San Luis Obispo Auto Repair

Giant Air Bag Recall What’s the Deal?? A Japanese company, Takata, is one of the world’s  leading manufacturers of automotive safety products, including the air bags supplied to a huge number of cars. Cars and trucks manufactured by BMW, Chrysler, Ford, GM (non-GM made cars only), Honda, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, and Toyota are included. Most models affected were manufactured between 2000 and 2008. For a complete list and to see if there is a current recall on the air bag in your car, see nhtsa.gov and use their “vin search” function to check your car. Right now the list may be incomplete, so please check again in a month or two. So what’s the deal?  Right now (November 21, 2014) the best information suggests that the explosive material that deploys the bag is affected by high humidity, and over time it can absorb enough moisture to change the chemical properties of the propellant. Instead of deploying in a controlled , timed release ... read more

Driving Green - strategies for buying, driving, and maintaining a motor vehicle with minimal environmental impact. Most people don’t really consider the lifetime costs of owning a car, let alone its effect on the environment. The purchase price comes out of your pocket, but many of the other costs are shared by everyone, especially the effect they have on our environment. In this article I am trying to provide you a roadmap with different routes selected with a common goal in mind: getting from place to place with the least impact on our environment. The environmental penalty for driving a conventional car reads like some sort of existential horror story. Burning one gallon of gas consumes all the oxygen in 11,000 gallons of air and produces 20 pounds of CO2. (That’ll tell you how hard your air filter works!) The average passenger car in the US generates 5.26 tons of CO2 driving 11,500 miles in one year. The numbers become stupefying when one considers th ... read more