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Car care and maintenance: six tips for teens

Many teens know little or nothing about the basics of auto repair, an AutoMD.com survey finds. Since preventative car maintenance is important for safety, here are easy do-it-yourself auto repair and care tips for teens – and their parents: 

6. Slow down

  • By Ray Cox Contributor

Perhaps one of the best ways to keep your car well maintained, and stay safe on the road, is to avoid speeding! It may seem fun to drive fast, or you might simply be in a hurry (late for school, maybe?), but speeding is incredibly dangerous and bad for your car. Driving slower puts less demand on your car’s engine and transmission, and also helps to reduce the amount of gas you use. Avoid all driving habits that put stress and strain on your vehicle, such as fast driving, hitting curbs, and off-roading. It is also a good idea to slow down and increase your following distance when driving in harsh weather, as vehicles can lose traction in rain, snow, and ice.

Did you know? Speeding is dangerous because it reduces your reaction time to avoid a potential collision. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, speeding causes 1 in 5 serious crashes involving teen driver error.

For a more comprehensive guide to auto repair for teen drivers including step-by-step repair instructions, auto repair tips and tricks, a vehicle diagram, maintenance repair quiz, and a Certificate of Commitment (which serves as a teen driver pledge to routinely maintain their vehicle), go to www.automd.com/teen/.

– Ray Cox is an ASE certified master technician with AutoMD.com, an online automotive-repair service owned by US Auto Parts Network.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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