Whats living under your seats??

A customer came into the shop with one of my favorite kinds of complaints:

“My car is making a noise.” Okay… What kind of noise?

“I don’t know. It’s like a clunking or rolling sound. But it doesn’t happen all the time.”

Of course it doesn’t. Welcome to the wonderful world of the intermittent noise. These can be some of the hardest things for us to diagnose because the car never seems to make the noise when we want it to.

We drove it. Nothing. We put it on a lift and checked underneath. Nothing obvious.

We looked at the suspension. Checked around the vehicle. Drove it again.

Then… There it was. A little clunk… roll… clunk. Okay! We heard it! Now we had to find it. Now we were looking inside the car… until finally…

Mystery solved.

There was a water bottle underneath the seat. That’s it. No broken suspension. No expensive repair. No major mechanical failure.

A water bottle.

Every time the car turned or stopped a certain way, the bottle rolled underneath the seat and made the noise. The customer wasn’t imagining it. The noise was absolutely there. It just wasn’t coming from the car.

So What’s Under YOUR Seat?

Think about everything that ends up inside our cars. Water bottles. Pens. Coins. Kids’ toys. Makeup. Charging cables. Umbrellas. Tools. Receipts.

And, naturally… French fries.

There’s always a french fry. Most of this stuff is harmless until it starts moving around. And that’s where my funny little water-bottle story becomes a safety lesson.

Keep Loose Stuff Away From Your Pedals

A bottle rolling underneath the passenger seat is annoying. A bottle rolling underneath the driver’s seat and toward the pedals can become dangerous.

You don’t want to step on your brake and discover something underneath or behind the pedal. And please—if something falls while you’re driving, don’t reach down looking for it.

Your phone, lipstick or water bottle can wait. Pull over somewhere safe first.

There’s Something Else Under Your Seats

Today’s cars have a lot more underneath the seats than people realize. Depending on the vehicle, you may have wiring and connectors for power seats, heated seats, seat belts, occupant sensors and airbag systems.

That’s another reason I don’t love seeing the area underneath the seats used as storage. Especially when we’re talking about liquids.

Your Auto Know! 

Here’s today’s five-minute car check.

Open the doors. Move the seats forward and backward. Look underneath them.

Check around the driver’s pedals. Take out anything that doesn’t belong there and secure the things you actually need to keep in the car. Because sometimes that mysterious noise you’ve been worried about isn’t a $2,000 repair.

Sometimes it’s a $2 bottle of water rolling underneath your seat.

And that’s why diagnosing a car is about more than replacing parts. You have to find the actual problem.

In this case? Mystery solved.

And the repair bill for the water bottle? I’ll let you have that one for free. 

Now you Auto Know.