Auto Repair in Camarillo

test2 Have you noticed an increase in price when you get a flat tire fixed in Camarillo, or have your tires rotated? It might be the result of your TPMS, or Tire Pressure Monitoring System.

The federal government began requiring a TPMS system on 2008 model year passenger vehicles and light trucks. Some 2006 and 2007 models may have them as well. The system has a warning light that is mounted on the dashboard that will go on if one of the tires becomes severely underinflated.

Why the new requirement? Because underinflated tires are the number one cause of tire failure. Tire blowouts cause crashes and sometimes fatal accidents. Underinflated tires also need longer stopping distance and can skid, both of which also present dangers on CA roads. Many flat tires can also be prevented by proper tire inflation, and though this may seem an economic consideration, Camarillo drivers who have changed a flat on the side of the road recognize that this has serious safety concerns as well.

Advances in tire technology, specifically the development of radial tires, has made it harder for Camarillo drivers to recognize when a tire is underinflated. At a recommended pressure of 35 psi, a tire is seriously underinflated at 26 psi. But the tire doesn't look low on air until it reaches 20 psi. This raises concerns about vehicle owners being able to tell when their vehicles are a safety hazard on the road. Hence, the TPMS.

So, like seatbelts, the TPMS system is expected to save a lot of lives. The technology has been in use in race cars for years, and now it's being mandated for all passenger cars, SUV's, minivans and pick-ups. Besides warning drivers in the Camarillo area when their tires need air, the system is required to indicate when it is malfunctioning.

This increased safety won't come without increased costs. Estimates regarding the cost of maintaining the TPMS on your vehicle run from $27 to $100. Also, there will be an added cost for tire repair. Camarillo service centers have had to purchase new scanning equipment to work with TPMS sensors and other equipment to repair tires and wheels equipped with TPMS. The pros at Camarillo Car Care Center have to be trained to use the new equipment. These costs will have to be passed on to Camarillo drivers.

Further, whenever a tire is changed, Camarillo Car Care Center will have to deal with the TPMS. Sensors will have to be removed, then re-installed and re-activated. Sometimes the act of changing a tire will damage a sensor, and it will need to be replaced. These extra services will come at an added charge to Camarillo drivers.

Tire rotations will require that the TPMS be re-programmed. And whenever a vehicle's battery is disconnected, the TPMS will require re-programming as well.

The TPMS itself will require attention – it contains batteries and sensors that will wear out and need to be replaced.

So, if you've noticed an increase in the cost for vehicle care at your Camarillo tire center, it may not be the economy. It could be the cost of the TPMS in newer vehicles. Before you dash off an angry letter to Congress, however, stop and consider what you're paying for. If predictions are correct, the TPMS will save lives, and that will be a benefit to all of us.

Of course, no warning system will save lives in Camarillo if drivers don't pay attention to it. And remember that the warning doesn't come on until the tire is severely under inflated; you still should check your tire pressure at least once a month. You can prevent accidents and potentially save lives without a warning system by keeping their tires properly inflated.

Safe driving!

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

A lot of us Camarillo drivers like our vehicles to reflect our personalities. We're picky about color and body style. We'll customize anything from floor mats to window tints to license plates. One popular way for CA motorists to customize a vehicle is to get new wheels.

Wheels come in thousands of designs. Custom wheels can add personality, style, or sass to a vehicle. Many of these customizations involve getting a bigger wheel.

Fifteen- or 16-inch wheels used to be the factory standard, but today, because many Camarillo drivers like the look of larger wheels, many vehicles are available with 17- or 18-inch wheels. Optional 20-inch or larger wheel packages are also available in Camarillo.

If you want to upsize the wheels on your current vehicle, however, you should know it's not a do-it-yourself project. There are factors to consider to ensure your wheel change doesn't jeopardize your vehicle's safety.

First, you need to understand rolling diameter. The rolling diameter is the overall height of a tire. If you increase the rolling diameter of your tires when you upsize your wheels, you may need to modify your suspension to ensure the larger tires fit within the space and don't rub in turns or over bumps. If that's more work than you're willing to do or pay for, then you need to maintain rolling diameter when you change your wheels.

It's not as hard as it sounds. Imagine a doughnut. That doughnut represents rolling diameter, so you can't make the doughnut bigger. However, you can increase the size of the doughnut hole. That gives you a bigger wheel. Tires with reduced sidewalls on larger wheels will preserve your rolling diameter.

