Dear Car Talk:
I bought a used Volvo for my wife. I didn’t know it had locking lug nuts on it. The car did not come with a key to remove them.
None of the tire dealers in my small town had keys or could get the tires off. The Volvo dealership 70 miles away told me I would have to drive it to them, even though I had the VIN number. One of the tires was too worn out to drive that far, so I finally found a key to buy after A LOT of hunting online.
But here’s my question: Is there any way to remove a locking lug nut without the key? If the tire had gone flat on my wife while driving, she would have been in trouble, and I would have been in even worse trouble!
— Bill
We’re going to reveal state secrets here, Bill. For those not familiar with locking wheel nuts, they’re for people who worry about their wheels getting stolen. You get four of them, and you replace one lug nut on each wheel with one of these “locking nuts.”
And what makes it “locking” is that a regular lug wrench won’t fit over it. You need the matching key or “mate,” which fits over your particular locking nut and attaches to a socket wrench.
We actually have a kit that’s designed to remove locking lug nuts for which owners have lost their key. But it doesn’t work on every car.
What does work on every car is this: We loosen up the other four wheel nuts on each wheel, by several turns. And then we drive the car around the parking lot. I’ll take left and right turns, and make some abrupt stops, trying to put stress on the wheels. And pretty much 100% of the time, when I pull back into the garage, those locking nuts have loosened up.
And at that point, we can point an air chisel at the edge of each locking nut, and spin it the rest of the way off. Then we give them back to the owner, who usually flings them into the trash, along with some choice words.
And then, next time we see the customer, they sheepishly tell us they found the key at the back of the glove box or buried next to the spare tire. So consider yourself freed, Bill. Power to the people.
Dear Car Talk:
Years ago, the difference in price between different grades of gasoline was 10 cents a gallon. Now there’s a dollar difference between regular and premium where I live.
On the other hand, a bottle of octane booster is about $4. If premium is recommended for my car, is it OK to add a bottle of octane booster to regular gasoline during each fill-up?
I figure that could save me about 15 bucks per fill-up. But looking at different bottles of octane boosters, one states “barely street legal” and another states “not street legal.” What is this in reference to?
— Doug
Your plan sounds almost too good to be true, Doug. You know why? It is.
First of all, you may be reading the claims on the bottles incorrectly. Octane boosters tend to brag about how many “points” they’ll raise your octane. But points aren’t the same as octane numbers. Each “point” is a tenth of an octane number.
So, if you buy a product that says it’ll raise 5 gallons of 87 octane gas by 7 points, you won’t get 94 octane. You’ll get 87.7 octane. Disappointing, right?
Of course, the other problem is the “street legal” stuff. In many cases, the main additive used in those products is something called MMT. That’s methyl cyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl. But you probably knew that.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set a limit to how much of this stuff can be added to gasoline, because there’s some suspicion that it might lead us to grow, like, three heads. And not smarter ones.
Other octane boosting chemicals have environmental issues, or have the potential to damage your engine or emissions equipment, and void your warranty. And, think about it — if there was a cheap, easy fix for raising octane, wouldn’t Exxon already be all over it?
So, you may wonder, why is this stuff on store shelves at all? Well, there are exceptions to the EPA’s rule; these octane boosters are allowed to be sold for use on race tracks and for things like lawnmowers, chainsaws and really powerful men’s body hair trimmers.
But if that doesn’t describe your use, it’s best to just fill up at the pump, Doug.
