adding it yourself and all you're doing is
knocking out 20% of the nitrogen that's in there, so it's a waste of money don't throw
your money away filling your tires with nitrogen and the
fifth and last thing not to do is, don't forget to change your coolant every once
in a while if you keep your cars a long time now, this is an old car it has the
old fashioned green coolant in it, you need to change it once every three
years, but more modern cars they use extended life antifreeze as you can see
here 150,000 miles or five years, now if you don't keep your cars five years or 150
thousand miles you don't have to care, and there are even more modern ones
there are seven years so it's not something you need to do all that often
but if you're cheap like me and drive your cars 30 years 20 years 15 years you
want to change the coolant when it's required, if you don't know and it can
ruin the water pump, it can ruin the head of the engine and with these modern
computerized cars, it actually creates a battery voltage when it's low inside the
coolant and that can destroy the electronic system and the computer
sensors make the car go haywire, I've had customers with cars like that, I stick my
meter in their coolant and another end on the battery terminal and find out
that there's voltage flowing through the coolant, that destroys stuff, it's not
that hard to change the coolant out you can change it out yourself but you have
to do it if you keep the car a long time to prevent all kinds of electrolysis that's
going to occur inside and damage your car, so now you got it five things that
you shouldn't do on your car if you want it to last a long time, their simple
things you can easily do them yourself, you don't want to waste money, but on the
other hand you don't want to ruin your car because you didn't want to buy $30
of antifreeze, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair
videos, remember ring that Bell!