Automotive Blogger

Winter is creeping closer and closer, with snow already making an appearance in the Midwest. If you live in a place where the temperatures dip below freezing, it’s a wise idea to make sure your car is prepped for winter. For this week’s Tech Thursday, here are some things you should do to winterize your car:

1. Battery: Cold weather can reduce your battery’s life by up to half, so get your battery tested, and replace it if necessary.
2. Tires: Winter or summer, saving gas, or staying on the road, it all comes down to tired. For winter, make sure they have adequate pressure, and also make sure the treads are in good condition. This is a good time to rotate your tires, or replace them with snow tires, if necessary.
3. Wipers: Make sure your windshield wipers are in good condition. If the blades show any signs of tearing or cracking, or if they leave bad streaks or smears on the windshield, replace them. If you live in a place prone to snow and ice, you might want to consider special winter-friendly wiper blades.
4. Fluids: Keep your gas tank at least half full all the time to keep the gas lines from freezing, and make sure you have enough antifreeze as well. This is also a good time to replenish the washing fluid for your windshield with a winter blend to help reduce ice.
5. Emergency Preparedness: Along with a first-aid kit, make sure your trunk holds a flashlight, jumper cables, a tool kit, and tire chains if snow and ice are an issue. Also, a bag of sand or kitty litter can be invaluable if you get stuck in snow or ice, either for traction, or just to add weight. Packing a blanket and matches or a propane lighter is wise also.

Winter driving doesn’t have to be dangerous, and getting caught in weather doesn’t have to be deadly. Keep your car well-maintained, drive sensibly, and stay warm.

It’s usually the high-end marques like BMW and Mercedes-Benz that pioneer vehicle safety, but recently Nissan’s jumped into the game, with new safety innovations and nifty gadgets. Examples include the new “pop-up” engine hood on this year’s Skyline, and the just-announced “slip-hazard warning system” which hasn’t yet been released, but will supposedly detect slippery road conditions and alert the driver using an interactive voice system.

The technology involves a relay of information from the ABS through the proprietary “Intelligent Transport System,” a new feature that links your car with third-party data gathered from the local police, other drivers, and records that detail “the slippery points” along your route.

Testing is currently underway in Japan.

We’ve trawled YouTube this week for our TechThursday spot, and offer this video, on how to change a tire:

We expect hybrid vehicles from Honda, which offered the first one in the USA, and Toyota, since their Prius is still the poster-car for the green car movement, but when we think of alternative fuel, Audi isn’t generally the first name that comes to mind.

It soon will be.

Audi has been working on a hybrid-electric system they refer to as a parallel engine, because it will work solely on gas, solely on electric, or both at the same time. The Q7 SUV will be the first to sport the new system, and, sometime next year, Audi’s alternative-fuel offerings in the USA will expand again to include diesel engines that have a 600-miles-per-tank range between refueling stops.

Question of the moment: What do Subaru, Mercedes and BMW have in common? Well, for one thing, they all use LoJack as their anti-theft device of choice. My other half drives a Forester, and reminded me that we haven’t updated our address with Lo-Jack since moving out of California three years ago, which got me wondering exactly how it works.

I’ve always thought of LoJack as the automotive equivalent of micro-chipping a pet, and I knew it involved a transceiver signal that could be activated if a theft was reported, but it wasn’t until that conversation the other night that I began to wonder where this chip was.

I discovered that I’m not allowed to know. There are 20 possible locations for the transceiver to be located, in any given vehicle, but car owners are not told where they are. This is in case they’re ever in the car when it’s stolen. If you don’t know where the chip is, you can’t tell a thief the location, and they can’t disable it.

I also learned that the transceiver is tied to each car’s VIN. Specifically, here’s what it says on the LoJack website:

Each LoJack System has a unique code that is tied into the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). When a theft is reported to the police, a routine entry into the state police crime computer results in a match of the LoJack System’s unique code against the state VIN database. This automatically activates the LoJack System in your car, which emits an inaudible signal. Law enforcement authorities who are equipped with LoJack vehicle tracking units - in their police cruisers and aviation units - are always listening for a LoJack signal. Police use the LoJack vehicle tracking units to track and recover your LoJack equipped vehicle.

Having a better idea of how LoJack works has made me more confident in the system, but you know what really impressed me? They have a 90% recovery rate of equipped cars. When you consider that there’s a car stolen somewhere in the USA every 25 or 26 seconds, that’s seriously cool.