Rolling diameter is important because your wheels and tires still need to fit inside the wheel well. Also, your speedometer, odometer and anti-lock brakes are all programmed to work with a specific rolling diameter. You'll throw off the readings on your speedometer and odometer if you change your rolling diameter. And for your anti-lock brakes to work properly, your rolling diameter must be within 3% of the factory recommendations. While some Camarillo drivers who upsize may not be concerned about meter readings, throwing off the brake system is a serious safety hazard.

Further, many vehicles in Camarillo are now equipped with electronically controlled suspensions. Changing the rolling diameter will negatively affect this system as well, which can lead to a less smooth ride and lower handling performance as well as safety concerns.

Your friendly and knowledgeable Camarillo Car Care Center tire professional may be able to reprogram your vehicle's computer to adjust for a larger (or smaller) rolling diameter.

So to maintain rolling diameter, you'll need tires with a shorter sidewall. These tires will be designed to give the sidewalls the strength they need to maintain ride quality. Consider that doughnut again. As the wheel (the doughnut hole) gets bigger, the sidewall of the tire (the width of the remaining doughnut) gets shorter. That means the tire holds less air. The sidewalls have to be made stiffer to compensate for the decreased air capacity.

To improve their strength, the shorter tires will also be slightly wider than your previous tires. But this means you'll have a larger contact patch, or, in other words, a larger area of tire making contact with the road. This can actually increase your handling performance and decrease braking distances. Many CA auto buffs customize their wheels just for this reason—they want the improved performance rather than looks or style. If you drive a truck or an SUV around Camarillo, you might be interested in the extra control an upsized wheel can provide.

Now, that larger contact patch still has to fit inside your wheel well without rubbing when cornering or when bouncing over bumps or potholes on Camarillo roads. This is termed fitment, and you may need a few adjustments so your new wheels will fit properly. You may need spacers so that your brakes will fit inside the new wheels, as well.

Camarillo Car Care Center tire professionals are experts at mounting, adjusting, and customizing wheels. They can give you a lot of good auto advice on wheels and tires, including how they affect driving performance and car care. They can help you select wheels and tires that will suit your driving needs and habits.

For example, if you drive off-road around Camarillo, you should consider a higher profile tire. This type of tire will protect your rims from damage while you're bouncing over rocks. Or, if you tow a trailer or haul heavy loads around CA, you'll want a tire with a load rating equal to your demands. Your friendly and knowledgeable Camarillo Car Care Center tire professional can help you with these types of concerns.

Once you've got your new wheels, have your service advisor at Camarillo Car Care Center see if you need an alignment. You don't want those new wheels and your higher performance compromised by poor alignment. Get the most out of your investment by getting the work done right at Camarillo Car Care Center in Camarillo.

Last but not least, remember tire pressure. With larger wheels, your new tires will hold less air and they'll need slightly higher pressure. You'll need to stay on top of preventive maintenance and keep them properly inflated. Be sure to check their pressure at least once a week. If you don't keep your tires at their correct pressure, they will wear out really fast. It will also affect your braking and handling performance.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

Most vehicles have automatic transmissions, yet a lot of Camarillo drivers only have a fuzzy understanding about what a transmission does. Think back to the last time you rode a bike in Camarillo. You started out in a lower gear and shifted to higher gears as you went faster. Down shift for hills, stuff like that. Think of your legs as the engine – there's an ideal speed you can pedal and you change gears to leverage the work you're doing.

Lower gears for power on hills or for starting out. Higher gears for more speed. That's what the automatic transmission does – it automatically starts in lower gears and shifts up to higher gears to go faster on CA roads. And it automatically shifts back down to climb Camarillo hills, pass or start up again.

Vehicle automatic transmissions have certainly gotten more sophisticated in recent years. They have more speeds than before: the base is four speeds, five is very common.

At Camarillo Car Care Center, we routinely service transmissions with six speeds and several have seven or even eight speeds. As you can imagine, this means more parts. Any they all have to fit into roughly the same space.

Transmissions are computer controlled these days, with some high end transmissions having two or three computers. Transmissions are engineered to last. But they are also engineered to tighter tolerances. If a portion of the transmission is starved for lubrication, it can lead to failure.

