Chesapeake Auto Repair

Go Big or Go Home: Upsize Your Wheels at West Service Center, Inc.   A lot of us Chesapeake car owners 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 Virginia drivers 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 sixteen-inch wheels used to be the factory standard, But today, because a lot of Chesapeake motorists like the look of larger wheels, many vehicles are available with seventeen or eighteen-inch wheels. Optional wheel packages of twenty inches or more are also available in Chesapeake. 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 important factors involved i ... read more

Under Pressure in Chesapeake: TPMS Have you noticed an increase in price when you get a flat fixed in Chesapeake or 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 under inflated. Why the new requirement? Because underinflated tires are the number one cause of tire failure. Tire blowouts cause detrimental and sometimes fatal accidents. Underinflated tires also need longer stopping distance and can skid, both of which also present dangers on Virginia roads. Many flat tires can also be prevented by proper tire inflation, and though this may seem an economic consideration, Chesapeake drivers who have changed a flat on the side of the road recogn ... read more

Fuel Saving Tip: Dirty Oil In Your Chesapeake van   If you’re a quart low in your van, there isn’t enough motor oil to lubricate your engine properly. The extra friction causes drag that reduces fuel economy while you’re driving around the Chesapeake area. The same goes for dirty oil; it doesn’t reduce friction properly. The result is you get to watch those numbers at your local Chesapeake gas pump rolling higher and higher. The transmission also needs the proper amount of clean fluid to do its work. When it’s in need of service, the transmission drags your fuel economy down. So keep it clean and give yourself a fighting chance.    

Gear Up: Transmission Service at West Service Center, Inc. in Chesapeake   The transmission system in your vehicle allows you to change gears. Lower gears are power gears. They get your vehicle moving and get it up hills. Higher gears get the vehicle up to speed and get it rolling faster. If you have a standard transmission, then you have to do the work of shifting gears yourself. But with an automatic transmission, the vehicle shifts gears on its own. It automatically starts out in low gear and automatically shifts to high gears as it gets rolling. Again, it will automatically shift to a lower gear to climb hills or when you need a burst of speed. How does it know when to change gears? Today’s automatic transmissions are computer-controlled. The computer gathers information about what the vehicle is doing, and changes the gears as needed. Automatic transmissions are becoming more sophisticated all the time. More gears, or “speeds” are being added. A ... read more

Odometer Rollback On Your Chesapeake Virginia Auto How do Chesapeake motorists know if an odometer is telling the truth? Well, back in ’86, Congress passed the Truth-in-Mileage Act to protect Virginia consumers against mileage fraud. It says a Virginia seller must certify the mileage reported is the Actual Mileage. To have your odometer checked in Chesapeake Virginia, stop by West Service Center, Inc.: If it isn’t, the seller must say why; like maybe the odometer is past its mechanical limits. Some older odometers only go to 99,999 miles and then start over at 0. Or, the odometer has been tampered with, broken or replaced. If the seller tells you the mileage isn’t accurate, there’s not much chance of putting a good number to it; And there’s the unscrupulous seller who claims the reading is true, but it’s not so. What can Chesapeake car owners do? First, you can go to www.CarFax.com, where for a small fee, they’ll give ... read more