Over the river and through the woods was more dangerous back when cars had crummy bias-ply tires, rear-wheel drive and ordinary brakes.

This process repeats many times per second until the vehicle stops or you lift your foot off the brake pedal. The ABS computer does a power-on self test every time you cycle the ignition.

If something goes wrong with your car and you don’t know much about car repair, then it’s time to go to the shop and find out what’s wrong. However, lots of people are understandably worried about getting ripped off—mechanics are pretty good at detecting when a customer doesn’t know anything about cars. To avoid this,…