Welcome to our series on hybrid vehicles and new technologies that will be serialized over the coming weeks.

Forget about the hybrid system for a moment and look at the Toyota Prius as a car that has brakes and spark plugs and filters; a vehicle that offers profitable service opportunities. Let others steer clear of hybrids, while you steer them into your shop!

Brakes, oil and fluid changes, and filter replacements are all low tech, and easy to do. You’ll need to use recommended fluids a

Fuse-popping shorts in electrical circuits can be hard to locate. Younger techs have been known to incinerate a couple dozen fuses looking for a voltage short to ground, while the truly fearless among us simply install a fat jumper wire in place of the fuse, and follow the smoke from burning insulation. Neither approach will garner the "top troubleshooter" award.

Back in 2006, Sam Bell wrote an article in Motor magazine that mentioned replacing a burned fuse with a sealed beam headlight whe...

The great fictional detective Inspector Morse didn't believe in coincidence, and most of the time, neither do I. But a normally mundane spark plug replacement turned into a bit of a mystery this past weekend, when two statistical improbabilities joined forces to scare the livin' bejeebers out of me.

Let me set this up. I normally screw in a new set of spark plugs every 50K miles. Yeah, I know the 100,000 mile tuneup is the love child of every OEM marketing department, along with its sibling...