As cars become more technologically advanced, the importance of your vehicle’s battery becomes more important. In the old days, a car battery essentially worked, or it didn’t; if it was good enough to start the car, it was good enough. Modern vehicles are a different story. A faulty battery can cause a variety of issues, including engine codes, sensor failures, irregular transmission behavior, and the list goes on.
Battery failure often causes issues that are commonly misdiagnosed, and in the hands of the wrong auto repair shop, a mechanic may spend hundreds of your hard-earned dollars chasing problems that don’t exist. At T & A American Car Care Center in Milton, FL, our mechanics are familiar with modern vehicles and the problems that accompany them.
At T & A American Car Care Center in Milton, we’re fans of drivers who tweak and customize their vehicles to meet specific wants and needs. For many car enthusiasts, a manual transmission is a must, and the performance of that transmission relies heavily on the clutch.
In the diesel world, "blow-by" is a term you're bound to run across at some point if your line of work involves diesel-powered vehicles of any kind. What is blow-by, what causes it, and how concerned should you be? At T & A American Car Care Center in Milton, FL, our fleet maintenance and diesel technicians see it on a regular basis. Here we'll take a quick look at blow-by, correcting it, and preventing it.
What is Blow-By? - Diesel blow-by is a term that describes an event of lost compression into the crankcase. Blow-by occurs whenever a burnt or unburnt fuel and air mixture escape from the cylinder and past the piston rings and into the crankcase. In a perfect world, the piston would be sealed tightly in the cylinder, able to move up and down but keeping all the air and fuel and exhaust that enters or exits the cylinder during the combustion process out of the crankcase. As you'll see, this perfect world doesn't exist, but it is important to minimize the amount of blow-by in a diesel engine.
Changing the oil in big trucks and commercial vehicles is an expensive, but necessary, part of keeping your vehicles going. You don’t want to wait until it’s too late to change your oil, but changing it too early can be a waste of time and money. Having your oil tested regularly helps us to hone in on exactly how often your oil needs to be changed, to optimize reliability and efficiency.
It’s easier than ever to keep your fleet running smoothly for thousands of miles. If a vehicle has less than 50,000 miles on it today, chances are it still has 75 percent of its driving life ahead of it. That’s good news if you’re a company managing a fleet of vehicles. It wasn’t that long ago that hitting the 100,000-mile mark on the odometer was a major milestone. Today, vehicles are built to last. With the proper maintenance and attention, there’s no reason you shouldn’t expect to see that 50,000-mile reading on the odometer one day roll right past 200,000 and keep ongoing. Here at T & A American Car Care Center, we're going to give you some tips on how to make that happen!
Over the past decade, vehicles with CVTs, or Continuously Variable Transmissions, seem to have taken over the market. While many people have different opinions on CVT transmissions, what are they, and how do they work? T & A American Car Care Center in Milton has a simple explanation for you.
Fluid levels, tire condition, dashboard lights, and a variety of other items typically are briefly explored whenever you bring your vehicle in for maintenance here at T & A American Car Care Center in Milton, FL, where we are good at noticing things that need repair, but the fact of the matter is that only you know your car. You know when your car feels off when it's been serviced last (or that it hasn't been serviced at all,) and have at least some vague idea of what’s going on with your vehicle day to day. Here are some questions you can ask us next time you come by the shop;
What does a flex plate do, and how do you know if yours is faulty? Your vehicle may be telling you things you may not know. T & A American Car Care Center in Milton has the answers you need.
