I still have awful memories of taking the mrs driving in a 106 when she was learning to drive, thankfully she didnt persue driving for much longer afterwords.

 

bit whos cooking and cleaning whilst these woman are driving????

 

That's brilliant.. Fine on the last mot.. Lol

 

I popped out earlier before my 2-10 shift as one of my reverse lights was out. On my return I went to pull up outside my house and saw a 58 plate red sh1tbox type car parked diagonally half on the kerb and half on the road a couple doors down. I assumed there had been a crash and noticed the house it was parked 'outside' of had its door ajar. Being a good citizen I knocked on the door and asked if anyone was hurt.

Out popped a 40 something rent-a-Thai-bride lady, maybe 4 foot nothing max. Smiling like a Cheshire cat she politely asked "Can you reverse, I new driver"...

She hadn't crashed at all, just assumed that was a reasonable standard of street parking.

A little bit of wee came out

 

The amount cars I work on with no oil showing on the dipstick is amazing...probably 7 out of 10 need oil. The ignorance of some is epic. There's one breader (sorry, that's what I call a woman with a big MPV ), which is a right shed. She was told just to get it through MOT is more than its worth and its better scrapping it. But she wanted teh work done....all £1K of it.

The problem is the car even after the work completed is still a shed...the engine is not healthy (rattles its **** off when you start it), shocks worn, suspension generaly worn, clutch on its way, gearbox not much better. Anyway, against our advice she has all the work done, drives away happy as larry with new MOT.

Yesterday its dragged in by a RAC van....She said "some light came on the dash and then it start making funny noises and stopped"........ she'd ran it out of oil

RAC man stuck some oil in and found it would only turn over witha booster pack on the battery, then it would run and sound like a bag of spanners witha cloud of oil smoke out of the exhuast. Yup, sorry luv...that £1K we told you NOT to spend, has just been wasted, all because you didn't keep tabs on the oil level and ignored the light on the dash and carried on driving until it physically stopped.

 

My father-in-law was the manager for a company that had a pool car that was used regularly by one particular employee and so he asked this bloke to check and fill it up the oil. Which he did.

A little while later, said employee came into the factory to tell my father-in-law that there must be a problem with the pool car as it was coughing and smoking a lot since he filled it with oil.

It turns out that this employee, who clearly had no idea about cars, had "filled" the engine with oil, literally up to the the filler cap with the obvious consequences.

They had to drain all the oil out in the car park and top it back up with the correct quantity before it could be driven again!

 

lol, it always makes me laugh when people put on an add "lady owner" as though it's a good thing..

I'd NEVER buy a car that belonged to a woman, all the girls iv'e ever known never look under the bonnet, and they always drive the car from service to service, if the car is lucky, or mot to mot with out checking oil, tyres,or anything for that matter until it stops working.

Although some blokes arn't much better, a mate once asked me if he should put the oil in "that frying pan thing on top of the engine"

 

To be honest I'd only ever look at the oil on my car if I got a light on the dash.

Same with washer fluid.

I don't agree that when the light comes on it's too late.

 

I service fleet stuff and hear this quite often.. "The low oil warning came on the other week, but I knew it was due a service soon so didn't top up"

Guy I work with was telling me (only last week) about a work experience kid they had at a garage. The tech had been servicing a car and asked the work experience kid to fill it with oil.. Yep, he took it literally!

 

Depends which car and which light, Oil low light is fine to top up but some cars dont have that like a subaru and if you get an oil light on one of these its usually down to having no oil pressure which is an engine killer

 

Yup the red oil can = engine dead light. Usually needs about 3-5psi to turn off which is not enough to stop bearing wear/damage.

If it comes on when going round roundabouts and then goes out again, you may save it. But generally speaking everytime that light comes on for anything longer than five seconds, irrepairable wear is done to the bearing surfaces. Do it too many times and the engine will eventually give up on you.

Not only that but with under 1 liter of oil in the sump (as opposed to 4 litres)...the loss of thermal mass means the oil runs hot, to the point it stops doing its job and thins out too much. Remmeber the primary cooling of a engine is done by the oil...not the coolant (coolant mainly does the combustion chambers and bores..its the oil that cools the pistons, bearings, crank, rods and cams etc ). So even if the light stays off, excessive wear does happen.

Today's low on oil sheds:

Ford KA...on minimum, needed a pint (noisy as f**k...at a guess the camshaft is knackered).
Nissan micra...nothing on the dipstick...took 1.5 litres.
Lexus GS300 nothing showing, drained about 2 litres of trecle- sump holds 5.5 litres.

 

I guess also that if you have let the oil level drop that much then it has been in there a very long time & is going to be in a pretty poor state thereby compounding the problem.

 

Tell me why have a "warning" light , if by the time it comes on the damage is done ?

 

A lad i know filled the gearbox oil up on his fiat......through the inspection hatch on the bell housing!

 

If you turn the engine off within about 10 of the low oil pressure light comming on then you'll likely save the engine (i.e knock it into neutral and turn off the ignition and coast to somewhere safe...watch out for the steering lock though ). But during that time when the engine runs with no/low oil pressure, excessive wear will occurr. And everytime it happens that wear continues further and further until either somthing fails or it seizes.

Also runnig with less than a litre of oil the sump will make the oil overheat and degrade, also causing wear and eventual failure...typically there is no warning light for overheated oil.

In the MPV's case a piston has seized in the bore. Bearings are shot as well by the sounds of it, but that's not reason why it ground to a halt ....which is suprising as usually they eject a rod out the block (she must have been in traffic, so it stalled). Although if it was started and took for a drive now...even with fresh oil it'd eject a rod pretty soon.

 

the trick to convincing a woman into doing what you suggest is to make them believe it was their idea in the first place