For most of us, starting our car is (or should be) completely uneventful. You turn a key or press a button, then the engine just starts. However, there was a time when cars had to be manually started.

Starter motors sit at the center of every modern ignition, yet most drivers only notice them when the key twist leads to silence. I want to unpack what that small electric motor actually does, how it ...

Back in the day, you had to hand-crank your engine to start it. Thankfully, Charles Kettering and Cadillac gave us the electric starter motor in 1912, and we’ve started our engines from the comfort of ...

The opening part of this series laid out how the starter motor works, set the thing in the context of its electrical supply and suggested a few eyes-and-ears checks as the first steps in ...

You turn the key on your Jeep and are greeted with a clicking sound, or maybe only silence. Whether you’re running late for work or headed out for weekend wheeling, that’s a situation that can ruin ...

There are about a thousand and one sounds a car can make when it’s deteriorating toward failure. You’ve got clunks from broken suspension parts, the hiss of a spent radiator, and brop, brop, brop of a ...