Top 10 most expensive mistakes in car repair

8. Driving on fumes

Rebecca Cook/Reuters/File
Several men help push a pickup truck into a gas station after it ran out of gas in 2003 in metro Detroit after a blackout closed many gas stations. Running on fumes is no longer a good idea because electric fuel pumps can fail with no gas in the tank.

Gone are the days when cars had mechanical fuel pumps and carburetors – unless you drive a car made in the 1970s or '80s. When cars had carburetors, you could drive them until all the gas was gone, refuel, and drive again with no problem. However, most fuel-injected engines rely on in-tank electric pumps that use the gas to cool and lubricate their components. Driving your fuel-injected engine frequently on fumes could cause the pump to fail, leading to a very costly repair.

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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.”

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