It is 9 PM Sunday and you are driving your Perodua home from a weekend vacation with your family. You drove 230 KM to the holiday destination on Friday, the drive was pleasant, you reached your destination, had a good time with your family and planned to drive back after dinner back home 230 KM away.
Everything goes well, as planned, kids are tired, wife dozing off in the passenger seat and you are still 120 KM from home, and the nearest gas station is about 40KM ahead and your car’s engine just dies. No power, no lights, in the middle of nowhere and you are in the middle lane.
What do you do? Instinctively, you try to get the car into the middle lane as the vehicles behind you will be coming in your direction at around 110 KM/H and that’s a very dangerous situation and you know it. The car rolls to the slow lane and stops. You do the right thing and get your kids out of the car and get them and your wife to the emergency lane, and you go back to the car, put it on neutral, release the handbrakes and push the car slowly as your wife helps to the emergency lane, put the hazard signs up 200 meters away and call for a towing service, nobody picks up, it is Sunday, and it is already 11.00 PM and the traffic is thin.
Cars whizz by and after about 30 minutes you realize, that you might be stuck there for quite a while before help arrives. You take matters into your own hands, and pop the hood to have a look inside. You check for loose wires, jiggle this and that, but nothing happens, you turn the ignition – nothing. Since the ‘battery indicator’ comes on, you make the most logical assumption that your battery is fine and that the engine is caput.
You know a little, about engines, based on conversations with friends and mechanics and arrive at the conclusion that your starter motor is faulty and the only way out of this situation is to get your car towed to the workshop and get a mechanic to fix it. Is it really? There is something wrong, definitely, but you just assume that it is something more than you can handle.
The problem you are facing is in the Perodua car workshop manual, but you left it in your garage and for the life of you, you assume that car manuals only contain information that you are already well versed in when the truth is that most people only know 20 % about their cars, because most people never read these manuals and to make matters worse, they never keep it in the car!
The point is that someone in the same situation, who actually kept the reference manual in the car, would have checked it and realized that they blew a fuse and that there was a spare along with a map and colour code of which fuse went where, replaced the fuse and went on their merry way within 15 minutes after the engine died.
Now that is the difference between proactive drivers and reactive drivers. If you own a car, but somehow discarded your car workshop manuals, you could get a copy direct from your dealers or the manufacturer as having your car manual in your at all times is as important as having a spare tyre!