Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa. com. Can you talk about your car in English?
Let's do it. Today, you are going to learn a lot of car vocabulary. We'll talk about types of cars, and also different parts of the car on the outside and the inside.
I am not a mechanic, so these are all words that are known to normal people in everyday conversation. These are not specialized terms. If you have a car, and if you need to explain different parts of your car in English, this is the vocabulary lesson for you.
First, let's talk about different types of cars. This is a compact car. These are usually the smallest kinds of cars.
Then we have a sedan. A sedan is a little bit bigger, and it has usually four doors. This is a convertible or a convertible car.
The roof of a convertible car can open. This is a hatchback. A hatchback has a special back part that opens up.
This allows you to carry more stuff, and it can be convenient if you often travel or carry large things like a dog crate, it can be helpful to have a hatchback. A pickup truck, or a pickup, or a truck. In a lot of places around the world, most people in daily life don't have a pickup truck because they don't need to carry lots of things, only if it's needed maybe for your job, but in the US it is very common for normal people who don't need this type of car for their job to just have a pickup truck.
Maybe they like to put their bike in the back, maybe they like to put some gardening supplies or anything, but it's pretty common for normal people, everyday people to have a pickup truck. This is a minivan. It's what I have.
This is usually 100% only for families. All of the marketing, all of the features are for families who have kids, especially young kids, but it's helpful for any age of kids. There's a lot of space, the doors slide open, as I'll show you in just a little bit, so your kid doesn't open the door and hit someone else's car.
There's just a lot of good features for families. This is an SUV. Those letters stand for sports utility vehicle.
A lot of people do not use this for sports. All of the advertisements show these big cars going off road into the mud and doing some kind of adventure, but the majority of people don't do that with these kinds of cars. They just like having a big car.
It's safer. I've been thinking about this, because in the US, a lot of people have big cars. I have a minivan.
This is a pretty big car. A lot of people have SUV's, and I think the reason for this is they are generally safer, a bigger car is safer, but when a lot of people have big cars, everybody else needs to have a big car too. I know in Europe, for example, small cars like compact cars are really common, but if 50% of people have a really big SUV, well, your compact car probably would feel really dangerous at that point.
But because so many people have small cars in Europe, small cars are probably fine. This is just my theory about why Americans have big cars. Maybe they just like big things too, I don't know, but I think that for me, I like to have this car because it is safe, it has a lot of space, but also there are a lot of big cars on the roads, so I want to be able to stay safe.
Talking about safety or lack of safety, this is a sports car. Sports cars are known for going fast just for fun. Maybe you drive your sports car to work, but usually this is for fun.
You drive on some mountain roads, or you just drive really fast on the highway, this is a sports car. All right. Now that we've talked about the types of cars, let's get looking at my car and take a look at all the different parts on the outside, and then we'll go onto the inside.
I just want to let you know it is incredibly sunny today. I'm going to try my best to record this for you. I've been trying to film this video for three weeks, but it has snowed, it's been rainy.
There was some kind of loud machine out here, so I couldn't record. And finally, it's sunny, but it's really sunny. I hope that you'll be able to see this well and learn a lot.
As I said, I have a minivan for my family. There is a hood, the hood of the car. This is a very American term.
We call this the hood. Inside the hood is the engine and all of the other parts that a mechanic might look at. There are also the headlights here.
There is a bumper on the front and on the back. This is, if you get in to a little accident, maybe you bump someone else's car with your bumper, then maybe your bumper will bend a little bit. Sometimes we call this your fender, or on the back, your fender.
And those types of small accidents are called fender benders. So if you call your friend and say, "Oh, I had a fender bender today," it means that it was just a small accident. You weren't hurt, but your car probably got a little damaged, and it's going to get fixed.
This is the grill, the grill in the front of the car. This is the tire. This is the wheel or the rim of the tire, and these little guys around here are called lug nuts.
If you go to the mechanic, they will ask you for your lug nut key, and there is a specific little piece to turn and open these lug nuts. It's specific to your car, because if everyone's was the same, then someone could steal your tire or steal the rim of your tire. So the mechanic might ask you for your lug nut key to get this off.
On the side of the car is the gas tank. That's where I fill up the gas. On the back of the car is, on my car, it is a hatch.
