Merging Into Life: Everything You Need To Know about Car Repair

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Audra Fordin: When it comes to your car – to prolong the life of it – it really is in doing your maintenance.

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Amanda Greene: That’s Audra Fordin. She’ll be joining us later to arm you with the knowledge to walk into an auto shop with confidence. But first, I’d like to introduce you to our first guest.

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Peyton Knight: My name is Peyton Knight. I own Knight’s Automotive Repair in Ledgewood, New Jersey. I’ve been in business for 40 years. I’ve been the top auto repair shop three times in the AAA section that we’re in.

[00:01:49]
Amanda Greene: There is a lot of responsibility when it comes to car ownership, and so I would love for you to give us some of the basics. What are some of the things new car owners need to keep track of in terms of regular car maintenance? Because we know, regular maintenance is very important.

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Peyton Knight: Well, that’s true. The first thing I tell everybody is read the owner’s manual. The owner’s manual will tell you a lot of things to do with the car, how to handle the car, how to drive the car, how to maintain the car, when it should be maintained and how it should be maintained. That’s the first thing you should do. The next thing I would recommend is make sure you find somebody who is reliable, honest and who will help you.

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Amanda Greene: Finding someone can be tricky. So how do you find a mechanic that you can trust?

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Peyton Knight: Well, first of all, we have to meet certain criteria to be a AAA-approved facility, so that’s one thing. We have to have good standing with the customers and they check up on us all the time. The other thing is if you have a friend or a relative or neighbor who knows somebody that they’ve been using and trusting, that’s a very good way.

Find a AAA Approved Auto Repair Facility near you.

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Amanda Greene: In terms of basic car maintenance, what are the things that are super important to make sure we’re on top of?

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Peyton Knight: Oil changes are very, very important, and the reason why they’re even more important today is because they’re telling you to go longer in between oil changes. They’re telling you in some vehicles 10,000 miles. And yeah, that’s fine when the car’s brand new, but when the car gets a lot of miles on it, the car has 60, 70 or 80,000 miles on it, you’re going to start burning oil. You may want to check the oil every 1,500 miles, every 1,000 miles. As long as you have a dipstick, you can check it.

Now on some of the high-end cars, you can’t check it. There’s not a dipstick. You have to have a computer to check the oil level. And if you know you have a car that’s burning oil, you got to check the oil every 500 miles. It’s very important because we’re seeing a lot of engines today that people aren’t checking the oil, especially with the thin oil we’re using today.

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Amanda Greene: So we’re not waiting for the little light to come on the dash to say, “Get your oil changed.” It’s something we need to be on top of before that.

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Peyton Knight: Absolutely. Sometimes that light doesn’t come on and you’re already 2, 000 miles over your oil change requirement. So it’s very important that they check the oil and all the fluids.

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Amanda Greene: And I don’t know if this varies car to car, but you know when you go to get your oil changed at certain places? They’ll offer you an upgrade to your oil change where they’re using a different kind of oil or something.

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Peyton Knight: Some people will do that, but here again, read the owner’s manual. What is the proper recommendation oil? Is it full synthetic or semi-synthetic? There’s high mileage oil for cars that have got a lot of miles on them. Yeah, it’s better oil. It’ll last a little bit longer, but I would go with what the manufacturer recommends is what I tell the customers.

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Amanda Greene: Tire pressure is something I’ve recently become more aware of, I would say, because in the winter my little light will often come on because it’s cold out and I just recently learned where to find what the appropriate tire pressure is for my car. It’s in the door jamb.

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Peyton Knight: Yes. Yes it is.

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Amanda Greene: Is it there on every car?

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Peyton Knight: Yes, pretty much every car it’s there. So if that tire light’s on, you definitely want to check your tires, the air pressure. They put those sensors on the car for safety because years ago people didn’t check their tires. And why you have a blowout is when it’s low tire pressure, it causes extreme heat in the tire and that will cause the tire to explode on the highway.

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Amanda Greene: And that looks very scary. I was behind someone who had that happen to them and that looked terrifying. So to review, some of the basics when it comes to being a first time car owner, the maintenance that you need to keep track of, oil changes, checking your oil, and tire pressure. Transmission fluid I feel like is another fluid we’re supposed to be looking at.

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Peyton Knight: Yes, absolutely. If there is a stick to check the transmission fluid. Some cars you can’t do it with a stick.

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Amanda Greene: So, if I bring my car in for a regular oil change, are most technicians checking the tire pressure and the transmission fluid during that service or is that something I need to specifically ask for?

