Drive it Forever
Q Many of us can't afford a new Prius and are considering buying a used one. I'm looking at a 2001 Prius with 41,000 miles on it, in great condition, with an asking price of $11,200. For a person on a budget like mine, would I be taking on a big risk, or should I stick with a Honda Civic or
My current car is a 1993 Honda Accord with 207,000 miles, so I keep my cars for a long time.
A I could not recommend this. The battery pack in the Prius is supposed to last "really long." So far no one has really been able to determine what "really long" is, at least not in passenger-car service with ordinary folk driving.
The fleets Toyota has been running have had good luck with batteries. You might too. Or you might need to replace the battery pack, which would not be cheap. And no one knows whether that pack will cost $1,000 or $5,000 in a couple of years. I also doubt that you'll be able to get the highly complex Prius to work properly for as long as you've gotten your Accord to run.
If you like the idea of saving gas, that's fine. But you're betting that the Prius will run a long time without any serious maintenance against the difference in the cost of gasoline. I don't like the odds.
Q I recently had my brakes worked on by my local mechanic. He changed my master cylinder and booster. The rear brake pads were also replaced. Now my cruise control does not work.
My mechanic changed the steering wheel "clock spring," but that didn't fix it. He hooked my Taurus up to a diagnostic computer, which showed that all the cruise buttons are active and registering, but I still have no cruise control.
Is there any connection between the brake work and the cruise-control system?
A Are the brake lights working? If the brake lights do not work properly, the cruise control won't.
Q A question from a recent issue got me thinking. A guy with a Kia Sportage asked where the spark plugs and spark-plug wires on this car were, and was told that this car did not have a distributor.
Is this true? I thought that all cars must have a distributor, or at least something that works like a distributor. Can you please explain how a car could run without having a distributor?
A Traditional distributors did two things: First, they housed the ignition points that switched the ignition coil on and off to make the sparks. Second, after the high-voltage spark traveled back to the distributor, the rotor in turn distributed it to the spark plugs.
Many modern cars have no distributor at all. The ignition is triggered by toothed timing wheels spinning with the crankshaft, which is much more accurate than points. Then there are individual coils for each cylinder, fired by the engine-management computer.
Some engines share coils between two cylinders. The cylinder at top dead center (TDC) of its compression stroke fires normally, and at the same instant the plug in the opposite cylinder also fires at TDC on the exhaust stroke. This cylinder has no fuel mixture left to burn, so the spark is simply wasted. A full crankshaft rotation later, the same two plugs fire simultaneously again, but the tables are turned and the second cylinder is filled with a fuel/air mixture and lights off. But there is still no distributor.
Q Will a Flowmaster exhaust system improve performance and gas mileage on a 2006 Honda CRV?
A Yes, but not very much unless you change a bunch of other stuff too.
Q Living in a very hilly town, I often shift to a lower gear when going down hills in order to save my brakes. Does this harm the transmission, and would it contribute to recent dirty transmission fluid in my 1999 Camry?
A No.
Mike Allen is a senior editor for Popular Mechanics magazine. Questions should be sent via e-mail to driveit@nytimes.com. 