3 Reasons Your Car Shakes and What to Do About It

3 Reasons Your Car Shakes and What to Do About It

Is your old bucket-of-bolts shaking like me on my first “date” with Ellie in fifth grade, meeting behind the gym after school? I was so nervous, I cut my tongue on her braces.

No worries, I’ve got you covered. Above all, every car is different, so you should have a qualified mechanic look at your hoopdee to see what it might be. But also consider the following possibilities.

Poltergeists

There is a good chance your car shakes because it haunted. Try this: Park your vehicle in an open field at night. Keep the lights on but turn off the engine. Say out loud with gusto, “Be gone, devil of the drivetrain! Fly home, ghost of the gearbox! I banish thee, poltergeist of the pistons!” Then lift the hood and slam it three times.

Hidden Memories

Have you ever had a bad flashback about something that happened years ago, an event so bad it made you shudder? Like the time you broke your ankle because you were going down the stairs and you thought there was one more stair at the bottom but there wasn’t.

Cars also have memory. They internalize all the bad things you do to them. Over time, it comes back in the form of shakes and shudders. Like the time you drove your car through a cornfield in high school, corn flying into every open window, because you wanted to “write” your girlfriend’s name in the stalks. Not fun for your car. And it remembers.

Bad Roads

I don’t know about you, but where I live the roads are worse than ever. They barely ever pave them new anymore, instead they patch the holes and put patches on the patches. The result is a patch monster bigger than the patches on a 75-year-old Harley rider’s jean jacket at the Sturgis Motorcyle Rally. “Hey, man, let me show you this patch I got riding with Dennis Hopper at Altamont,” he says.

All those road patches shake your car so bad, eventually it just keeps on shaking.

And I don’t blame your car one bit. It’s madness out there.