Not enough fluid can starve the transmission, or dirty transmission fluid can clog small passages in the transmission. Then the lubricant is blocked and can't get to all the parts to protect them, so they wear out prematurely. The technicians at Camarillo Car Care Center see far too many transmissions that needlessly failed due to neglect.

And, as you can imagine, repairing one of these new transmissions at any Camarillo service center can be quite costly. That's why owner’s manuals have a schedule for how often you should change the fluid and what type of fluid to use.

It's really important for Camarillo area drivers to carefully follow the manufacturer's transmission service schedule.

At Camarillo Car Care Center in Camarillo, we hope you never become shiftless in Camarillo because you didn't take care of your transmission.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

There's a reason we use the word “diagnose” when we talk about fixing cars in Camarillo. Figuring out what's wrong with your vehicle has a lot of similarities to figuring out what's wrong with someone who is ill. Vehicles are a mass of complex systems that can produce a variety of symptoms when something goes wrong. As with human diagnoses, a single symptom may indicate a number of problems, and determining the exact cause requires training and experience.

Sometimes the diagnosis of your vehicle's trouble comes down to trial and error. This can be frustrating for Camarillo drivers because time and money are on the line. You may feel you should only be paying for repair work. Of course, you only want to pay for the right repair – and a proper diagnosis is part of getting it right. Like at the doctor's office — some of what you pay for is the doctor's time and effort to figure out what's wrong with you, not for the actual cure.

The good news is that Camarillo drivers can do a lot to help their friendly and knowledgeable service advisors at Camarillo Car Care Center figure out what's wrong with their vehicle. Again, the medical office is a good analogy. The more information you can give your doctor about where it hurts, when it hurts and how it hurts, the more quickly he will be able to help you. In the same way, the more you can tell your Camarillo Car Care Center service technician about when the problem occurs, what is sounds like, how often it occurs, where it occurs, etc., the more efficiently he will be able to get you back on the road.

Good preventive maintenance goes a long way toward keeping your car out of a Camarillo repair shop, but if you need to take it there, good communication will get you back on the road quickly.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

There's a segment of the Camarillo area population that's not committed to proper vehicle maintenance.

Now, the ignition system in your vehicle is electronic and controlled by the engine management computer. Spark plugs rarely get fouled and will last for as much as 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers). So tune-ups used to force you in to Camarillo Car Care Center for service, and while you were there you just took care of whatever else was on the list.

Also, in recent years, a large percentage of new vehicles in Camarillo have been leased. These folks plan on turning the vehicle in after two or three years, so they haven't focused on the maintenance that helps a vehicle last longer.

Given all that, what's the benefit to keeping up with factory scheduled maintenance? Well, your vehicle will perform better and return better fuel economy.

Those benefits pay for themselves as they go along. The big plus is that major repairs are prevented. And these aren't just repairs that are a long way off. Modern vehicle engines are far more sophisticated and have many parts that are in critical need of proper lubrication. Missing just one oil change can allow oil sludge to start forming. Sludge clogs small engine passages, robbing parts of the lubrication they need. An expensive failure could easily occur within two or three years.

And modern engines require more sophisticated fluids. Because of the different types of materials that are used to make auto parts, things like aluminum, plastics and steel, different types of additives are required to protect automotive components from corrosion. These additives deplete with time as well as with use.

Taking care of the little things now prevents big problems later. At Camarillo Car Care Center, we have been taking care of all those little things for years. Your vehicle still needs to be taken care of – it's just that some of those points of care have changed with automotive advancements. The need for proper maintenance in Camarillo drivers vehicles did not go away.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

When it comes to their vehicles, some Camarillo residents don't have a maintenance mindset. They know they need to take care of their cars, but it's really hard to get them to remember to do it. Camarillo drivers generally accept that many things in life require regular maintenance, but just may not have applied it to their vehicles.

Here's something that will help: The key to good vehicle maintenance starts with the oil change. Think about it – when you go in for a full-service oil change, your friendly and knowledgeable Camarillo Car Care Center service advisor will check all your fluids. If one of them is low, he can look for the reason. If your serpentine belt is cracked, he'll see it and let you know. Corroded battery cable – they've got you covered. And at Camarillo Car Care Center, we check whether your vehicle manufacturer has recommended any services at your current mileage.

