Self-driving vehicles were once depicted as parts of some cool or dystopian future in which everything was automated. Now, you can find a whole fleet of them in Silicon Valley. The world is gradually moving towards this future. Advancements are being made everyday in the hopes of automating many aspects of our lives.
How do we diagnose complex “issues” when they go wrong?
One of the scariest moments that can happen while driving is when you try to stop and your break pedal sinks to the floor.
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting hotter. In fact, here in Columbia, MD we are expecting the temperature to hit the 90’s this week. If your car’s air conditioning system is blowing hot air, don’t sweat it out. Take care of it now.
Based on the above definition, #2 to be exact, there is no doubt that we are experiencing an epidemic. Over the past year, we have seen dozens of Mini Coopers coming into our facility with a very low oil level. This is serious because it can dramatically reduce the life of a Mini Cooper engine!
You schedule a safety inspection, wake up to find it’s pouring down raining, and the auto shop says it can’t perform your inspection! At first, this seems unreasonable — bureaucracy gone wild and unfair. Let’s take a closer look at the reason why.
It’s interesting; so many things that we use today just don’t require much maintenance. When we purchase something like a television or a toaster oven, we don’t ever expect to have to take them to a repair shop. They may require a bit of cleaning now and then, but that’s just about all the maintenance we expect to do.
Here we are at the winter solstice, December 21, 2016. It’s the shortest day of the year. We are commuting in the dark or driving when the sun is low — at dawn in the morning or dusk in the evening — making visibility difficult. Couple this with fog, mist, ice and snow and driving becomes a real challenge.
One fall weekend, my wife and I were driving north on Interstate 270, going from Urbana to Frederick, Maryland, when we spotted a sign saying “Scenic Overlook.” We had some time to kill so we took the exit.
Recently, I stood in as the courtesy van driver. It’s always a fun job; I hear so many stories and my first trip out was not an exception. One of the customers described the problem he was having with his car.
I would have never thought I would be doing repair diagnostics at our local JCPenney at the Columbia Mall, but I find myself answering auto repair questions in some of the oddest places. The other day I was standing in the check-out line at JCPenney and ran into one of our British American Auto Care customers.
There are a lot of distractions for drivers these days — from GPS systems to mobile phones to all kinds of computer display panels. Get distracted long enough and you just may end up hitting a road obstacle — it could be a median strip, a pot hole or some debris in the roadway.
