Goss’ Garage

Pat Goss, MotorWeek's resident master technician, helps consumers understand car problems and how to speak the same language as their technician. As cars becoming increasingly complex, fewer repairs can be accomplished at home. Effective communication with a repair shop is vital to keeping consumer and operating costs under control. From rattles and squeaks to leaks and drips, Pat covers a myriad of issues designed to keep cars on the road and out of the repair shop.

Dead Battery Lockout

Here’s something that’s rapidly going away, the old fashion key and two button key fob. These things are being replaced by modern keys that well they don’t fit into anything. These things they go in your pocket and they send out a signal so that you can touch the door handle and unlock the car or lock it for that matter. Stays in your pocket, you get into the car,… Read More

Wipeout

No matter what car you drive, some of the most basic items can have the biggest impact on your driving safety, like your wiper blades for instance. If you can’t see well, then you certainly can’t drive safely. First, keep the blades of the windshield free of leaves and dirt. Even a small leaf caught under the blade of your wipers, well that could prevent the blade… Read More

Air Filters

There’s a myth about air filters that dirty air filters will affect gas mileage. Well back in the day when cars had carburetors, like this old one here, well yes that was true but carburetors have been gone a long time now and modern cars they have fuel injection and a dirty air filter will not affect fuel economy. The reason being is that when the air was… Read More

Keeping Your Engine Clean

I’ve heard it said that a clean engine like this is a happy engine. Maybe that means a dirty one is a sad engine. I don’t know about that but what I can tell you is that the engines that we see coming into the repair shops, well the ones that are kept clean over the life of the vehicle, they usually have fewer problems. Well that’s because of several different… Read More

Dum-Dum DIY Jobs

Now I know none of you would do these things but we see some pretty crazy stuff coming into the repair shops. One of the more typical ones is where the exhaust system has a leak and the driver goes out and buys duck tape or some other type of tape and wraps it around the leaking part and expects it to stop the leak. Well it may momentarily, but remember exhaust… Read More

Replace your Rockers

Although vehicle manufacturers have made huge improvements in preventing body rust on vehicles, we still have some out there that are like this. And that is rust. What causes rust is where dirt and moisture combine inside or between two pieces of metal, dirt holds the moisture, it eats itself from the inside out. Now in this case you may have to replace this due… Read More

Batter Up Batteries

Few things on modern cars are as important as its battery and that’s because everything works with electricity on todays cars. That means we have to have a really clean battery all the time. All this grease and dirt and everything laying on top of it. We clean it away using some type of grease cutting detergent and clear water to rinse it. But the really important… Read More

Give me a Brake

Brakes. Oh so important but they seem so simple. But there’s so much to know about them. Number one, they wear. And that means you need to check them periodically. And if there’s ever a change in the way the brakes feel, or that they make noise or anything like that you get them checked immediately. Here’s and example of when you don’t do that. Everything is… Read More

Winter Tires

If you live in an area where you get any amount of snow whatsoever, there is the eternal question: Do I need winter tires? And to shed some light on it, we have our tire expert, Matt Edmonds. Matt, welcome back to Goss’ garage. Matt Edmonds: Pleasure to be here, Pat. Pat: Alright, we have some examples of tires here. Give us a primer. Matt: Well we’ve got the… Read More

Follow Your Nose

Ah there’s nothing like that new car smell. But in many cases that new car smell gives way to some rather pungent odors. Not the least of which is the one which smells like dirty sweat socks. Well that could indicate that you have a leaky sunroof if your car has one. So you want to start out by looking at the drains in the sunroof. No, they’re not waterproof. So… Read More