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Peyton Knight: So when you bring a car into my facility, we do what we call a vehicle condition inspection. We check all the fluids, we check the suspension, we check everything on your car. We make sure the lights are working properly, the wiper blades are good, the wiper fluid’s working properly. We fill that up. We check pretty much everything on your car. It takes about 45 minutes for us to check the car out completely.

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Amanda Greene: Wow, but you’re giving a full service checkup. That would make me feel very taken care of. So a vehicle condition inspection is something you could maybe ask for if you go to an auto shop like Peyton’s, but walking into a mechanic isn’t always an easy experience, especially if you don’t know a lot about cars. Well, our next guest is going to put all of your trepidations to rest.

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Audra Fordin: People ought to know about their car. Once you release that fear to open up your hood and actually see what’s going on, then you’ll be able to do things yourself.

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Amanda Greene: That’s Audra Fordin. She’s the first woman to own her family’s auto shop in New York, and as you can imagine, she’s got a good story to boot.

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Audra Fordin: I bought the business from my father in 1997. And then about 10 years later, we had a huge, terrible recession and New York was impacted tremendously. I was looking at the bus one day at the bus stop and I’m looking at the people, I’m waving to my customers. They didn’t have money to fix their cars. And I realized that my customers aren’t driving, which means I have no cars to fix.

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Amanda Greene: Audra had to switch gears. With so many people struggling to afford getting their cars serviced, it sparked a new idea to help with something she had been dealing with her entire life.

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Audra Fordin: There’s a lot of automotive intimidation, women who don’t feel comfortable at the auto shop. I’m at risk of losing this business, which is my pride because they said that I couldn’t do it in the first place. What am I going to do? And I had compassion for the struggle that not only was I going through, but so was my community.

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Amanda Greene: So Audra started Women Auto Know offering workshops to help women and anyone who doesn’t know much about car repairs learn how to take care of things themselves. Today, Women Auto Know workshops are available across the country. I love what you’re doing. One of my favorite sayings is, “Empowered women, empower women,” and you are living that. This is an area where that’s so needed. Many of us walk into an auto shop and really don’t know a lot about cars. So can you describe that experience? What are the things that you think people might find intimidating and maybe some tips how they could overcome that feeling?

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Audra Fordin: Sure. How they find it intimidating is you don’t know what you don’t know. I had friends who were going to the auto shop who had no idea what was going on with their car. They were so uncomfortable. So I created this driver checklist that they would be able to bring into the auto shop with them so that they knew what was going on with their car. Basically, it covers the eight essential systems from head to toe of your car. Think of the car like your human body. There’s so much relatability and it demystifies it if you could correlate the two.

So, if we’re going to talk about the car from head to toe, starting with essential number one is your brain and your immune system. That’s all the dashboard lights on your car. Pay attention to what those dashboard lights are. They’re color-coded. They’re red, yellow, and green, just like the stop light that’s on the road. Those red lights mean stop, something is really important, it needs attention. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It could be your seatbelt, but it is something to pay attention to. Anytime you see a red light blinking on your dashboard, your car is screaming at you that it wants your attention.

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Amanda Greene: Okay, that’s the first one. What’s next?

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Audra Fordin: Essential number two, you’re talking about your vision, your eyesight. People need to see you, you need to see them. So you need to know that your headlights and your taillights are all working. And then you have your fuel system. Know what your vehicle eats. Just like we eat food to fuel our bodies, you need fuel for your car’s body. And then you have our essential number four, your charging system, and that is the heart of your car. If your battery is dead, you’re going nowhere. So you need to understand that your battery is working well and the alternator and charging system’s in good operation.

Learn about AAA Car Battery Service.

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Amanda Greene: I’m loving all these analogies. Okay, we’re at four, right? Dashboard lights, fuel, charging system. What’s essential number five?

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Audra Fordin: Essential number five, like the lungs that we breathe, you have filters that filter out each one of the fluids through each one of your systems. Make sure that those filters are clean. Essential number six is our circulatory system is all of the fluids that are running through the systems that operate your car, your power steering fluid, your motor oil, your transmission fluid, your brake fluid. So you want those all to be clean and running free.

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Amanda Greene: Very important.

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Audra Fordin: Essential number seven here is your steering, your suspension and your brakes. You want all of that to be operating like cat-like reflexes so that you are able to, on a pinpoint, be able to stop your vehicle. And then essential number eight, the car is made up of all kinds of cork and rubber products that transport all of those fluids and filters and everything gets transmitted through the computer system to the dashboard lights, and ultimately that is how your car’s communicating to you. So by checking all of those eight essential systems, that is the ultimate way to make sure that you’re prolonging the life of your car and that you’re the safest on the road.

