Car forums are still a very important place in 2025. Is there something really stupid and specific happening to your car? Chances are, there’s a forum somewhere with a ridiculously deep dive on why it happens and how to fix it. Knowledge like this can’t really be found on TikTok or Instagram, yet it’s also not super easy to search for these resources.
Lately, your favorite Autopian writers have been combing through enthusiast forums and finding out what’s going on with certain cars. It’s how we’ve discovered a lot of our engine swap stories as well as our part failure stories, like the $3 part that can strand your Jeep Wrangler. Thank you, Gubbin!
Just want to note that these “here’s something important that mostly just forum nerds know” articles are a great public service.
Ecsta C3PO has a great idea:
There should be an online database of this for all vehicles, compiling the “best-of” from the forums.
Examples I can think of
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2011-ish Kia Optima Steering coupler – cheap (if labour intensive) repair for clicking noise in steering column
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2013-ish Mazda3 rear strut mount – common failure point because aluminum mount oxidizes and fails, especially annoying when studs snap when trying to remove.
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Some early 2000’s Subarus you can pull the power steering sensor on the steering column and get great steering feel with no warning lights.
In today’s Shitbox Showdown, contributor Mark Tucker made a reference to the weird way to count Star Wars movies and Triumph car names in order. Twobox Designgineer makes a good reference:
If you’re counting in Star Wars, it goes 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9. If you’re counting in Triumph sports car, for the US market, it goes 2, 3, 4, 4A, 250, 6, 7, 8.
If you’re counting off the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, it goes 1, 2, 5. Sorry, 1, 2, 3, The rabbit had me confused.
Today, Thomas wrote about how someone drove a fan car upside down. SlowCarFast figured out who really was behind the wheel:
Is that how Stig’s Australian cousin does things?
Have a great evening, everyone!
Top graphic laptop image: Wikipedia/stock.adobe.com
Benzworld has an Encyclopaedia Germanica section that’s full of great information.
Might I present you with
https://www.diyauto.com/
Lots of forum posts and guides compiled in a way that can be filtered by make/model etc
I forget which Nissan forum I grabbed them from, but one thing I liked about having my 2002 Q45 was I was able to download the entire catalogue of Inifiniti’s official Service Manuals that their technicians use. At that forum link, it looked like pretty much every car Nissan produced (within a timeframe) had these manuals available.
The difference between using a Hayne’s/Chilton’s and using those service manuals was astounding.
One thing that does suck about awesome car forum posts is people often link in pictures and videos that go dead over time. So the forum post about changing your heater core remains but the useful pictures/videos are long gone.
I try to archive the entire webpage when there’s a great post I want to use/keep.
I found that through a forum too. It has been amazing finding everything I need to work on a 25 year old Frontier.
Same with car sites! Old jalopnik posts, and even autopian posts, are missing tons of photos referenced in the articles, which makes them essentially useless.
In my Jetta TDI days, Fred’s TDI Club forums were amazing and incredibly helpful. And fun as well.
Jeez, 9 years later, now that I sold it and replaced with a Honda, I have far more infrequent reasons to research some minorly insignificant and debilitating problems.
The people on Fred’s were fun and we had a fair share of shared pain. It was a smaller pool of participants, but we were pretty engaged. I miss some of those contributors, but I have nothing to offer them anymore. Towards the end of my time there, there was a lot of sold it. Moved on to something Japanese. And then diesel fuel got so expensive, that a lot of us got to the point of “why bother.”
Don’t get me wrong. I loved my ’01 Jetta TDI. And I never drove a gasser Jetta from that era. So, I can’t compare the experiences. But there was some pain involved.
This site is a great place to commiserate about poor choices we may have made in our earlier years.
I am mildly offended that my Portal reference didn’t make the cut.
To quote the auto turrets: ” I don’t blame you.”
All hail the Holy Hand Grenade…
Ni!