How to Navigate Under Your Car: Auto Repair & Maintenance Tips

"Hi! I’m William Myers from Austin Subaru for Expert Village and I’m going to show you the underside of your Subaru. This is the underside of your Subaru, this is your belly pan and under this is your engine, your engine oil filter, the engine below and if you come back a little bit you’ll see your exhaust pipes and up here is your center differential but this is the main thing I want to talk about right here is your transmission pan. And the reason why I want to talk about this is because there’s a lot of shops out there that when they walk under the vehicle they’re paying somebody minimum wage that doesn’t know much about cars, they see this big paily pan and then they see this pan here with a drain plug and a filter on it and this is your AP pan this is your automatic transmission pan and a lot of times the wrong fluid gets drained. So it’s important that if you had your oil changed and then all of the sudden the transmission is shifting funny, stop check your transmission fluid and check your engine oil, your engine oil maybe over filled and the transmission fluid maybe empty. This does happen this is a reality this happens so it’s important, I’m not saying every shop does it I’m saying we see it here at this dealership and I’m not going to name any names but we see it. So if you have your oil change done and then all the sudden the transmission starts shifting funny or acting funny, it didn’t happen till after the oil change, check your transmission fluid and if it is low add immediately, in this case it’s better to have a little too much than none at all because you will burn this transmission up. Now we’re going to remove the belly pans you can actually see your engine oil pan, where you would drain it if you decided to change your own oil in engine oil filter and just point out some of the components that are under the car. Like where your axles are, your lower control arm so if somebody saying you got a bad lower control arm you can actually know what they’re talking about so if they’re pointing at something and you can say well that’s not what the lower control arm on well I thought it looked different. So you can question it asking questions is not a problem, always as your mechanic questions if you have any doubt quiz him make him explain things."