In automotive shops, lifts are hoists that raise a car so technicians can access the underside. The speaker plans to use multiple vehicles on lifts to teach teens about underbody systems and maintenance tasks they can do themselves.
The Chevrolet Nova is a car model made by Chevrolet that was popular for performance, especially in the 1970s. If a car “has no traction,” the tires can’t grip the road, so it can spin or slide even if the engine is strong. That’s why a Nova might be mentioned in a crash story about losing control.
Anti-skid mechanisms are safety systems that help stop the wheels from slipping. When the car senses loss of traction, it can step in to help you keep control.
Dynamic stability control is a computer-based safety feature that helps prevent skids. If the car starts to slide, it can automatically reduce power and brake certain wheels to help you stay on course.
Term
interlock brakes
Interlock brakes is a way of describing coordinated braking that helps the car stay stable. The idea is that the brakes work together to reduce skidding and help avoid accidents.
Seatbelts hold you in place during a crash. Without them, you can be thrown forward or sideways, which makes injuries much more likely.
Concept
capabilities of a car
“Capabilities of a car” means what the car can and can’t do in an emergency. Knowing that helps kids drive more safely because they understand the limits of the vehicle.
Anti-lock brakes (ABS) help you stop without the wheels locking up. That’s why the pedal can pulse during a hard stop—it's the car automatically adjusting braking to keep traction.
Concept
traffic light
The speaker is emphasizing intersection risk management: even with a green light, drivers should still check for cross-traffic because some drivers run red lights. This is about defensive driving rather than trusting signals blindly.
A spin refers to a loss of traction where the car rotates around its axis, often resulting in the vehicle facing a different direction than intended. New drivers may panic and do the wrong inputs, so training focuses on staying calm and controlling the car’s direction.
Airbags are safety cushions that deploy during a crash. They help protect people by reducing how hard you hit inside the car, especially when used with a seat belt.
The sidewall is the part of the tire with printed information. It may show the tire’s maximum pressure, but your car might need a different pressure for everyday driving.
Maximum pressure is the most air pressure the tire is allowed to have. It’s not automatically the right pressure for your car—your car’s label tells you what to run.
You should check tire pressure when the tires are cold, like before you drive or after the car has sat. Driving heats the tires and can make the pressure reading look higher than it really is.
Term
door jam on the driver's side
On most cars, there’s a sticker in the driver’s door jamb that tells you the correct tire pressure. That sticker is what you should follow, not just the numbers printed on the tire.
Term
different tires on the front and rear
Some cars use different tires in the front than in the back. If that’s the case, you may not be allowed to swap them side-to-side or front-to-rear during rotation.
Tire pressure is how much air is in your tires. If it’s too low or too high, the tire doesn’t sit on the road the way it should, so steering and grip can feel off.
The Mazda RX-7 is a sports car. Here it’s mentioned to show that if someone stays on top of tire pressures, they can get unusually long tire life.
LIVE
Hey folks, this is Lenny Lawson, the Car Guru, and I'm happy to announce that we're
doing another teen driver experience event at my dealerships in Greenville, Tennessee.
And let me turn my calendar over.
We just had to change the date because of a conflict with the state troopers because
they're going to be here.
Yeah, it's going to be Thursday the 23rd of July.
It gives you time to plan for it.
If you need to drive down from the tri-cities to get your teenager down here, no, they are
not going to want to come.
I already know how to drive.
I know.
I've heard it all before too.
But most of them, you have to admit, they don't know anything about cars.
They've never raised the hood of a car.
If you ask them to check the oil or check the air pressure in their tires, check the power
steering fluid, change a tire, jumpstart a car, they wouldn't have a clue.
They will after they leave this event.
I can promise you their eyes will be opened and yours will too.
I'm throwing in a little twist this time.
I'm going to let the parents stick around or the guardians, grandparents, whoever's
taking care of the kids brought them down here.
They don't have to drop them off and leave.
You're going to get to stay because I had a lot of parents say, can we stay?
I don't know about any of that stuff.
You know, I need to learn that and absolutely, you're going to get to stay, but you just
got to be quiet because you're monitoring, you're not necessarily participating.
These are for kids.
We're trying to help them live longer lives to avoid dangerous situations in an automobile.
We cover it all.
I'll have a state trooper here.
As a matter of fact, he's going to do a demonstration on what he's looking for when he pulls somebody
over.
We'll have a cruiser actually in the showroom.
We've got this scene set up.
He's just pulled over a car in our showroom and he's going to do a traffic stop.
You're going to see exactly and hear exactly what he's looking for and what he has to see
in order for you to avoid getting a ticket.
You know, sometimes not getting a ticket depends a lot on the attitude of the person
that's being pulled over.
