Dear Car Talk: I have a 2017 Lincoln MKZ with a 2.0 hybrid engine (72,000 miles). I love this car! I don’t love the noise the car makes when it starts the gas engine. It’s strong It’s annoying. It seems to settle when the engine revs higher.
When I asked the dealer, I was told “yes, we heard that, and there were two more here today that were louder than yours.”
It’s supposed to be a luxury sedan. This crying noise is so loud that I literally have to scream when I’m at a front window. And when I start the remote car at home, I can hear the whining in the back of the house. Please help! —Scott
Dear SCOTT: Have you considered becoming a Van Halen fan? That would suffocate it.
Without hearing it and being able to narrow down its location, I can’t tell you if it’s belt noise or something worse.
You’d think if it was a snaking belt, they’d just replace it and rip you off. The same goes for a bad power steering pump. Therefore, it must be a much more difficult – and expensive – thing to fix them.
My fear is that it is a bearing that is wearing inside the transmission or engine somewhere.
If you have a good non-dealer mechanic, ask him to take a look. At the very least, they can use a length of tubing as a stethoscope and move it around until they find the precise source of the noise. It shouldn’t be hard to narrow it down to one component.
If they tell you it’s from the transmission, for example, at least you know why to start pressuring the dealer, after you buy the extended warranty. Good luck, Scott.
Dear Car Talk: I was recently in a serious car accident when our rental car collided with a bison on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were very lucky to walk away from a totaled car with all airbags deployed.
This got me thinking about my car, which is an old 2005 Toyota Camry SE. Are older cars less safe in a crash than newer cars? How do 2005 crash tests compare to 2023? Are the results comparable?
My Camry has better crash tests than the Nissan Kicks we’ve put together, but I wonder if that means it’s actually safer in a crash. Any ideas you may have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. —Beth
Dear BETH: Have you run into a bison from 2005 or a bison from 2023?
It’s a complicated question. We’ve found that most car manufacturers build their cars specifically to pass crash tests. So the safety of a car is directly dependent on how the car was being tested at the time.
In the years since 2005, the tests have evolved. The main differences are that in 2005 side and rear impact tests were newly introduced. Therefore, the companies probably worked to improve their side and rear impact scores in the following years.
And in fact, you’ll find that the new Camry has a much better side impact rating than your Camry.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also added a roof strength test in 2009 and in 2012 added a “front offset” test. This measures how a car does when the front corner of the car hits an object, such as a telephone pole. Or a bison.
These crashes are actually quite common: you’re heading towards something and you try to swerve, but you can’t, and you hit it with the front corner of the car. It posed a new challenge for automakers, because this type of crash jolts passengers both forward and sideways at the same time. So safer cars resulted from that.
If you decide to buy a new car today, check out the results from the NHTSA (NHTSA.gov) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (iihs.org); they will reflect how the car did in all these newer tests.
A new car will also have more modern electronic safety features, such as bison automatic emergency braking, which helps prevent some crashes and reduces the speed at which others happen.
So I don’t think your Camry is “unsafe”. But I think it’s fair to say that a newer car that gets the top safety pick plus award and has all of today’s electronic safety options (low and high speed automatic emergency braking, lane departure warning, control blind spot, etc.). ) would be safer.
Now let’s end this answer with a moment of silence for both the Nissan Kicks and the bison. Glad you had a good time, Beth. Next time, try hitting something less dense.
Ray Magliozzi dispenses car advice on Car Talk every Saturday. Email him by visiting him cartalk.com