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Amanda Greene: Wow, I feel like I just learned more from that checklist than I ever have about cars. That’s such a great starting point for people to familiarize themselves with all the different systems in a vehicle. I think becoming more accustomed to that checklist would definitely make me feel more self-assured walking into an auto shop.

Audra, let’s get into some more DIYs. What car repairs or basic car maintenance can people do themselves, save a little bit of money, and really continue to get to know their car rather than bringing it into the mechanic? What kinds of things can people do at home?

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Audra Fordin: You can of course check your fluids. You’re able to take care of your tire pressure. And some other DIYs as far as maintenance, you can check your shock absorbers. It’s called a bounce test and that’s when you push on the back or the front of the vehicle really hard at each wheel and then let go and see how many times it bounces. If you have weak shocks, this will allow the vehicle to bounce like two or more times, which might be a fun ride for a low impact aerobic workout, but it’s definitely not good for your car.

If you want to check your brakes, you could look at the pads through the wheel, but if you can’t see that just by looking at your brake fluid reservoir, because it’s a sealed unit, the brake fluid should always be full. And as the brake pads wear down, the fluid will wear down and that means that your brake pads are wearing.

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Amanda Greene: Okay. Those are some great things we can all be doing on the regular, just to keep an eye on things. How important is it to incorporate these types of practices into our maintenance routine?

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Audra Fordin: To prolong the life of your car, in real estate they say location, location, location. When it comes to your car, it’s maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. I think all the time people neglect doing oil changes, they put off doing a transmission service. And while it costs hundreds of dollars for a transmission service, it might cost you $200, it’ll cost you $5 ,000 for a new transmission. So penny wise and pound foolish. In order to prolong the life of your car, the best thing that you can do is your maintenance.

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Amanda Greene: Audra’s so right. I think we can all be guilty of this in one way or another. You know that feeling when you postpone going to the dentist because you don’t want to bite the bullet and pay the bill, but avoiding it always makes it so much worse down the line? The same principle applies to car repairs. Here’s Peyton again.

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Peyton Knight: Noises, vibrations, anything like that, you should have it checked out. It could be something simple or it could be something major. Until someone looks at it, they can’t tell you. Like in anything, it’s easier to take care of it when it’s little, but if you let it go, it’s going to become bigger and bigger.

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Amanda Greene: Every time there’s a new noise or something going on in my car, I’ll go to the notes section in my phone and write down when it happened, what it sounded like. And I must sound crazy when I call the mechanic or bring it in, and I’m sure you see this all the time. I’m embarrassing myself trying to reenact and mimic the sounds that I heard. Do you get that a lot?

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Peyton Knight: Well, yeah, absolutely. But now with the cellphones, you can record it, you can take a picture of it. We actually do that for our customers. I have a digital inspection. So if your car, if something’s loose on it or it’s making a noise, I can send you, are you hearing this noise? Or I can show you. So yes, and it’s very important for you to let us know.

Let’s say that you have a noise and it only does it making a right-hand turn going uphill. If you just say “I got a noise in my car,” we could drive the car for half an hour and not find it. But the other thing that’s good, is if you take a ride in the car with us to point out where the noise is. That will save you money and save us time.

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Amanda Greene: I had a friend who used to keep a binder in his car and every time he would have a service done, he would save the receipt and keep a log of every maintenance that had been done on the vehicle ever. Do you suggest doing that? Is that something you see often?

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Peyton Knight: A lot of people do that and I think it’s a very good thing to do. I would recommend highly keeping receipts. We have the computers today. We have it all on our computer, so you could call up and say, hey, I want to see all my receipts and things of that nature. Plus there’s CARFAX. Let’s say you brought your car into me the first time and you don’t have any records. If you’ve been taking it to a place that has CARFAX, I can look it up and can see what has been done, when it’s been done.

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Amanda Greene: Okay, so keeping receipts is not a bad idea, but looking out for a mechanic that uses CARFAX sounds like a more modern and reliable way of keeping a car maintenance record. That’s good to know. Are there any driving techniques that might prolong the life of your car or the handling of your car?

