Latest news with #AudiA3E-Tron
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
These Are The Indispensable Things To Bring On A Cross-Country Road Trip
As an avid traveler of the gorgeous roads of these United States, I tend to tick up a lot of miles on my cars every year. In just the last six months, in fact, I've tacked another 20,000 miles on my Audi A3 E-Tron. When I'm driving something as new and well-maintained as the little Audi hatchback, I usually travel with little more than a credit card, an iPhone, and a AAA membership to take care of anything if the unlikely occurs. With some of my older and perhaps more fragile sports cars or motorcycles, however, I get a bit more nervous about breaking down on the side of the road. And that's especially true when I'm driving somewhere remote, out of cell phone range. For this summer I've decided to finally put together a kit of tools and repair components I might need in order to affect roadside repairs and get it home. I'm a reasonably handy wrench when needs arise, and I've been known to make a few fixes in the past even without a comprehensive toolkit. It's better to have and not need one than to need it in a pinch. I went to The Cheap Tool Store to get a few necessities and I think I've come up with the right answer for everything I would need for a few days or weeks on the road. Check out the kit I've assembled and let me know what you think I'm missing. Read more: Apparently It's Illegal To Put A 'For Sale' Sign In Your Truck Now Every car and motorcycle will require a different tool kit with different ingredients. My regular rides are generally old and German, so I pack metric tools and torx keys, for example. With a full set of deep well sockets, a complement of stubby box wrenches, a variety of pliers, cutters, and a multi-head screwdriver, I can take apart and put back together almost everything on any of my cars. It might be tedious and annoying to not have electric ratchets or impacts, but they'll still get the job done. A flashlight and a couple extra batteries also come in handy. A nice sharp knife can also be helpful in a pinch for survival purposes beyond just fixing your car. Definitely make sure you have all of the tools needed to remove one of your car's wheels, including any potential wheel lock keys, the correct socket for your wheel nut, a breaker bar, and a jack that will fit under your car. If you have lowered your car, as I have, make sure the factory jack still fits underneath. The best bet to building the kit you need is to get yourself under the hood and perform a top-to-bottom tune up and check-over before you leave for the start of the trip. Not only can you make sure you have all of the tools you needed for those tasks in your kit before you leave, but you can spend a few minutes looking at potential failure points and deciding what tools you would need to affect a repair or replacement, or simply replacing them before you take off. Check your shop manual for the procedure to replace an accessory drive belt, for example, and bring all of those tools. We'll talk a little more about what spare parts to bring later. In addition to tools, here are a few other universal necessities you might need to pack along as well. I don't go anywhere without a fully-charged jump pack. If you can, make sure you get one with a built-in tire inflator. You can bring a bike pump and push the air in yourself, but we have the tools to avoid such manual labor. Speaking of inflating tires, you're bound to get a nail or a spoon or something jammed into your tire if you drive enough miles, so pack a tire repair kit as well. They're cheap and easy to use, so that's a no-brainer. At the top of the photo you'll see my special tool to fix problems with motion. The can of WD-40 comes in handy when you have something that should be moving freely but doesn't, and the duct tape wrapped around it is for when you have something that is moving freely when it shouldn't. Apply liberally. If something needs to be fixed in place but duct tape won't do the job, make sure you have a full spate of zip ties, and I also like to carry a roll of metal safety wire. Some thread locker is also helpful when pesky fasteners start backing out after a few bumpy days of off-roading or driving rutted two-tracks. I also like to pack a bunch of extra fuses and my travel pack always has some spare cash in it for JIC emergencies. Rags will also help for when you need to clean up. OK, let's get down to spare parts. The three things you need to make an engine run are spark, fuel, and air. Each of those things have corresponding failure points. If you're driving something vintage make sure you bring a spare distributor cap, rotor, points, condenser, coil, and a spare set of spark plugs. Depending on how deep you want to get, you can bring a full spare fuel system, but at a minimum a spare fuel pump and fuel filter would be helpful, as well as a length of spare fuel line and some clamps. Bring some spare carb jets, particularly if you're heading to a different elevation, and know how to use them. You changed your oil and air filters before you left, didn't you? Cool, then you don't need to bring extras. But your car burns oil, so bring a couple quarts. Belts, my god you'll need belts! Water pump and hoses? Throw them in, too! Might as well have a bit of hose in case you develop a vacuum leak, too. You probably won't need an alternator, but it doesn't hurt to have one of those as well. Of course there are things you may need for yourself as well. Bring a standard first aid kit, as well as at least a week worth of any medications you take in case you get really stranded. If you're heading somewhere particularly desolate, or will be driving through particularly bad weather, make sure you have a rudimentary survival kit with a blanket, some extra non-parishable foods, and the tools to start a fire. And now that your entire trunk is full of stuff, you're ready to go on your road trip. Obviously, if you're on a motorcycle you'll want to be a bit more weight and space conscious when you're packing up. Cut some tools down, buy smaller and more compact versions of a tool, bring the bike-specific tools you'll need, and be prepared for everything to go wrong anyway. My BMW GS doesn't have a chain or tubed tires, so my tool kit is pretty small already, but looking at the kit Ari built in the video above, I could stand to make it a little smaller. Watch the video and it'll tell you everything you need to know about packing to travel on motorcycles. