Got your driver's permit? Top 5 things to know about your car.

You have your driver’s permit? Congratulations. You've learned the rules of the road and earned the right to drive. But there's a lot more to driving. If you want to drive safely and save money, you have to know how to keep your car properly maintained. One of our recent surveys at AutoMD.com found that two-thirds of parents of teen drivers rated their teen's basic knowledge of car maintenance as "somewhat or completely clueless," or "average." Teens can use online resources on our site or other websites to learn more. Here are five car maintenance and repair tips to get you started:

1. Gas: Don’t buy more than you need

Joshua Lott/Reuters/File
Fuel prices are displayed at a Chevron gas station in Phoenix, Ariz., in this file photo. Here are two tips to save money on driving: Don't buy premium gasoline, unless your car requires it, and don't 'top off' your tank.

Using a higher grade of gasoline than your car manufacturer recommends is like throwing money away. Premium gasoline costs 20 to 40 cents more per gallon than regular, and most experts agree that there is very little difference in quality between grades of gasoline. Another money-saving tip: When the gas tank is full and the pump handle shuts off automatically, do not add more gas. Gasoline needs room to expand, so if you top off your tank, the extra gasoline can evaporate into your car’s vapor collection system, causing your engine to run poorly. Sometimes, that extra gas is fed back into the gas station’s holding tank through its vapor recovery line. What’s more, overfilling your gas tank can cause harmful vapors to be released into the environment. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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