The oil change becomes kind of a focal point, a way to check in to see what needs to be done. The fact is that vehicle inspection surveys consistently reveal that over 80% of vehicles have one or more unperformed repair or maintenance services. Vehicles are generally very reliable and can take a lot of abuse and neglect. But you have to remember that vehicles are complicated machines. There are parts and fluids that are critical to their operation. Without them, the vehicle won't run at all.

So when you come into Camarillo Car Care Center for an oil change, you get advice from your friendly, knowledgeable service advisor and reminders about recommended services so you can avoid a total failure. And remember that your friendly and knowledgeable Camarillo Car Care Center service advisor can help you work out a maintenance and repair plan, prioritizing and scheduling the work to make sure you and your family are safe and to help you avoid expensive breakdowns.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

Warm weather or cold, Camarillo drivers still need to think about their vehicle's air conditioning. Most Camarillo people don't service their air conditioning until after it fails. At Camarillo Car Care Center, we can advise you on your vehicle manufacturers preventive maintenance schedules for air conditioning service, just as we do for transmission service, oil changes and so on.

Maintaining your air conditioning system means that you always have enough refrigerant to properly do the job. Small leaks in the vehicle's air conditioning system allow the refrigerant to escape and the system can't cool the air as well. We see that a lot at Camarillo Car Care Center in Camarillo.

The refrigerant also contains oil that lubricates air conditioning components and keeps the seals resilient. Low refrigerant and lubricating oil means that the air conditioning parts will wear out prematurely, and all Camarillo vehicle owners know that air conditioning repairs can be costly. At Camarillo Car Care Center, we recommended that the air conditioner be run regularly, even during winter months, to keep the parts and seals lubricated.

Camarillo drivers need to be aware that there's one more thing that isn't directly related to air conditioning service but does impact the quality of the air in your vehicle. And that's your cabin air filter. This filter cleans dust, pollen, pollution and other impurities in the air that come from the heater and air conditioner. The cabin air filter needs to be replaced when it's dirty. If you don't, it'll start to smell. Not all vehicles have one, so ask your Camarillo Car Care Center service advisor to check your cabin air filter at the same time they're doing your air conditioning service.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

Weight is the enemy of fuel economy. Everyone from Camarillo knows this makes sense.  

Some of us in the Camarillo area carry a bunch of unnecessary weight, and I'm not talkin' what you see in the mirror.

Guys: sports equipment and tools. Ladies: well, just take a look around the passenger compartment and trunk. I think my car has about 45 pounds of French fries on the floor.

All that extra weight wastes gas as you drive between here and there, and everywhere else.

Lose the junk and save some money.

...And you really only need one of those spare tires.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

This fuel saving tip is so simple, no one will believe it. It has to do with your gas cap.

The first thing is to make sure it's screwed on tight. If it's loose, gas vapor will be constantly leaking out; wasted gas.

This could cause the Check Engine light to come on as well.

A worn gas cap can have the same effect. If you constantly smell gas when you walk by your tank, you might need a new gas cap.

So, twist your cap until it clicks three times – that means it's on tight. Have your Camarillo area service advisor at Camarillo Car Care Center inspect the cap to see if it needs to be replaced.

See, I told you it was simple.

Don't forget to call Camarillo Car Care Center at 805-482-2853 for an appointment to optimize your vehicle for better fuel economy. 

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com

Today we're talking to Camarillo drivers about shocks and struts. They're so easy for CA folks to forget about because they last so long and wear out so slowly. But your shocks are really responsible for keeping your tires on the road – so they're very important.

Without shocks, your wheels would be bouncing over bumps and lifting on corners. The shocks push the tire down to the road to maximize traction. Good shocks equal good ride quality and safe handling for Camarillo drivers.

There's a difference between shocks and springs. Springs support the weight of the vehicle, keeping it suspended up off the axles. The shocks moderate the rebound motion as wheels hit bumps. Now a strut combines a shock and a coil spring in one compact unit.

It's best to replace all four shocks at the same time. That way you'll have even, predictable handling at all four corners. Anything less could be dangerous.

Visit Camarillo Car Care Center to have your shocks and struts inspected by a professional.

Camarillo Car Care Center
2739 Daily Drive
Camarillo, CA 93010
805-482-2853
www.camarillocarcare.com