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Peyton Knight: When you start your car when it’s cold, let it run for a good 30 seconds, maybe a minute. If you start your car, throw it in reverse right away, the engine’s running, but it’s not being lubricated for a good 30 or 40 seconds and that causes premature wear on the components. Your oil’s in the pan, it takes a little time for it to get up into the upper part of the transmission and the engine and lubricate it.

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Amanda Greene: So that’s not a just-in the-winter thing, that’s an all-the-time thing?

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Peyton Knight: Correct. The engine is cold all the time. So if it’s 80 degrees out, the engine’s cold because the engine runs at 210 to 220 degrees. So it doesn’t matter where you are in the country, the engine’s cold.

One thing I also stress is anything extreme is going to put more wear on your tires, your suspension and things of that nature. When you see the light changing red, you’re on the highway and the light changes red, don’t keep your foot on the brake. Coast up to the light so you don’t slam on the brakes. The easier you drive a car, like when you accelerate from the light, don’t accelerate real super hard like you’re racing the car. And the same thing like handling, driving turns and things of that nature. The more gentle you are driving your car, accelerating and braking, everything will last a lot longer.

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Amanda Greene: Is there anything else you want to share as far as things that a first-time car owner should keep in mind?

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Peyton Knight: Well, another big thing is keeping your car clean. Again, here in the Northeast when they put all the salt and what they put on the road, take it to a car wash and get the undercarriage clean maybe once or twice during the winter because it’s rusting the car.

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Amanda Greene: Okay.

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Peyton Knight: Washing and waxing your car. If you keep your car so that it’s not all rusted out and stuff, when you go to sell it, you’ll get more for it. But you got to wash it once every couple of weeks. You got to wax it once a year, twice a year. You got to take pride in your vehicle.

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Amanda Greene: This is something I try to instill in my kids, even though they are nowhere near driving age yet. We always say, if you want to have nice things, you have to take proper care of them. This has all been so helpful. I think I need to go read my owner’s manual from cover to cover after this. But first we can’t forget about our quiz. So we’re going to move on to a little rapid fire quiz segment called What Does This Noise Mean? Are you ready?

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Peyton Knight: Sure.

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Amanda Greene: Okay, so I hear a hissing sound under the hood. Do I bring it in?

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Peyton Knight: Well, if you don’t know what it is, absolutely bring it in. You might want to open up the hood and listen. You might see something. Let’s say it’s the belt squealing or hissing and you see the pulley wobbling. You may not want to drive it because if that pulley falls off, it could do damage to your engine. You might want to have it towed in. So if you hear a noise, call someone reliable and ask them what to do.

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Amanda Greene: Okay, what does this noise mean? I hear a chugging or rattling noise.

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Peyton Knight: Well, it depends on when you hear it. Now these are the questions I’ll ask you. Is the car moving? Is the car sitting you hear this rattling noise or chugging noise, or are you driving it? Because if you’re driving, it could be one thing. If you’re sitting and it’s in park and you’re hearing a noise, it could be something totally different.

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Amanda Greene: How about I hear like a clicking or a knocking while turning?

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Peyton Knight: Okay, that could be a component in the suspension, the steering suspension. Also, the axles, if you turn them, the axles are wearing out, they’ll make a clicking noise too when you’re turning.

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Amanda Greene: Do I bring it in?

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Peyton Knight: Absolutely.

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Amanda Greene: Just from talking to you, I wish that you were in my town because I feel like I could trust you instantly, which is a really nice feeling. And so everything really does come back to finding a mechanic you trust and bringing your car for a service at a shop where you feel taken care of.

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Peyton Knight: Absolutely. Reliable and safe, I have it on the wall.

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Amanda Greene: To keep your car in tip-top shape, remember, don’t wait for maintenance lights to tell you when you need an oil change. If you have an older car, get it done more often. The auto shop doesn’t have to be a nerve-wracking experience. Take the time to learn how your car’s different systems work, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Keep track of where and when problems arise. Driving safe will always help you prolong your car’s life.

You’ve been listening to Merging Into Life, where we navigate life’s milestones one episode at a time, brought to you by AAA Northeast with assistance from JAR Audio. I’m your host, Amanda Greene. If you’re learning as much as I am, follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. Email us at podcast@aaanortheast.com.

Our guests say you need to find a trusted mechanic. Maybe I should call my mom. ‘Hey, Mom. No, I’m fine. No, seriously, I’m fine. No, I can’t come to dinner, but I do have a question. I needed to ask you, who’s your mechanic? My car is making this weird noise and I really need to go get it looked at.’

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily the views of AAA Northeast, AAA, and/or its affiliates.