Customer Reviews

Popular Mechanics Complete Car Care Manual

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I agree that certain parts of the book are fairly basic, but how else do you expect to learn? I think this book is GREAT!! I'm a university student, with a strong interest in cars/trucks. My father was never big into automotive, so I never learned. This book is basically the "bible" of automotives for those looking to learn. It teaches everything from simple oil changes, to doing complex things such as servicing your electronic suspension, etc...

I have ONLY good things to say about this book, and I disagree very much that it is too basic. If it's too basic for you, you ought to consider going into mechanics as a profession, cause you know a whole lot!!

BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE THE LEAST INTEREST OF LEARNING HOW TO SERVICE/FIX/ENHANCE YOUR CAR!!!!

If you don't know anything about cars, read the Dummies book or use the web to get familiar with basic automotive systems: ignition, fuel/air mix delivery, motor, transmission, cooling, exhaust, suspension, electrical... maybe a few more I'm forgetting.

If you actually want to fix something on your car, buy the Hayne's or Chilton's manual for your make and model.

Between learning how cars work and learning how to fix your car falls the shadow. This Popular Mechanics book amounts to a long list of what can go wrong with your car, with some too-general-to-be-applied repair instructions. There are a lot of "this should be somewhere around here, or possibly over there, or maybe your car doesn't have it" situations. If shop manuals didn't exist, this book would be useful. But they do exist, and they are not hard to follow, especially for the sort of repairs you'd undertake by yourself without training.

This book wastes your time with cheesy lead-ins to every problem ("You're on your way home from the mother-in-law's on a snowy Thanksgiving night, when you hear a knock coming from the front-passenger side of the car...") and proceeds to give instruction about as useful as the advice of a mechanically inclined friend who has not seen the problem.

Not a completely useless book. Just not necessary.

This book has some of what my husband already knows in it but he enjoys reading it anyway. He's found it to be pretty informative.

This latest edition continues the tradition of essays that are models of clarity, with only occasional missteps, like claiming battery cable connector bolts are specially lead-coated. I was disappointed to see the illustrations, once a highlight, have suffered a little since the last edition, and that some advanced topics like valve jobs and turbo repair are gone. Previous editions seemed to offer an alternative in a crowded field of similar books, aimed at those who already know how to do the basic jobs, but this last has been dumbed down and joked up, just another ... for Dummies title.

When I signed up for this manual I thought that I was going to be able to select the kind of car that I thought that the manual would be for.
Not too many years ago the automobile manufacturers used to produce a manual for their cars but they got cheap like almost every manufacture does in this world today. You can buy these manuals now from a auto publisher for $140+. Thats highway robbery.
Your manual is pretty fair for "general" automotive work.