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1 week ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Knowing when to wash your vehicle is pretty cut and dried — the car's dirty, you wash it. How and when you wash it is, of course, entirely up to you and depends on how picky you want to be and how much time you have to spend on it. What about the underside of your vehicle? It's easy to forget about, because out of sight out of mind, but washing the underside of your car or truck is every bit as important as washing the windows and sheet metal. Why is it so important, you ask?
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1 week ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Way back in October 1999, Dodge reentered NASCAR's top series after 15 years in the wilderness with much fanfare. The company had slunk out of NASCAR in 1984 after years of decline — the last Dodge win had been in 1977, when Neil Bonnett beat Richard "The King" Petty at Ontario Motor Speedway — and most race fans figured that was the end of Dodge's illustrious racing history.
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1 week ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
When buying a used vehicle, there's always the chance that the seller, whether a car lot or a private individual, isn't on the up and up. Previous owners have all kinds of tricks and schemes they use to squeeze money out of unsuspecting buyers, ranging from the mundane and annoying to the outright fraudulent, but the worst one is possibly trying to sell a flooded vehicle.
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1 week ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
As emissions restrictions tighten and more automakers struggle to meet increasing CAFE standards, small-displacement turbocharged engines are becoming more and more common. A small, efficient, forced-induction four-cylinder engine goes further on a tank of gas (in theory, at any rate) and provides plenty of power for day-to-day driving. It's also smaller, lighter, and generally more efficient overall than a big old V6 or V8.
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1 week ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Heat is one of the biggest threats to your vehicle's drivetrain. I'm not talking the regular heat an engine makes when it's running, here. No, I'm talking excessive, piston-melting, gear-seizing heat caused by lubricant loss or some kind of catastrophic mechanical failure. It's not just engines that can overheat and destroy themselves: Transmissions are also vulnerable to heat damage, what with all the spinning gears and rods and other mechanical gewgaws in there.
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2 weeks ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
If you are, like me, a car nerd of a certain age, you may remember some '70s-era General Motors products with little wires embedded in the windshield. Two thin wires running parallel up the middle of the windshield from the bottom to a few inches from the top, where they each took a hard 90-degree turn. From there, the wires ran across the top of the windshield through the tinted shade band, and terminated a few inches from where the glass met the A pillar making a sort of T-shape.
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2 weeks ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Modern automobiles are packed to the gunwales with subtle features that are designed to improve the driver and passengers' comfort and safety while being as unobtrusive as possible. In ye olden days these things were more obvious — the driver-facing, fender-mounted turn signal indicators on 70s-era land yachts, for example, or power retractable radio antennas — but today stuff like this is so built-in and automated as to be nearly invisible unless you're looking for it.
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2 weeks ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Do you take a lot of short trips in your vehicle? When I say short here I mean between 5 to 10 miles or under 15 minutes. You know, short hops here and there to the store, school, or work. You probably do, whether you realize it or not. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average length of a car trip here in the States is just under 6 miles and less than 7% of trips are longer than 30 miles. That's not a lot of miles, right?
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2 weeks ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
On New Years Eve 2015, my family and I were driving eastbound down the Ohio turnpike in my beloved 2002 Saturn L300. Everything was fine until, just past the Route 250 exit, the IP lit up like a Christmas tree and the engine suddenly lost power. Fortunately, I was able to coast to a safe spot on the shoulder. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of a miserable ordeal that finally ended with me discovering that the Saturn's timing chain had broken and the engine was mulched.
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3 weeks ago | 
jalopnik.com | Jason Marker
Despite what old cartoons would have you believe, it's neither normal nor good for your vehicle to smoke heavily while it's running. Maybe in the old days, but modern cars with modern fuel injection, cooling systems, and engine management systems are not supposed to smoke. So when you see a smokey car on the road, that's a sign of a serious problem. Typically, when a vehicle is having issues, you'll get two kinds of smoke from the exhaust — blue or white.