And if a trooper or a sheriff deputy or could be a local police officer truly believes that
the person sitting in that car is being totally honest and forthcoming and apologetic, sometimes
they'll let you off with a warning, but not if you're difficult.
And so these are the kind of things that these kids need to learn so that they can stay out
of trouble with the law.
We'll have multiple vehicles up on lifts so we can show them all the systems on the underside
of the car that nobody ever sees unless they walk into a shop or know a lot about cars.
And we're going to show them all kinds of neat little maintenance things that they can do
on their own and not have to pay somebody to do.
So again, this teen driver event is going to be on July the 23rd at Gateway Ford and
Gateway Nissan beginning at 6, so get here about 10 minutes early.
We'll get you seated and we'll feed everybody first and then we'll start with the program.
So anyway, how do you register?
Well, we're going to take 100 people.
So, and I mean 100 students, so that could be an additional 100 or more parents.
So call Gateway Ford at 423-639-5151.
That's 423-639-5151 and tell them that you want to register for the Gateway Teen Driver Event.
They'll need the names of the people that are coming.
We had some families bring five of their kids.
I know a couple of them were kind of young like in the 14 range, but still, they learned
a lot about cars and you will too.
So I'm going to be mentioning this multiple weeks up to the event and really hard the
first few days before the event, but this is your chance to get in early and make sure
that we do have room for you.
Okay, I'll take my first break.
I'll be back here in just one minute.
Okay, I am back.
You know, some accidents that happen on the road are just aren't avoidable.
My little wreck that I had in 1974 when I was driving back from Kingsport to Greenville
after a date went to a concert up there.
I got within one mile of my house and I either totally lost concentration or consciousness
like went to sleep because I spun out and wiped out a brand new 1974 Chevy SS Nova.
The car had no traction.
The roads were slick.
I was going around a turn and lost it.
And so was that avoidable?
Yeah, it was.
You know, back then the cars didn't have any kind of anti skid mechanisms on them like
dynamic stability control.
If I'd had that, I probably wouldn't have spun out.
Combination of that and the interlock brakes could have prevented my accident.
Plus, well, I wasn't hurt because it was just kind of a glancing blow.
It took out a bank and a fence row, but it was survivable.
When you get hit broadside or have a head on collision with one of those older cars,
they're just not.
They're not survivable.
Especially when you don't have seatbelts on.
I think it's important for the kids to be aware of what the capabilities are of a car,
what safety mechanisms are there.
What do anti-lock brakes feel like?
I've had several people come to me and they bought a new car.
Now this is in the past when anti-lock brakes were new.
They would come and they'd say, there's something wrong with my brakes.
I said, well, tell me what they're doing.
Well, on a hard stop, I feel this pulsating in the foot pedal.
I said, well, that's how the anti-lock brakes work.
That's just normal operation.
And because they do that, because they pulse, it will save you a lot of heartache,
keep you from hitting another car.
But regardless of all of this safety equipment, we still have responsibilities as drivers.
And there are a lot of little things that kids can do and learn early on that will save them.
Just for an example, approaching an intersection.
A lot of people trust the traffic lights.
You should never trust a traffic light.
If it turns green, you don't pull out.
You look first and make sure nothing's coming because people run red lights.
Another thing is how to handle a spin.
Most new drivers have no clue.
Some of them will take their hands off the steering wheel and start screaming.
That's the wrong thing to do.
And that's one of the many things that we talk about during this team driver experience.
We're not taking them out on the road.
We're showing them some videos of how airbags work.
A lot of people have not seen actual airbags deploying what that's like.
And also how anti-lock brakes work and why they make a big difference and how to use them.
So all this safety information is very important.
And you want that to be in your kids' heads.
Also, I give them a guidebook that they can take home with them.
And review that.
You can sit down around the dinner table and do that as well.
It's so important.
If you want a copy of the team driver experience guidebook, I'll be happy to send you one.
If you cannot make it to our event, send me your email address to 423-552-2020.
And then you can sit down with your kids and go through that.
And I think they'll get a lot out of it if you can get them to listen.
That's the biggest challenge, isn't it?
You know, sometimes at that age, it's just hard to break through their force field.
And it's one of the things that I pride myself on being able to do,
especially when I have kids in a group setting and we're able to go over this stuff in an
interesting and dynamic way.
One other important area that we cover is just the fundamentals of an automobile and how they work.
It's just like if you are a car owner and you go into a shop and you think you need breaks,
your brakes are squealing, or they're not stopping as good as they used to be.
And then the guy says, well, ma'am, you're going to have to have new pads.
And we're going to need to turn your rotors.
What does that mean?
What are pads?
What are rotors?
Well, if you come to this event, you'll know what those are because you'll have diagrams.
