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Okay, here's a quick car transmission question for you: how long does it take to take a brand-new Mercedes-Benz and then destroy its transmission through careless operation? Would you be surprised to hear that you could do it in 15 min. flat? You can do it if you were stuck in snow and if you tried to floor the gas pedal and spin the wheels hard to try to get out. You'll see signs of transmission problems about 10 min. in, and you'll completely blow the transmission in another 10 min. or so.

Most people don't realize this, but a car's transmission is very easily overheated through careless operation. Overheating is the number one cause of transmission failure.

There are other kinds ways you can run a car that could harm the transmission as well – automatic transmissions happen to be quite sensitive to anything going wrong with its transmission fluid quality. Use the wrong kind of transmission fluid, and you'll completely destroy the transmission in perhaps an hour of driving.

When you sink that key into the ignition and turn it, you only want to see all the lights turn on and turn off. One of the worst things that can happen to your peace of mind is to see the Check Engine light on. If it turns on with a Bing Bong and it doesn't turn off, that’s it. You'll never have any peace of mind until you really understand what's going on.

Usually, when that Check Engine light comes on, it means that there's something that your car's computer has found your engine doing that could affect how your fuel economy works or how your engine's exhaust is. Sometimes, it could be a one-time malfunction. If so, the light will turn off on its own after a while. If it doesn't, you can consider yourself warned.

Every car manufactured since 1996 has what they call a Powertrain Control Module or an Electronic Control Module – a computer that tries to keep your car fuel efficient and economical to run. It also checks your exhaust to see if your car is more polluting than it should be. The computer does more than to check for signs of trouble though. It constantly checks just how your engine runs to make sure that it does its best, given the environment the car is in.

The sound of squealing brakes can be a truly awful thing to experience. But did you know that not all squealing of brakes were bad? How are you supposed to know what kind of squealing signals brake problems and what kind is normal? That's what we're here to discuss.

Brakes don't just squeal because they are breaking down. They could easily break down without any squealing. The reason they squeal is that the manufacturer puts a layer of noisy material in just so that you'll know when you're close to needing to replace them. The warning system has a special kind of squealing tendency though so that you can tell the difference. They squeal even when you're nowhere near depressing the brake pedal. The squealing is a low-level constant thing.

Some of the more expensive cars, the brake pads have electronics and them. And a light on your instrument cluster will light up to tell you that the brakes need replacement.

When the antifreeze in a car cooling system begins to overheat and burn, the horrible smell is quite unmistakable. And then of course, there's the dry ice effect floating out of your hood that leaves you in no doubt. Well, people hate things going wrong with the car cooling system because they can be potentially expensive to fix. Diagnosing them and tracking down the source of the problem though isn't as hard.

They don't call it a car engine cooling “system” for no reason. It's a complex multiple component appliance that can fail at different points. To begin with, there is the radiator on the front of your car, the pump that pumps coolant or water through the system, there's the radiator fan, there is the thermostat and there is all the plumbing.

When your car starts up, the coolant pump, turned by a belt from the engine, begins to draw up all the coolant collected at the bottom of the radiator sump, and it comes it straight into the engine. The coolant goes through all the tunnels and jackets and piping, becomes very, very hot collecting heat from the engine, goes past the thermostat to tell the thermostat how hot it is, and then it goes on to the radiator. The radiator core is made up of lots of little pipes connected to all the fins. The fan blows cool fresh air through the fins to cool the radiator down, and the coolant cools down as well. And so the cycle continues.

No car can last forever. Even if comes with a bulletproof reputation for quality and if it's built like a tank. At one point or another, something's going to give. Depending on how well a car is built though, that point can come sooner rather than later with some models. Whatever kind of service your car is built for though, the kind of engine maintenance you put in could make a great deal of difference to how trouble-free your ownership experience is.

If car manufacturers could design those engines to be transparent, people would never neglect their engine maintenance responsibilities. Just visually speaking, a neglected engine can be a terribly sad sight – instead of a bright and glossy array of precision parts, you get to see a clogged and dark-looking machine that's gummed up, slow, worn-out.

The funny thing is, once you let the maintenance get out from under you, even a car that's a couple of years old can begin to look worse than a well-maintained 10-year-old veteran of the roads.

Certainly, a clean car can be a beautiful thing. I have a friend who is justifiably proud of how his 10-year-old Mercury Grand Marquis with 150,000 miles on the clock looks like it couldn’t be more than a couple of years old. He regularly gets compliments on it. Life can just feel much better when you have a beautifully clean car to get into every morning. How did he manage to keep it away? He became master of all the great car interior cleaning tricks you ever heard of.

To most people, even cleaning the outside of the car doesn’t put them off that much. It's just fun to slosh water on it and get it cleaned up in no time. The car’s interior though, would definitely suffer if you trained a high-pressure hose on it. There are all these surfaces made up of different kinds of material, there are electronics, there are all these delicate and intricate shapes and so on. You have to be skilled enough that you know how to clean carpets, wood, glass, transparent plastic – the whole lot. That’s what car interior cleaning is like. Well, let's take a look at how it's done. You wouldn't believe how much you can get done in just an hour.

The first thing you want to do is to get rid of all loose dirt everywhere. Just get a nice, powerful vacuum cleaner, snap a small brush attachment on, and train it on your car. Remove the floor mats and suck up all the dirt with the vacuum. Train it at on every nook and cranny and do it three or four times. Your carpets should be mostly free of surface grime now.

All right, let's start this off the right way – what is the freeze plug, anyway. And why is freeze plug replacement anything you would want to do?

Well, you want to know what a freeze plug is because well, frankly, lots of people haven't ever heard of this thing. If you know what it is and if you know how to replace one, won't you look grand among your friends who are less informed?

But seriously, here's what a freeze plug is. It's a little metal lug that closes off little holes designed into all kinds of places in your engine. They do have an important function.

The thing is, they don't design holes into your engine block for a specific reason. It's just that they need to mold your engine out of liquid, molten metal. But they don't just need to mold a solid shape. An engine block has intricate spaces and tunnels within. All these need to be molded as well. Once the mold, usually made of sand, has done its job, how do you remove it from all the tunnels inside the engine block?

There are all kinds of reasons why cars will fail. Sooner or later, it will happen to every car. Learn the rules of a great car engine maintenance though, and you’ll see it happen a lot less to you.

It usually doesn't seem quite commonsensical to people, but a car that's just parked in the garage can wear out a lot faster than a car that's in use sometimes. If you happen to live by the coast where there's a lot of salt and humidity in the air, the car's engine will corrode and jam quite quickly if the car is just left standing for months on end. Sometimes, maintenance can just be about driving a car from time to time.

But quite apart from unusual scenarios like that, the regular deal with car engine maintenance is that if you're neglectful, your car can fall apart quite quickly. Take a two-year-old car engine that's poorly maintained and a 20-year-old car with 250,000 miles on it that's properly maintained, and you'll quickly think the 20-year-old car was the new one. That's how quickly poor car engine maintenance can show problems up.