Hamburg Auto Repair

Photo by MK Hamilton on Unsplash   The experience known as highway hypnosis (or white line fever) causes many summer crashes, particularly late at night. Overextended travelers may find themselves falling asleep at the wheel with many miles to go.    It might be their fault for not preparing for a long trip, but in truth, highway hypnosis happens about twenty minutes going into a long drive. Sleepiness can be an issue, but the more significant problem is that we built our highway system as a uniformly monotonous landscape. Seeing the same turnpike and off-ramp over and over again makes our oculomotor (eye-to-brain) system stagnant. Just like seeing a pocket watch tick back and forth and being hypnotized, the landsc ... read more

Welcome to April’s blog! We hope that Spring has been treating you kindly. We’re a quarter of the year in right now, and things have begun to look up in almost every part of life! With Spring in bloom and Summer on the way, it’s a good time to remember that the summer heat can be murder. When you know what to expect year after year, you unconsciously just began preparing for some of it. But for some of you, Hamburg summers are relatively new and punishing. Here’s a quick guide to preparing yourself for the worst of our season: Put your air conditioner through its paces. It’s a good idea to know now if you’re a/c can’t take the summer heat. Test it to make sure it is responsive and generates enough cool air when you need it. Treat the interior to a massage. Use the right kind of cleaning solution for your interior (consoles, buttons, and seats) and wipe it down. Vinyl can crack and blister in the sun, so be s ... read more

Welcome to March’s blog! We’ve got the new season on our minds. After a rough winter, we’re hoping spring will bring about some much-needed renewal to our lives, and we hope you feel the same way! As we enter those rituals of ‘out with the old, in with the new,’ it’s time to start thinking about spring cleaning and improving our living, working, and travelling situations. Just as a house needs to be turned out once a year, so should your car get a thorough cleaning. It may not have occured to you previously that spring cleaning is important for you car, for a number of reasons: Hygiene. Your car is the same car your kid sneezed in and the same car you dropped parts of a cheeseburger into. It doesn’t self-clean, and the germs that are left behind remain a part of the car.  Engine performance. Your car’s engine gets populated with leaves and debris. If these things aren’t cleaned out, they can choke their way into the fuel sy ... read more

Welcome to a new month! It's just a week until the Super Bowl and two weeks until Valentine's Day! We hope you have someone special with whom to share both occasions. Many of you will be looking for gifts, and some of you will be hunting for the perfect offering for the car lover in your life. And finding a gift for a car lover can be a tricky proposition. Car lovers tend to have particular interests. Most already have what they want for their car, so it's quite a trick to find something they haven't already purchased for themselves and their peace of mind. To find the right gift, you might have to keep an eye peeled out for what they keep in their car, or what they proudly display. Consider swag and things they wouldn't buy for themselves. You can get official apparel for most brands, and if you can get the colors to match their car, that's a delightful gift. The gift you want to find is something that will make their drive better somehow. Here are our five ... read more

Welcome to 2021! We hope you and your family have managed to cope in the past year. 2021 will likely have challenges of its own, but here’s to positivity and grace in the New Year. Speaking of the New Year: have you made any resolutions yet for 2021? We’ve compiled a short list of the sins we think need the most addressing to keep the roads safe… small commitments you can make to improve the driving around Hamburg. Paying attention: There’s so many distractions in a car these days. Phones, chatty passengers, kids… it’s important to get our distractions sorted before you begin driving. Set your phone up as hands free, ask your passenger to let you concentrate on the road, and remind the kids to be on their best behavior until you reach your destination. And be sure to know the route you are taking before you start the journey, so there’s no fiddling with a navigation app in the middle of your trip! Defensive Driving ... read more

At last, 2020 is finally ending! It’s been quite a rough year: a pandemic, a hotly-contested election, and  it’s good to see the end of it at last. Like many auto shops, we are grateful to our core customers for keeping us open and surviving through the pandemic. Unfortunately 2021 has as much uncertainty to it as 2020 did. We’re still in the middle of a contested election, the COVID19 vaccine hasn’t been distributed yet, we don’t have any assurances that COVID19 won’t still be dragging our businesses well into 2021, and we’re on the brink of a recession. We’re entering this new year with a lot of negatives still trailing us. Because of the issues with COVID19 and the economy, this is a really bad year to plan weddings and family gatherings. We’d like to recommend a few simple ideas towards cutting down on the danger of events that can’t be cancelled (but must be): Do it, smaller. Take vacations, because you need to ha ... read more

Despite everything 2020 has thrown at us, we’ve managed to make it to November. It’s time to meet up with our families and to give thanks for everyone who made it through a very rough year. At Schultz Auto & Truck Repair, we couldn’t have lasted without your patronage and support during this summer. It’s you that we’re most thankful for. We hope you’ll roast a turkey and raise a glass to everyone you love. To the uncles and cousins you may disagree with politically but still love. To the friends and neighbors who helped you and looked out for your family when toilet paper was at a premium. To the loved ones who can’t come to the feast because they are vulnerable and worried about gathering in groups, still.  As we give thanks for all we have this year and for each other, one forgotten entity you rely on daily deserves your recognition and respect. I am of course talking about your vehicle. What else will brave the weather for you, al ... read more

At Schultz Auto & Truck Repair in Hamburg, New York, we’re more than just your local service shop. We’re a NAPA Auto Care center as well. You might wonder, “what does that mean for me?” Let us explain it for you! When you bring your car or truck into Schultz Auto & Truck Repair for service, all qualifying labor and parts are covered with the nationwide NAPA AutoCare Peace of Mind Warranty, protecting you for 36,000 miles, or 36 months (3 calendar years).  That warranty is honored at more than 14,000 locations nationwide, protecting you wherever you roam. That’s more than any other automotive repair brand warranty. And it comes standard with all our labor and our parts.  Here’s what included with the NAPA AutoCare Peace of Mind Warranty: FREE with your qualifying repair or service work Covers parts and labor on qualifying repairs and services for 36 months/36,000 miles Honored nationwide by over 14,000 NAPA AutoCare Center loca ... read more

Computer diagnostics are an important part of auto repair and maintenance service. Why? To put it simply, it is a testing system that allows our mechanics to find the root cause of why your Check Engine light is on, or why your car is having issues.  In this month’s blog, we thought it would be a great idea to share information with you about the ins and outs of computer diagnostics. To begin, let’s talk about the high-tech, computer modulated system that runs your automobile. Your car is essentially a sophisticated computer network on wheels, and because of the many computers, it is not easy for a DIY mechanic to pinpoint any issues without the specialized computer diagnostics testing equipment. Gone are the days when the mechanical aspects of a Domestic, Asian, or European vehicle are deemed simple. Because of the many computers that monitor pressure, speed, airflow, temperature, cameras, erratic driving, and more, your vehicle needs the attention of technicians w ... read more

Digital Visual Inspections are a service we provide here at Schultz Auto & Truck Repair in Hamburg, NY. Why do we do this? Because digital inspections rock! Digital Inspections are the reports that our team sends you via email, text, or print that explain all that is good and not so good with your vehicle. Call us a little biased, but we really like providing digital visual inspections to our clients. To illustrate our point, let’s talk about what life was like before digital inspections were available to independent auto repair shops like ours. Back in the “old” days, a visual inspection report included a manual checklist of your vehicle. For example, we offered a 30-point visual inspection that involved a paper checklist, a pencil, and a full walk-around of your vehicle’s interior and exterior to report any issues. We would denote green, yellow, or red to let you know of things like your brakes, your oil level, your filters, and systems were good, needed ... read more