Performance Unlimited Blog

They’re all around us. The road construction season is in full bloom here in McHenry County and beyond. And road construction requires adjustments to our driving styles. In McHenry County, many of the road construction projects are in towns and cities. Some of the construction projects are on country roads, too. Some of the projects are municipal road resurfacing projects. More are Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) projects. But, whoever is running the project, or wherever the work is done, one thing is true. You need to slow down in those construction zones Illinois is one of the states with the highest number of road construction workers killed by drivers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The overwhelming majority are killed by drivers in automobiles. Inevitably, fatal injuries to workers at road construction sites, when workers are hit by passing vehicles, are the result of driver error. The driver has done something wrong to cause the accident. But those...

When this McHenry summer started, it worked great. The fan blew cold air out of the vents quickly responding to the hot days that we were already experiencing back then. But now, only half-a-dozen weeks later, your car, truck or SUV’s air conditioning just doesn’t seem to keep up. Is it hotter out now than it was then or is your vehicle’s AC system fading, fading, fading until it reaches a point where all it will blow is hot air out of the vents? It is possible. An air conditioning system in a car, truck or SUV may be up to any temperature a McHenry summer will throw at it. But, a system that was strong when summer started may have lost its mojo as summer continued. If a component of your vehicle’s air conditioning system breaks, the change may be immediate and dramatic. But that’s not the way it always happens. Often, when a car, truck or SUV’s AC system fails, it does so slowly and over time. From day to day, you don’t notice the change. The air conditioning fails so gradually that i...

We’ve already had days where the temperature was in the upper 90s this Richmond spring and summer, all the reason you need to avoid leaving children or pets in parked cars. No doubt, we have more hot days ahead. The temperature, however, does not need to hit 90 in Richmond to make it dangerous leaving children and pets in cars.  Have you ever gotten into a car that was sitting in the sun and virtually burned your back on the seat? That’s hot. Really hot. Dangerously hot. According to the INSIDER Website, approximately 39 children die of heatstroke each year in the U.S. because the children were left in hot car.  In Illinois, it’s illegal to leave a child in a car unattended. According to statute 510ILCS70/7.1, it’s also illegal in Illinois to “Confine any animal in a motor vehicle in such a manner that places it in a life or health threatening situation by exposure to a prolonged period of extreme heat or cold, without proper ventilation or other protection from such heat or c...

It replaced the minivan that replaced the station wagon Minivans killed the station wagon; the SUV has killed the minivan which is why you see far more SUVs on McHenry roads than you do minivans or station wagons. The death of the station wagon is almost complete. Few auto manufacturers even offer station wagons anymore. But, at one time, the roads of McHenry (and beyond) abounded with station wagons. What happened? The station wagon dates back to around 1910, meaning that this was an option among the earlier automobiles. The earliest station wagons had wood sides and came to be known as Woodies. Initially, they had metal framing covered with wood. But the look appealed to enough drivers that, when all-steel bodies became standard, wood was sometimes applied to station wagons for purely aesthetic reasons. The appeal of wooden sides on station wagons went as far as to include wooden stickers applied to the sides of the vehicle. Wood-like trim was built around the wood stickers so that t...

When America was founded, the people of this country had the freedom to go wherever they liked. They could cross borders between states without papers or permission. The biggest restraint they faced was the time it took to travel. This is not something we can easily relate to in the age of the automobile. They could travel by boat but then they were restrained to the Eastern coastline or by the course of the river they sailed. Otherwise, they had two choices – horse or by foot. On average, a healthy person can walk about 3 mph. If they did that for 24 hours, they would travel 72 miles. But, even if they stayed awake and walked that entire time, inevitably, they would probably want to take a rest at some point. Really pushing themselves, they might walk 20 or 25 miles in a day. Look at it this way; if someone from McHenry walked 25 miles one day, they could go to one of several other cities in the county and back. But it would take all day. A trip from McHenry to Chicago would take abou...