5 Things You Have Never Asked About Your Car

Have you ever wondered why certain things are a certain way on your car?

Of course you have.

But I’m going to point out five things very few people have ever questioned, just so that when someone tries to act smart in your car you can actually answer the question above and then officially put on your smug face.

When it comes to filling up your car, most of us don’t even bother to do it ourselves.

Such is the luxury of gas stations in Singapore that all you do is pull up next to the pump (on the correct side of your car, but more on that in a bit), get out, and say to the attendant one of three numbers plus the desired quantity.

You then head into the air-conditioned comfort of the mart and wait aimlessly hoping that you can guess correctly when your car’s done filling up.

But I digress.

If you think about it now, you will easily picture your fuel filler port somewhere near the rear of the car, a little bit in front of the boot and on the side somewhere around the rear wheel arch.

The question you never asked is – why do most cars have their fuel ports there?

It is simply because your fuel tank is located somewhere in that area of your car. Specifically, its under the rear bench of your car.

So it makes good sense to locate the filler port just there, where gravity and pressure can fill up the tank easily without requiring the fuel to travel very much.

Oh and as for which side your fuel port is – for those that are either blessed or cursed with having to drive multiple cars where the ports can be on different sides, look for the tiny arrow somewhere on the fuel gauge.

Okay some people have asked about this.

Well many people have in fact.

A common answer you might have heard from the salesperson is that “oh this is a continental car, so the indicator is on the left.”

Okay sure, why do continental cars do that?

The traditional answer is that continental cars are made more in left-hand drive than right-hand drive, so the indicator stalks are reversed.

But again, why do they have to be reversed if the steering wheel was on the left?

After all, most people drive cars here with no problems with the indicator on the left or right, they either completely don’t signal (I’m looking at you Bimmer drivers) or they basically get on with it and develop muscle memory on their hands after a couple of weeks.

While the fact is there is no real answer to this question, a good guess is actually to do with the position of gear levers in cars.

Back in the day when manual transmissions were the order of the day, you actually needed to use another hand to change gears, which meant that if the turn signal indicator stalk was on the opposite side of the gear lever you could signal and change gears at the same time without your one hand leaving the steering wheel.

Why do I need a traction control switch?

In what possible universe would I turn off my traction control and drive like a stupid teenager?

Yes well we know you’re all sensible drivers out there who wouldn’t risk an accident turning off the electronic aids that help you keep the car pointed in the right direction.

But it still begs the question – why is there a switch to turn it off? Shouldn't the traction control be always on for the safety of other road users too?

And if I can turn off traction control, why don’t they just go ahead a put another switch for me to turn off the Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) too, since we’re all going a bit crazy turning off safety systems?

The answer comes in the form of weather.

Yes, in Singapore, the traction control button is never required to be touched.

However in countries with snow, traction control actually can interfere with driving in certain conditions.

For instance, overnight your car might be buried in thick snow, and what traction control does is it limits power to wheels that don’t have any grip; and as you might imagine when the car’s tyres are buried in snow, there is very little grip and with traction control constantly reducing power to the wheels, you’re never getting out.

So people do actually need to turn off the system so as to get out of such slippery situations; as for ABS, well, there is simply no conceivable situation you might need to turn that off, hence there isn’t a switch for that.

Why is N between R and D?

For that matter, why do I even need the N mode?

This is actually an easy one. In cars with a manual transmission, not engaging a gear meant that the car was left in neutral, and this was necessary because the engine would stall if the wrong gear was engaged at the wrong time.

However with automatic transmissions, you hardly ever touch the gear lever once you’ve set it into D, and you can stop and start the vehicle at traffic lights without ever switching the transmission mode.

So what is the neutral position for? Essentially it prevents you from engaging reverse directly from drive and vice versa.

With manual transmissions, it was unlikely for a driver to inadvertently engage reverse unintentionally, because of the typical H-pattern of gearboxes which required that you engage each gear deliberately.

But with automatic transmissions, the gear lever only moves in a linear fashion (up and down basically), which means that if you hit the lever accidentally, you could shift the car from forward gears to the reverse gear, so a neutral setting is placed between them to prevent the disaster of such a thing from ever happening.

Ever wondered why the bonnet opens differently from the boot?

While most boots open easily with the touch of either a mechanical or electronic switch, almost every bonnet has some sort of catch which requires you to fish for a while to find, and then figure out in what direction to push or pull the lever.

Once you’ve got the lever, you find out that the bonnet can be quite a heavy piece of metal to lift.

So what’s the point of making your life so difficult just to access the mechanical bits of the car?

It’s simply a safety catch.

If for any reason the bonnet should pop open when you’re driving along, the safety catch prevents it from flapping up and completely obscuring your view.

So you’ll find that even on a froot (the front boot of certain cars), there’s a safety catch that operates in the same way even if the engine was in the back of the car.

One genius manufacturer that did away with this catch is BMW, which I really applaud for keeping my hands dirt and burn free with their pull-twice-on-the-lever-inside concept. Rather than having a second lever in the front of the bonnet, modern BMWs simply unlatch the bonnet completely when you pull twice on the lever to pop the bonnet.

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