Yep, we're providing diagrams.
In addition to the hands-on experience, we're going to point it out.
We're going to show it to you.
You'll be underneath a car looking at this stuff.
This is what the teenagers really liked.
There were a bunch of them and never seen the underside of a car.
They've washed cars before.
Some of them had driving experience, but they don't know what makes it work.
They don't know what happens when they turn the steering wheel, press the gas pedal,
press the brake pedal.
No idea.
They just want it to do what it's supposed to do.
And when it doesn't, they're lost.
So my goal is to give them enough knowledge so that when they are on their own and they
own a vehicle or they're buying a vehicle, they know how to check it out and evaluate it.
We even showed them what to look for when they're thinking about buying a car.
What kind of things to be concerned about.
Like how to tell if a car's been painted without checking a car fax or something like that.
Because sometimes you just, well, a lot of people just don't have access to that and
they don't know how to do it.
They've never heard a car fax.
So they go look at a car and, well, they can't tell if it's had any body work
or had any frame damage.
I mean, these are things that I think everybody needs to know.
You don't need to know it every day.
That's the problem.
Most people trade cars, whatever, four to 10 years.
And it's just not something you do all the time.
Now you maintain your car more often than that.
And if you don't maintain your car, then you're going to have issues
when it comes to reliability.
And you certainly don't want that to happen.
So this is all part of what we do.
What would you want your child to learn?
What's the best way to present this information to them?
Is their car life, their interaction with an automobile important?
Of course it is.
They're either going to have to drive your car.
They're going to drive somebody else's car, a friend or whatever.
Or they're going to buy their own.
And at some point there's going to be decisions that have to be made.
And you would prefer that they not be lost.
Okay, here's another example.
Your tires.
Now one of the most important things a person can do is maintain
proper air pressure in their tires.
And if they don't own a compressor, which everybody should have in their garage,
a little cheap air compressor so that they can add air to their tires when it's necessary.
Why?
Because your tires will wear prematurely if they don't have enough air pressure in them.
So where do you get those pressure readings?
Again, most people don't know.
They look on the sidewall of the tire.
They may do that.
It'll say 32 pounds or 36 pounds.
But that's the maximum pressure for that tire when the tires are cold.
If you want to know what pressure your tires are supposed to have on it for your car,
you look in the door jam on the driver's side.
There's a little label there.
And it will say how much air pressure is supposed to be in the front and rear tires.
You know, some cars come with different tires on the front and rear.
They can't be rotated.
And like the tires on one of my cars are much bigger on the rear than they are on the front.
And they require different pressures.
The front requires 37 pounds.
The rears require 45 pounds.
What does that do to the performance of the car?
It can really affect the handling on that particular car.
So most people don't understand that.
We show them how to do that, how to check the air pressure, and then how to add it.
Occasionally, I'll see somebody at the gas station.
They'll go up to one of those little air pressure pumps and put in whatever it costs.
I don't even know what it does now.
It used to be a quarter to put air in your tires.
Very rarely do I see anybody do that.
And so if the air pressure goes down in your tires,
your tires are going to wear on the outside edges of the tires.
If you have too much air in the tires, they're going to wear in the middle of the tire.
Tires are expensive.
If you keep the air pressure right, they'll last longer.
Plus, if you get an alignment once a year, they'll last longer.
Would you rather spend $1,200 for a new set of tires every three years or every five years?
Because that's kind of what the difference is going to be.
Of course, depending upon the amount of miles that you drive,
it could be the difference between needing new tires at 40,000 miles and at 70,000.
I had a guy one time, got 80,000 miles out of a set of tires on a Mazda RX-7.
The tire still looked pretty good because he was fanatical about the tire pressures
and his alignments.
He would get alignment every year.
So these are the kind of things I'm going to be teaching these kids and the adults that stick
around.
And like I say, if you want to copy the guidebook for the teen driver event, then just again,
send me your email address to my cell phone at 423-552-2020.
And I'll turn it around to you really quick.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
Okay, I am back.
So one of my main motivations for doing this is because of what happened to us.
So I was at the dealership.
It was January.
It was overcast temperatures in the 40s and I was leaving the dealership at about
probably around 515 somewhere in the neighborhood.
There was still a little bit of light left and I turned out the dealership and was headed
down the four lane towards my house.
And I got to a place where I had to turn off the four lane there at Walgreens and my phone
rang, cell phone rang.
And I didn't recognize the number, but I answered the phone and it was a state trooper that I know.
And he said, Lenny, your son's been in a car accident and you need to get to the hospital.
And I said, oh my goodness, what hospital?
And he said Tacoma.
So I rushed over to Tacoma Hospital and all these thoughts going through my mind.