Did you see how that opened up? This is the cargo area of a car, or for my car, it is called a hatch, but for sedans like this, this is just called a trunk. In the US, we call this a trunk, in the UK, I think they call it the boot, which doesn't really make sense because boots should be tires, right?
They're at the bottom of the car helping it to walk, but now the boot is back here, I guess, in the UK. In the US, we call this a trunk or a hatch. You can also see my brake lights, blinker lights.
These blinkers will flash when I turn the car, if I turn them on, which you should, and back here is my license plate. Before I drive, I need to use my remote, or some people call this a fob to open my car. Some cars don't have this remote, especially if they're older cars and you can just open the door with a key, a regular key.
But my car has this little remote, so I will push the button and all the doors are now unlocked. If you would also like to learn more vocabulary about daily life, I recommend checking out my video, 120 kitchen items up here. You can learn about different words to describe the kitchen.
All right. Let's go inside the car. I'm sitting in the driver's seat.
This is my headrest. And beside me is the passenger seat. I have a back row.
In fact, I have three rows. This is the first row. The second row is where my children sit, and the third row, because I have a minivan is where guests can sit, or we can fold the chairs down and put things back there.
I have car seats in my back seat. I have car seats because I have young children and they keep my children safe. We can say that their car seats are rear facing car seats.
That means that they are not looking at the front of the car, they're looking at the back of the car. That's because my children are still really small, but when they get bigger, their seats will turn around and we can call them front facing car seats. Even though the word car seat sounds very vague, it is always for a child.
Yes, this is a seat, but we do not really call this a car seat because a car seat is only for a child. In some cars, you need to put the key in the ignition, but my car does not have that. I just have a button, and when I push the button, the car turns on.
This is the steering wheel, the steering wheel. Behind the steering wheel is the dashboard. Let's take a look at that.
On the dashboard, we have here the speedometer, speedometer, that tells you how fast you're going. Right now I'm just sitting in the car in my driveway, so my speed is zero. You will notice at the top that my car says MPH miles per hour.
Underneath that, there is some little tiny numbers. Those are kilometers. In the US, it shows miles per hour, but a lot of cars will show the conversion.
If you're used to using kilometers, usually there will be an option on the dashboard. Other important features on the dashboard are your fuel, mileage here. Well, this just shows if you are F or E, full or empty.
Right now you can see I have a little notice that says low fuel. That means I need to get some more gas. Another feature you can see over here is C and H, that is cold and hot.
That will tell you if your engine is too hot. If it is close to H, it is overheating, and you will have some problems. You need to stop immediately.
But ideally, it should be in the middle, not at C, not at H. Beside the dashboard, we have the center console, the center console. The main feature of this is the shifter.
My car is an automatic car. That means that I do not need to think about gears. I don't need to think about first gear, second gear, third gear.
That is only for a manual car. In the US, automatic cars like mine are the most common, but there are still plenty of people who have manual cars. In fact, when I was growing up, my family had only manual cars, and that's how I learned how to drive.
When people realize that you have a manual car, usually they're pretty surprised, but this is the first automatic car that I've owned, so that's just the way it is. Well, if you want to use the shifter, that is how you will start driving. It is right now in park.
We need to go to reverse to get out of my driveway, and then we need to go down here to drive. All we have to do is pull it down to reverse, and I'll go backwards, and then keep going down to go into drive, which will take us forward. Beside the shifter is the climate control.
There is heat and air conditioning, and you can change all the different modes for that type of thing. Above that, there is a little screen that will help with audio, music, radio. You can even use your phone through the screen.
My car is not the deluxe luxury version, so you can't watch videos on there, but that seems like a really bad idea to me. If you're driving, you don't want to have that kind of distraction. There's also vents.
This is a vent that you can use to direct the air towards you or away from you. And of course, we can't forget on the steering wheel, the horn. If someone does something that annoys you, honk the horn.
Inside the car, there is also a rear view mirror. This will help you to see out the back when you're going backwards and as you're turning. There are also side mirrors to help you see beside you and behind you when you're turning and changing lanes.
If the sun is really bright like today, you can put down your visor. Don't look at yourself too long in the mirror. Don't forget to put on your seatbelt.
