Tag Archive: radiator


Trucks Just Want to Have Fun

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Paula Lauterbach)

I have had my truck for about 4 years.  Sometimes I have needed to add water to the radiator, but the interior temp gauge never rose above the halfway mark.

In mid July 2011, I drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas (Remember…JULY) to attend a conference of atheists, skeptics, free thinkers and the like.  I brought water in case something happened because of the heat, but I had no problems.

Then yesterday (July 24), I drove a much shorter distance to Orange County to see a friend speak at a Christian Church and answer questions about what it means to be a non-believer.  Very nice talk.

Within five minutes of leaving the venue, my “check gauges” light buzzed loudly and my temp gauge was all the way over to the red right area.  I pulled over ASAP and used all the water I had for Vegas.  It made it to the restaurant I was going to next (and then a gas station for more).

Now my truck seems ok.  But I thought it was funny it was all fine and dandy traveling to Vegas to be near heathens and then had an issue after visiting a church!

[EDITOR: If this doesn’t sound like perfect confirmation bias to reinforce my preference of Vegas over church, I don’t know what does.]

(Submitted by reader Steve Gray)

I was driving to the Valley on the 405. Going up the mild grade from the L.A. basin, my car died.

A few days later, I was driving the same route, and the car died in exactly the same place.

It at first seemed like an unbelievable coincidence, and maybe just a little spooky, but I soon found out the problem was simply an overheating radiator. Once I thought about it, I realized it took a definite amount of time for the engine to get hot enough to stall from the time and place I left, pretty much guaranteeing it would die in the same place each time. So in the end, no magic, nothing supernatural, just mundane mechanical problems.