The key to avoiding a car breakdown when you leave your Wonder Lake home is to stay up to date on maintenance of your vehicle.

If you’ve never left your Wonder Lake home only to find yourself stuck on the highway somewhere because of an automotive breakdown, consider yourself lucky. In fact, either you haven’t been driving for long or you might want to consider yourself downright blessed.

There are numerous things that can go wrong that would leave you stranded on the side of the road waiting for a service truck or a tow. Inevitably, like the luck of the draw, one of them chooses each of us at some time in our driving career. 

You can have tires that go flat or even blowout. You can run out of gasoline (though this isn’t really the car’s fault unless the gas gauge is faulty). Your muffler pipe can rust away and break so you’re dragging a muffler down the street back to your Wonder Lake home. Your catalytic converter can clog shutting down the engine.

Steering or suspension components can break. You can have an electrical problem. The alternator may malfunction. The battery can stop holding a charge. Turn signals, headlights or brake lights can fail. You can also leave your engine overheated.

Then there’s also the chance that your engine could seize up or otherwise fail catastrophically. Thankfully, this latter potentiality isn’t common; seldom do car engines fail that dramatically. But fuel systems can get clogged, sparkplugs and foul and other problems can render engines inoperable.  

Even if you are fastidious about maintaining your vehicle, one of these problems can strike you stuck on the side of the road. But, if you are that serious about maintaining your vehicle in good and safe operating condition, those problems are far less likely. 

Someone who doesn’t maintain their vehicle is far more likely to find themselves on the side of the road dealing with a mechanical problem. Hopefully, it won’t have to happen to them too often before they get the hint. Then again, some may find themselves on the side of the road time after time desperately asking the sky, ‘Why me?!’

The answer is to maintain your vehicles properly. While maintaining a car, such as changing the oil on schedule, it’s more likely that a bad tire will be noticed.

When you bring your car to a trusted Wonder Lake auto repair shop for that simple maintenance, you can be sure they’ll look the vehicle over to see if there are any other problems.