My mother knew LESS THAN ZERO about cars. She knew nothing, and what she THOUGHT that she knew was wrong.

When I was growing up (until 16), my mother bought a new car almost every year because all of her cars broke down quickly. She performed ZERO required maintenance. Her entire maintenance activities consisted in putting gasoline in the car (rarely). Nothing more. Her cars failed constantly and she was dropped from AAA because of abuse. Suddenly, when I got my driver's license, her problems disappeared miraculously. There was a full service station one block from our home, so I would take the car there after she came home from work and ask them to do whatever the service manual required for a given mileage. Voilà! It is truly amazing how well that works. Don't get me wrong, I knew very little about maintaining a car, but the engineers who wrote the service manual knew all about it.