You say you like to live dangerously?  Well here’s a great way to do it. Buy yourself some syrupy drink like we have here, put it in one of these flimsy cup holders, and then find a back road with lots of bumps, or a railroad track, or a couple of speed bumps, or maybe a couple of kids in the car holding on to the drinks, and you are courting disaster. How so? Well, you know all these drinks get spilled, and when they do, many times it’s going to be in the console or around the shifter. And on a modern car the console is full of switches and all kinds of electronics, and that can spell a big repair bill.

You see, if we take a look at this shifter over here, this one has various components in it, including circuit boards full of electronic components. Well that’s for the special type of shifter it has, and things like that. But spill a drink into this, and you’re going to spend several hundred dollars fixing your high-line car.

But you say well, I’ve got a basic car, and I don’t have anything like that. It’s just plain cloth seats and basic-just basic everything. Well, don’t kid yourself, because here we have a very basic seat out of a very basic automobile. And you look on here-there are wires under this seat, and that’s because in most seats these days there are sensors to tell when the seat is occupied, and that will trigger the seatbelt warning light or the airbag for that particular seat. So you spill something into this, it gets into the sensor… another big repair.

So, no matter what you have, if it’s on the seat, in the console, or even on the floor-what you see on the floor lots of times there are sensors and modules built under the seats that control various safety devices on the car. No matter where it’s spilled, get someplace immediately and use a wet-or-dry vac or compressed air to completely get rid of that spilled drink. That can save you hundreds of dollars in future repairs, and it means you’ll be driving a safer car.



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The address is MotorWeek, Owings Mills, MD, 21117.