Dear Tom and Ray: I listen to your show a lot, and I completely agree that SUV drivers are a menace. I know, because I just bought one. I had a Saturn sedan and I was very careful and considerate. After I bought my Toyota Highlander, I realized that I drive faster, I can’t see a lot of things I could see before, and last week I actually got out of my car and nearly got into a fistfight with another woman. I’m not usually a fighter; in fact, I’m a Catholic-school religion teacher at an all-boys school, and I’m really soft-spoken and patient. The only explanation I have is the SUV. It has changed me. I’m thinking about selling it, even though I only bought it in December. It’s only got a four-cylinder engine, and it has front-wheel drive only, so it’s not a big gas-guzzler. Should I cut my losses and get a Subaru? I want to be safe, but I also want others to be safe in my vicinity! — Trish Tom: To be honest with you, Trish, the Highlander hardly is among the worst SUVs. It’s mid-size, it’s based on a car platform and yours has the optional four-cylinder engine, so it’s not like people can legitimately oink at you as you drive by.
Ray: However, it is quite a change from your old Saturn sedan. In the Saturn, when you got up to 60 mph, the noise and vibration probably told you that you were going plenty fast enough. But the Highlander is brand new. And it’s very well-made. As a result, it’s so quiet and smooth that even at high speeds, you don’t feel personally endangered, like you did in the Saturn. And that lack of negative feedback has released your inner animal, Trish!
Tom: While I normally wouldn’t put the Highlander in the category of dangerous vehicles, in your hands I guess it is. I mean, fistfight, Trish?
Ray: So, if it makes you uncomfortable and you don’t like the way you behave in it, then trade it in for something you like better. Life is too short to be known as “that jerk Trish.”
Dear Tom and Ray: Following an end-of-semester party, my university English students were headed home for the holidays.
One of the girls said she was concerned about driving home in the snow with a radiator that had been leaking. The response from her classmates was to put an egg in the radiator. Somebody grabbed a couple of eggs from my refrigerator, put one in the radiator and gave her the second to keep in the car — I hope not for long. I never thought to ask if the egg went in whole or if it was broken. The only possibility my husband and I could come up with is that the egg would cook in the hot radiator and be pulled toward the leak. Is this a valid short-term solution to a leaky radiator? And if so, how does the mechanic remove the cooked egg? — Leslie
Ray: It’s a legitimate last-ditch potential solution for a leaky radiator, Leslie. But I would emphasize “last-ditch” and “potential.” The egg works — when it works — exactly as you describe. You do have to crack it open. You pour the contents into the radiator. Then the egg cooks and partially solidifies, and is pushed toward the leak, where it might lodge in a small hole and plug it up. At least for a while. And how do you get it out? You don’t. Which is why we don’t recommend this for a car that still has useful life in it.
Tom: Right. Because the egg can also plug up your heater core, for instance.
Ray: Instead, we’d recommend one of the many commercially available products that use some kind of proprietary compound that dissolves in the coolant and then hardens when exposed to the air at the leak site.
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