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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: 

3. Don’t ignore dashboard warning lights

  • By Ray Cox Contributor

Dashboard warning lights are like alarm bells. They’re telling you something is wrong with your car! These warning lights include the check engine light, oil light, temperature light, brake light, and so on. When warning lights come on, pay attention to them! Read the owner’s manual so you know what each of the warning lights mean and how you should respond.

Did you know? If your Check Engine light is blinking while you’re driving, you should pull over immediately. The light can signal any number of system failures, from a fuel vapor leak caused by a loose gas cap to poor acceleration caused by a faulty MAF (Mass Air Flow) sensor. If it’s blinking while you’re driving, pull over or get to a mechanic right away. A blinking check engine light usually indicates a severe misfire that could damage your car’s engine. If the light comes on and stays on without flashing and the car seems to be running smoothly, chances are your car can be examined by a mechanic after you get home, or when you can get to one.

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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.”

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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