Automotive Industry News & Information - ABC Transmission & Auto Care / Auto Body

Car Exterior care tips include:
1. Protect car paint from the sun: Paint does more than make your vehicle look great. It’s also the first line of defense against rusted body panels. Of course, the best way to protect the paint is to park the car in a garage. If that is not possible, park in the shade or purchase a car cover. The sun’s ultraviolet rays break down paint and cause it to fade. Some car covers protect your car from more than sun, moisture, bird droppings, and dust — they also have a thin layer of cushioning that will guard against light impact, such as from a tipped bicycle or small falling tree branch.

2. Touch up nicks sooner rather than later Touch-up paint won’t adhere well to rust. So be sure to keep some matching touch-up paint on hand so you can touch up any minor nicks, often found around door edges, before rust has a chance to form.

You've probably noticed a bunch of warning lights on your dash when you start your engine. They flash on to test the circuits and then go off if everything's OK. One of the warning lights looks like a car battery. Its job is to tell you if your battery's not charging properly.

JASPER Re-manufactured Nissan VQ40DE 4.0L DOHC Engine now available at ABC Transmission & Auto Care / Auto Body in Atlantic Beach

Jasper Engines & Transmissions, the nation’s leader in remanufactured products, announces the availability of its re-manufactured Nissan VQ40DE 4.0L engine. This DOHC V6 engine is available in exchange for the following 2006-2011 vehicles: Nissan Frontier, Pathfinder, X-terra

When driving around town, your family car engine needs clean air to burn the fuel – and it needs a lot. In fact, a typical vehicle needs about 216,000 gallons of air for every tank of gas.

All that air passes through a filter that catches the dust and dirt. Eventually the filter gets completely full. Because the filter can only hold so much, dirt starts getting through. This dirty air passes through the mass airflow sensor, and starts to accumulate on the delicate sensor element. The mass air flow sensor measures how much air is getting into your engine. When the airflow reading is incorrect, your family car engine doesn’t get the proper amount of fuel. It runs rough and doesn’t perform as well as it should.

Most auto owners come to the shop with specific services in mind and an idea of how much they’ll be spending. Sometimes, a courtesy car inspection and a review of your service history will uncover additional items that require attention. How should you react to that?

Here’s some advice: It’s not as if your service advisor is saying “Do you want fries with that?” or “Supersize for 59 cents more.” We are not recommending something extra or something you don’t need. Recommendations are either based on the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule or on a problem uncovered during an automotive analysis.

Most people may not know much about transfer cases on their vehicles, but if you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle, you’ve got one. It makes sure you have power available for both the front and rear axles.

For example, if you have a rear-wheel drive SUV, power goes to the rear wheels until you need 4-wheel drive. That’s when the transfer case steps in and transfers some of the power to the front wheels as well. You might use a shift lever to go into 4-wheel drive, or it could be a button on the dash or it might even go into 4-wheel drive automatically, depending on your vehicle.

We do our best to budget for scheduled vehicle maintenance and it is hard to plan for unexpected family car repairs. The truth is that our vehicles can stay on the road longer than ever before with proper maintenance. That’s because of improved vehicle design and manufacturing quality. But some of those same improvements also lead to higher repairs costs for every family car or vehicle.

There’s a tool that can be found on Edmunds.com that you can use to prepare your service and repair budget. Let’s suppose you have a used Toyota Camry – a very popular car in the area…

You can improve your gas mileage by 1–2 percent by using the manufacturer's recommended grade of motor oil. For example, using 10W-30 motor oil in an engine designed to use 5W-30 can lower your gas mileage by 1–2 percent. Using 5W-30 in an engine designed for 5W-20 can lower your gas mileage by 1–1.5 percent.