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution here, but the fact that you're thinking about what you need before you take off and not scrambling to pack your kit the night before a big trip says you're going to be just fine. I like to keep everything in a little duffle bag, and I'm particularly annoyed by errant clatter in my car, so I try to wrap everything I can in the shop rags to keep metal-on-metal to a minimum. Don't overthink it, you'll probably be fine. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
I Drove My Audi A3 E-Tron 20,000 Miles In 6 Months, Here's How It Went
When I accidentally purchased a 65,000 mile plug-in hybrid German hatchback with no warranty back in August of last year, I was optimistic—though not entirely convinced—that my ownership experience would be largely positive. After running back and forth across this great nation five times in the last six months, my 2016 Audi A3 E-Tron has proven that it might just be the greatest road tripper/daily driver I've ever owned. Despite the few struggles I had with wrenching on this machine, all due to my own dumb*ss mistakes, it has served dutifully in fuel-sipping fealty. My goal with this car was always to rack up the miles, but I didn't quite expect to add this many of them quite so quickly. I don't think I have ever added 20,000 miles to a car so quickly, but pushing the odometer on this little plug-in hybrid from 65,000 to over 85,000 now has to come with some side effects, right? Everyone always says German cars without warranties are bad ideas, so how has it been? With Volkswagen's venerable 1.4T engine and a small electric motor under the hood, this little machine makes a combined 201 horsepower and 243 lb-ft of torque, which is more than enough for me to consider this a warm hatchback. This is the same platform and drivetrain found in the Europe-only Volkswagen GTE, after all. It'll run from 0-60 in 7.6 seconds, which is certainly quick enough for modern traffic. Aside from a few cosmetic modifications and regular oil changes, this car hasn't asked me for anything. So long as I keep it fed with electrons and driven responsibly, it returns either 20-25 miles of full-electric city driving, 50-60 miles per gallon in hybrid mode, or high-30s to low 40s with a totally flat battery. Because I've spent at least two thirds of my drive time on long interstate hauls, it's unfortunately been a lot of the latter. The more city driving I do, the higher the average MPG score it returns, obviously. Read more: Hertz Is Selling Its Fleet Of Rental Tesla Model 3s For Cheap In the time I've owned this car I have purchased two different sets of wheels and tires—one for summer, one for winter—installed lowering springs, swapped the grilles to give the car an S3-style look, popped on a pair of Audi Ur-Quattro door decals, and added a pair of Hella fog lights. I really like how the car looks now, but if I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't have done the Hella fog lights because this move meant I had to cut out too much of the grille to make everything fit and that resulted in a grille that is a little too loose and floppy for my taste. This summer I might take the bumper off again and try again with a new grille. We'll see how I feel about it once the weather warms up. The ECS Tuning lowering springs I installed are just a smidge on the too-stiff side, but the car just looks so much better with an inch and a half taken out of its ride height that I can't complain about it. It's only really bad when I spend three days in a row ripping across the country on I-80 feeling every single one of its expansion joints in my spine. Sometimes beauty comes with a little pain. The only flaw I have been able to find in this car across six months of nearly constantly being behind the wheel is the clear coat on the hood (above). I had plans to get it to my paint guy last fall, but ended up needing to run it way more miles than I had planned after our Cayenne pooped out its high pressure fuel pump in October. The three small holes in the car's clear coat have turned into two small holes and one really big one. I'll get this rectified soon, but for now it hasn't been causing any deeper issues, so I let it go for a few months. As many of you pointed out in the comments of the brake caliper post, the rotors are looking a little worse for wear, so perhaps I'll get them resurfaced in the coming months, but right now it's hardly a drivability issue as they don't squeak or grind and a good bit of the braking is done by energy recovery anyway. Equally, I probably should have installed new shocks and struts when I had the suspension apart, because the rears in particular are getting a bit bouncy. That's to be expected with 85,000 miles on the odometer, I suppose. The only minor annoyance I've found, and this is really picking nits, is that every once in a while if I shift out of park too quickly after hitting the start button, the car kind of has a minor freak out and won't go anywhere, so I have to turn it off and turn it back on. This isn't so much an issue with the car but an issue with my patience. I have learned to wait an additional half second for the computers to boot up before slapping the shifter into reverse, and it hasn't happened since. Unfortunately, that's kind of the whole list. Like I said back in late August when I picked it up, I think I got lucky. The interior still looks the same, packed with chocolatey goodness, though it's a little on the dirty side right now. The fuel mileage has been pretty great. The car looks good, drives good, and feels good. It's a good car, and well worth every penny of the $11,575 I paid for it. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