If you’re like me, you know that your car has overdrive, because there’s a button for it, and you have a general idea of what it does, but you’re not really sure you could explain it to someone else. For this week’s Technology Thursday, I offer a quick-and-dirty explanation of overdrive, as it’s commonly used.

Basically, overdrive (aka OD) is the highest gear in your transmission. Automatic transmissions have three speeds plus overdrive, which allows the engine to use a lower rpm than “normal� for any given road speed, which in turn offers better fuel efficiency, and sometimes quieter driving on highways.

When overdrive is switched on, it allows the engine to move into OD mode after a specific speed threshold is met (usually around 45 mph), and when it is off, the lower gears are the only options available. Generally speaking, it should only be used in normal driving conditions when you’re driving faster than 45 mph.

While overdrive is on, the transmission will automatically move into third gear when there is more load, and back to OD when there is less. For this reason, driving up steep grades, or towing a trailer can cause the transmission to shift back and forth between third and OD, as if “huntingâ€? for the right place. In these cases, and if you need to use the brakes frequently (like when you’re driving downhill), it’s best to turn overdrive off.

It was 103 degrees with high humidity where I live yesterday, so you’ll have to forgive me for posting about Dodge’s “Chill Zone” technology, which is a standard feature of the 2008 Dodge Avenger, at all trim levels, among other models from that maker.

If you’ve missed the recent news about the survey Dodge conducted as part of the marketing campaign for this, the information you need is this: 26% of Americans don’t use their glove compartment at all, 72% do use it, but not for actual gloves, and most Americans keep things like insurance info, sunglasses, tissues and flashlights in the glove box.

Enter Dodge. They’ve added a compartment to the lower front of the glove box, and chilled it with dedicated a/c vents. It can hold up to four standard soda cans, and keep them cool for you.

Now, I’m all for having cold beverages during long, hot summer drives, but I have to wonder if anyone is ever going to make a chilled glove box that is capable of holding and cooling a standard 17.5 oz. bottle of water.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never completely understood the difference between traction control and stability control, especially since some cars have both, some have one or the other, and some don’t have either. I looked it up, recently, and thought I’d share.

First, it’s important to understand traction control and stability control are not the same thing. Typically, at least on newer cars, traction control is an electro-hydraulic system designed to prevent traction-loss under excessive steering or throttling by the driver.
To do this, it shares actuators and sensors with the anti-lock braking system.

There is a list, actually, of what traction control can do:

1. Brake wheels (one or more)
2. Suppress the spark to the cylinders (one or more)
3. Reduce the fuel supply to the cylinders (again, one or more)
4. On drive-by-wire cars, it can close the throttle
5. On turbo-charged cars, it can actuate the boost control solenoid to reduce boost, which in turn reduces engine power

That’s all very well and good, but how does it apply to actual driving? Here are some examples:

• On street vehicles, traction control helps regulate throttle input to prevent spinning when accelerating in snow or on wet pavement.
• In race cars, it allows the greatest amount of acceleration possible without wheel spin, and maintains an optimum slip angle when drivers accelerate out of a turn.
• Off road, traction control can be used with or in place of mechanical locking differential, slowing spinning wheels with quick bursts of brake pressure, and providing more torque to non-spinning wheels, which makes controlling the vehicle easier.
• While cornering, helps prevent front-wheel drive cars from reaching the point where the wheels can’t steer and drive, or, if the wheels do lose their gripping ability, it can help keep the car stable. (In rear-wheel-drive cars, it can prevent oversteer.)

Traction control, by the way, can trace it’s roots all the way back to Positraction, a kind of limited slip differential used in older high-powered cars with rear wheel drive.

It should, however, never be taken for granted or allowed to encourage driving in dangerous conditions.

If you read car reviews at all, you’ve probably noticed the phrase “MyGig� coming up in the options lists for Chrysler (and Dodge, and Jeep) cars. But do you know what it is?

Based on what is essentially a 20Gb hard drive embedded into your car, MyGig includes a USB jack, two audio outputs, and a line-in jack in addition to the standard AM/FM radio, as well as a DVD/CD player, and a 6.5-inch touch-screen with voice command recognition. There’s also a SIRIUS Satellite Radio (and it’s just a chip in the radio instead of a separate unit) and Bluetooth capability for hands-free phone use.

Part of that 20Gb hard drive is dedicate to holding navigation software, but the rest of it is yours to use. The system will let you rip CDs directly to the hard drive, or you can use the USB port to transfer music or pictures, all of which can be played back through the system.

The first appearance of the MyGig package was on the 2007 Chrysler Sebring, but it will eventually be available on most other models as well.