You know, I was just hoping and praying that he was okay.
Also that his son was not in the vehicle with him when the accident happened and he wasn't.
But I got to the hospital and told the receptionist while I was there.
They took me back to a room just off of the emergency room where all of the examination
rooms were.
It was just a little private room, all white, and there was just me sitting there.
Within a couple minutes, a doctor walked in with a couple of nurses and he told me that my son
had passed away.
And of course, I don't know, I don't remember a lot.
I just remember that I collapsed on the floor sobbing and just lost.
I was there by myself.
You know, they were pet me on the back and so forth.
And anyway, after that, I don't know how long it was, but my wife arrived and my daughter's
arrived and the emergency room started filling up with family, friends, acquaintances.
And I remember they came and said, do you want to see him?
And the state trooper that had called me was standing there.
He's kind of a friend and he said, Lenny, I wouldn't recommend it.
So we walked over to the room.
The curtains were closed and we just fell against the glass.
And all of us just lined up there, just falling apart.
We didn't go in the room.
I do regret that to a certain extent, but then I wanted to remember him as he was.
So that that was the decision that we made, but this was all the result of a car accident.
He had been in Knoxville and he had driven from Knoxville to exit 23 on Interstate 81,
just the exit that you have to get off of to get to Greenville.
And he had dropped off his child with his, with the mother and then headed to Greenville.
And when he had gone less than a mile, a big transfer truck, a big tractor trailer,
decided to pull across the road and stopped in the median, but didn't clear the road.
He had apparently about six to eight feet was still sticking out in the road.
Well, for some reason, my son did not see it.
The people that were riding behind him said that his brake lights didn't come on
and hit the back of the truck and he went to heaven.
Now, I don't know why his brake lights didn't come on.
It could have been that he was distracted, you know, by his phone or whatever.
I don't know.
Doesn't really matter.
But ever since then, I have assumed that that was the case.
He was a good driver.
I mean, he was, he drove a little fast like I did and he was a very confident driver.
And, you know, he's a one handed driver, kind of like I get sometimes.
I mean, I bought him his first, he was an Azuzu trooper.
He was 15.
Well, I didn't buy it.
It was, we traded for it at the dealership and I brought it home.
It was a manual transmission.
I wanted to teach him how to do a manual.
So we would drive around the fields at my house and he got to where he had mastered
a manual transmission.
I was really excited.
I think one of the issues that I had, if could go back in time,
I would have slowed down my desire for him to have all these driving experiences
because I think he got overconfident and he just felt he was a whole lot better
driving, a lot better control than what he actually was because there were a number of
accidents that happened in the ensuing years.
But yeah, this is one of the prime motivations for me in my adulthood, my advanced age,
where I am now and the influence that I have to be able to help young people and their parents
to make better decisions when it comes to driving and the ownership of a car.
And so that has become my mission on this particular program slash podcast and
while we do this event, this teenager event.
So it's not just for teenagers.
It is for their parents.
Hopefully it will stimulate some discussions around the dinner table if they still gather
around the dinner table and they can talk about these things and the fact that the automobile
is, has tremendous potential for good things, but also for bad things.
It could be a deadly weapon.
You know, it can be something that leads to the end of them like it did for my son.
So that is the motivation and if you are interested in coming to this and having your
child or grandchild or, you know, somebody that you know, you want to bring them to this
teen driver experience, then I would highly recommend it.
I can't guarantee the result, but I can guarantee you one thing.
They'll know a lot more when they leave than when they came and they will enjoy doing it.
Not at first, they'll be like prisoners, but we turn that around real quickly.
And again, if you can't come to Greenville, Tennessee for the Gateway teen driving experience,
I get it.
Just send me your email address to 423-552-2020.
It's the next best thing is to get a copy of the guidebook and to be able to use it as a
talking point, a series of talking points, things you need to cover with your teenager
and then get out on the driveway with them and show them how to do some of these things
as far as car maintenance.
Make sure they understand the potential that's there for good or for bad.
And you will do about all you can do as a parent or a guardian or a grandparent or whatever.
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of My Car Guru.
And if you need me, let me know.
423-552-2020 or my email address is Lenny Lawson, 2020 at gmail.com.
And I'll see you next time.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson lays out a teen driver safety event at Gateway Ford and Gateway Nissan in Greenville, Tennessee, featuring state troopers, a staged traffic stop, and hands-on instruction under car lifts. He explains why teens need more than driving practice: understanding safety tech like ABS, how airbags deploy, and how to respond to real-world situations (intersection checks, handling spins). Lawson shares a personal crash story from 1974 to stress survivability and driver responsibility, then promotes a take-home “Gateway Teen Driver Experience Guidebook” for parents to review at home.
