Quick Tip of The Day for 5/21/2008
Listen to your vehicle. Sound strange? You can tell when you are feeling well and when things are not quite right and you are not feeling well. You listen to your body.
Listening to you vehicle is similar. You know what sounds it normally makes. As it ages, it probably makes different sounds, or even more sounds. You can tell that as you stop, you are starting to feel a pulsing as you apply the brakes; as you accelerate, the transmission is shifting harder. The list could go on forever. Listening includes all of the senses (except taste, of course).
Do you smell something different than normal? Do you see puddles of any kind on your garage floor? Do you see smoke coming from the engine compartment? When you turn the wheel, do you hear squealing from the tires? You should be in tune with your vehicle.
Recently, I noticed that when I turn the wheel, I hear a squealing, which usually means that the vehicle is out of alignment. Over the past few days, I have been noticing that it is shifting harder when going from 1st gear to 2nd gear. Since I’ve owned several cars that have had transmission problems in the past, I can tell that the car might be getting ready to have a transmission problem.
I now have two choices:
- I can take the car in and have the problem looked at and pay to fix whatever the problem is.
- Keeping in mind that the car is 4+ years old and that it currently has 135,000 miles on it, it may be time to consider getting a different vehicle. The car is only going to get older and is only going to have more and more problems. Notice that I did not say “new” vehicle. The truely frugal person does not have to have a “new” vehicle, but I’ll leave that for a future post.
This could go on for a while, but I think you know where this is going.
If I am oblivious to the indicators my vehicle is putting out, I only have myself to blame when I am in the middle of nowhere and a tie-rod breaks or the transmission goes out. I can mitigate the hassle, and the additional cost by listening.