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.
Modern Mufflers
There’s a wonderful sound - high performance exhaust on a high performance car. Now, it doesn’t make any difference what you drive. There are high performance exhaust systems available. But you know before we go into the high performance exhaust system, let’s take a look at the way the typical muffler is designed and constructed. This is the way the average… Read More
Protecting Against Car Identity Theft
Identity theft is an enormous problem, and now it’s even happening to cars. You know, anybody can walk past your car and copy down the VIN number because it’s right there in the windshield. Once they’ve copied your VIN number, they can apply for duplicate papers, and those papers can be used on another car that has been stolen or may have been reconstructed. How… Read More
Garage Dressups
There isn’t a reason in the world that a garage has to be dull and boring. Well, we went on the Internet to find some things that we could use to, well, make the garage a more appealing place to be. The first thing we came up with is two cool kits. Now this is one of them. Notice the filling station pump nozzle and hose and everything. This kit simply fits on to a… Read More
Black Boxes
We have some really neat add-on black box technology here. All right, first on my Explorer I wanted to have a reverse sensing system, but I didn’t want the buttons that show through the bumper. I think those are pretty ugly myself. So I elected to go after market on it, and I installed one of these systems. This is a ROSS system, and ROSS stands for Rostra… Read More
Tire Changing
Here’s something that’s pretty basic, a flat tire. Now you would think that that would be just straightforward, but it can actually be dangerous and it can be confusing. You see cars today, well, they don’t all have spare tires. They may have no spare, yet come equipped with an air pump and some puncture sealer. Well, even if you do have a spare, how could it be… Read More
Certify This!
As cars have become more complicated, it’s more complicated to get them repaired properly. Well, that means that if you need mechanical repairs on your automobile, you need to look for an ASE certified technician. Now ASE certification deals with things mechanical, like brakes and steering and suspension, and there’s a machine shop certification. There’s a whole… Read More
Truck Stuff
This time we have some interesting new products for pickups and sport utilities. Now our first is from Lund and it’s a new side step. It makes it easier to get into the vehicle. Now I know you’ve seen hundreds of different styles of side steps over the years, so what could somebody do that would be different? Well, in this case they start out with an aluminum step… Read More
Pads & Rotors
There are a lot of decisions that need to be made if you want to have good brakes, and here to explain some of those issues is Matt Edmonds from The Tire Rack. Hi, Matt. Matt: Hi, Pat. Goss: All right. Brake pads, that’s the first issue. What do we have down here? Matt: We’ve got three different performance categories of brake pads represented here. The Akebono… Read More
Cheap Horsepower
One of our most popular questions is about getting more horsepower, and here to explain how to do that is Rich Chiavacci of EIP Tuning in Westminster, Maryland. Welcome to the show, Rich. Chiavacci: Thank you. Goss: All right. Lots of folks make big mistakes when they try to get more horsepower out of their car. What would you recommend as a first step if they’re… Read More
Quickies
This time we have a couple of unusual things that can cost drivers a lot of money. See, as cars have changed over the years, one thing that has changed right along with it is the ignition lock. Well, what does that have to do with anything? Well, built into that ignition lock on a modern automobile is probably going to be some form of anti-theft device, and that… Read More