It's simple: Some people understand how cars work, and some don't. And having some car knowledge saves you money. Lots of money. It also spares you the frustration and helplessness felt by the poor souls who don't know a camshaft from a crankshaft.
Put on your grease costume, Lunkhead!
As soon as I was old enough to hold a trouble light, my Dad drafted me into serving as his garage assistant. He was, and still is, the best mechanical diagnostician I've ever known. However, I wasn't always an enthusiastic participant in the repair operations we undertook -- a lot of the time, I would rather have been upstairs, watching TV or reading, than downstairs, in the cold garage, holding the light while Dad worked on the old cars we usually had. In hindsight, though, I'm glad I got roped into the job, because I picked up a lot of useful knowledge.
Dad was always frugal when it came to buying cars. We had old heaps that cost a few hundred bucks -- because Dad could always keep them running at very low cost, so he figured why shell out the extra money for a new car? I can't fault him for that -- we had a lot of cars whose previous owners thought they were at death's door, but that we were able to rejuvenate and drive for years. My own first set of wheels was a '74 Chevy C-20 pickup truck, which a friend of ours was getting rid of -- he was about to junk it but at the last minute thought, "Why don't I call Jim Kafalas and see if he's interested?" Sure enough, my father said, "Bring it over -- I'll take it!" Turned out there really wasn't anything seriously wrong with the truck -- once we fixed a couple of minor problems, it was good to go, and I drove it for five or six years after that.
With the exception of a 1974 Ford Pinto wagon we bought new
(for the astronomical, at the time, price of $2500 or so), we always got used
cars. So Dad spent a lot of time working on them -- and I spent thousands
of hours helping. As I got older, I graduated from holding the light to
holding a wrench on a bolt, topside, while Dad took off a nut on the other end
of the bolt underneath the car. I gradually started doing more and more
of the manual tasks as I continued to get older, stronger, and more experienced.
Eventually, we got to where I'd even do some of the brain work, offering a helpful
suggestion from time to time -- although I'm still not a tenth the diagnostician
my father is.
Lighten up -- this ain't brain surgery!
So I know a decent amount -- if not as much as I'd like to -- about how cars work. I relate all of this not out of a sense of superiority -- I'm still not much of a mechanic, after all -- but to say that some knowledge of auto mechanics is a useful thing.
Most people, however, treat automobiles as black boxes -- they just fill their car's gas tank when it gets empty, and they put the key in the ignition and drive. Nothing wrong with that, on a day-to-day basis; but even a modest knowledge of auto mechanics will save you tens of thousands of dollars, over a lifetime of driving.
Back in October, 1987, I broke with family tradition and bought a new car (see Ode to a rice burner, 7/21/98). In keeping with my cheapskate-car upbringing, though, I sought out a Hyundai Excel, which at the time was the least-expensive car on the market (not counting the Yugo, of course, because it doesn't count as a car). I did a little homework and found that all of the Excel variants -- 2-door hatchback, 4-door sedan, 4-door hatchback -- had the same engine, transmission, and other mechanical parts. The base model 2-door hatchback sold for $5,295; you could easily pay twice as much for a 4-door hatchback with a bunch of options -- but it was essentially the same car, mechanically speaking, as the base model. So I bought the cheap one -- and I'm still driving it, almost 12 years later. That's partly because the car was well designed and built, and partly because when something does go wrong, I can usually figure out whether or not it's a serious problem, and -- if I have to turn it over to a car doctor, I can tell him, at least in general terms, what I think the problem is.
Fixing the hole in your pocket
Bring a car into a garage and say, "It's making a funny noise," and you might as well say, "Here's my wallet -- take as much as you want!" By the same token, however, knowing something about what's wrong with your car gets you out of the "disillusionment-disgust" part of the anticipation-excitement-pride-payments-warranty-repairs-disillusionment-disgust cycle.
Even if you don't fix the car yourself, if you can bring it
in and say, "The front end wobbles when I hit a bump -- it might be that the
outer tie rods are shot, but it may be something else -- you'll be able to tell
for sure when you look at it." Or, "The brakes started sounding scratchy
last week -- take a look at the rotors and see if they need to be milled down,
or if I can get by with a new set of pads." Let the mechanic know that
you have a clue about what's probably wrong with the car, and what isn't
wrong -- if you can do that, he can't take you for a ride so easily.
My co-worker had brought the car to a dealer, who had informed her that it would cost about $2,000 to plug the leak. Ever skeptical, I asked her where it was leaking. "I don't know," she replied. "Well, do you have a general idea?," I continued. "I mean, when you open the hood, can you see the approximate area where the oil is leaking from?" "I never open the hood," she replied. I just shut my mouth and walked back to my desk -- what can you say, in that situation, that won't be taken as an insult? My co-worker ended up junking the car and buying a new one, at a cost of more than $15,000. This isn't "the high cost of new cars" -- it's the high cost of mechanical ignorance!
Few agonies approach the excruciating pain of listening to a conversation on the subject of cars, when the participants are people who wouldn't know a universal joint or a torque converter if it hit them in the face. Let's face it: after a house, a car is the most expensive thing most people will ever buy -- yet they don't think it's worth the time to put on some dirty old clothes, open the hood, and learn something about what makes a car run and how to keep it ship-shape. (Don't even get me started on the subject of driving the car -- I've already beaten that one to death, as you'll recall from The nut that holds the wheel, 9/10/98.)
I'm not the world's greatest mechanic myself; make no mistake about it. I can do straightforward automotive repairs, like replacing an alternator, a muffler, a radiator, or a starter; but for the complicated stuff, I turn it over to the professionals. But it's not necessary to be able to rebuild an engine to save yourself a ton of money, both at purchase time and when your car needs repairs -- all it takes is a basic understanding of how an internal combustion engine works, and how the other mechanical systems in a car perform their appointed tasks. And besides saving money, there's no small amount of pride in being able to keep an old heap on the road, while having an occasional chuckle at the expense of the people who keep buying cars, paying too much for them, and quickly becoming disillusioned as yesterday's dream machine becomes tomorrow's lemon. There's no such thing as a lemon, if you take charge of your car's health care!
Copyright © 1999 John J. Kafalas