If you truly want to be both economical and environmentally-friendly, the best thing you can do with a car is to drive it forever. That negates the manufacture of a new car somewhere, and avoids car payments for you. If you like your car and want to extend its life, Andrew P. Collins shares some tried-and-true tips for making that happen, like getting into the habit of setting your parking brake before setting your parking gear.
An off-road pro once told me, in the cab of a late-model Range Rover I was parking on a steep hill, to “hit the parking brake while it’s still in drive, then put it in park.” His explanation was that this way, kinetic energy from the vehicle’s weight gets transferred to the parking brake instead of its transmission.
Is that better? Well, brakes are a lot cheaper than trannies. Any opportunity to move stress from a more expensive component to a lesser one seems prudent, I guess.
In my experience, taking this step eliminates that big clunk you might hear when you shift from P to D on even just a moderate hill. Clunks bad. So, parking brake trick good. And that’s as technical as we’re going to get because I promised superstition here, not science. (I should do that more often.)
That won't help with my '97 Camry, since it doesn't having a parking gear. But there are other tips for promoting a car's longevity that involve vehicle maintenance, behavior in traffic, and even paperwork, at Jalopnik. -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Bull-Doser)