We can use two different verbs for this, to put on your seatbelt or to buckle your seatbelt. A common phrase is buckle up. So when you get in the car and you want everyone else in the car to put their seatbelt on, you can say, all right, don't forget to buckle up.
All right. Let's talk about the pedals in a car. There is the gas pedal, the brake pedal, and in my car over here, this is the emergency brake.
When I want to park, or if I'm on a hill and I need to park, especially, I can push in the emergency brake. Some people have an emergency break between the front two seats. There can be different places that the emergency brake is, but that's where it is for my car.
Because my car is an automatic, I don't have a clutch, but here, if you have a manual car, you have a clutch and you need to push the clutch whenever you want to shift gears. All right. When I am driving, I look out the windshield, windshield.
That is the big window in the front of my car. I also have windows on the side here. It's so clean, you can't even see.
It's probably the only clean part of my car, but I have windows here that I can roll down. To roll down the window, I need to push a button, and look at that. Great.
The windows work. They roll down. It's a little bit strange because you saw that I used a button.
I'm not actually rolling down the window physically, but it's because not too long ago, in fact, the first car that I ever drove had a crank, and you had to physically roll down the windows. We still use that verb, to roll down the windows, but nowadays, we just have a button. I can't believe that I forgot to talk about these really important parts of a car, and that is your windshield wipers.
When it's raining, you need to turn on your windshield wipers so that you can see out the windshield. It helps the rain to go off of your windshield. You have a front windshield wiper, probably two front windshield wipers, and you might have a back windshield wiper on the back of your car.
Also, don't forget your turn signal. When you flip on your turn signal, it makes your blinkers blink in the back of your car so that people know if you're turning left or turning right. Don't forget to turn on your turn signal or turn on your blinkers.
And finally, even though I showed you the headlights on my car, there's also another feature called your brights. Your brights are an extra level of brightness on your headlights so that you can see at night. But when another car is driving the opposite way, you need to make sure that you turn off your brights.
Notice that this is plural, turn off your brights because you don't want to blind the other person. You want them to be able to see where they're going. So this is useful when you're driving in really dark places.
Before we leave, let's talk about the final category, which is caring for your car. Yes, it's important to know the different parts of your car, but let's talk about the different maintenance things that might happen. When you're running low on gas, you need to go to a gas station.
That's what we call in the US a gas station. When there's something wrong with your car, you take it to a mechanic. Sometimes we just call this the shop.
My car is in the shop. Where's your car? It's in the shop.
Or I need to take my car to the shop, and the shop in this context means the mechanic. When your car is dirty, you can wash it yourself or you can take it to a car wash. It's a very self-explanatory expression, a car wash.
As part of regular maintenance to your car, you don't need to go to a mechanic. You can check your own oil. You can check the oil by opening the hood and pulling out, we call it a dipstick.
It looks like this. You can pull out the dipstick. You can also check the tire pressure with a pressure gauge.
Usually, your car, if it's a somewhat newer car will give you a warning on your dashboard if there is low air in your tires, but maybe that light or that warning is not working, so you're going to need to check it yourself to make sure that you have enough pressure in your tires. All right. Do you feel ready to talk about your car in English?
I hope that this lesson was helpful for you. I hope the sun wasn't too bright. I want to know in the comments, can you tell me about your car?
Can you describe some of the features of your car in the comments? Let us know. Make sure that you read each other's comments to continue learning, and thank you so much for learning English with me.
I'll see you again next Friday for a new lesson here on my YouTube channel. Bye. Oh my gosh, all my neighbors are walking around outside since it's so beautiful today, and I feel so embarrassed.
Hey, how are you doing? I don't know if she saw that I was recording. Maybe she thinks I'm talking to myself.
My neighbor's trying to drag his trash so slowly so that it's not loud. I could never be a vlogger who does this in public. It's so embarrassing to just be talking to a camera.
I guess you get used to it, but I would rather not do that. If you're worried about my video, don't worry about it. The next step is to download my free ebook, Five Steps to Becoming a Confident English Speaker.
You'll learn what you need to do to speak confidently and fluently. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more free lessons. Thanks so much.
Bye.
