I have this friend who loves weird cars and has made a ton of money in his life flipping weird cars, but the thing is that he's not good at working on weird cars so large bastard and I have done a lot of work on his cars.
He has probably owned 200+ cars in his life and I've probably worked on 15-25 of them, Large Bastard probably worked on 50+.
I have another friend who had a frankenjeep that had an engine that was an unholy amalgam of corvette, dodge caravan, and jeep parts. He was part of our jeep friendgroup, which was not a club it was just ten or so hackers who all owned jeeps and went offroading together. He used to brew beer for us as a thank you for when we'd help him keep his nightmare jeep running.
Large bastard knows a ton about cars and I'm interested enough in cars that whenever he is working on one I want to join in and learn. Large bastard has probably owned over 20 cars. When we first started dating he had an 84 mazda that i named Billy Buttfuck the Truck because it had mechanical issues that caused him to miss enough work that it became a problem. Some of our first dates involved me helping him to replace the radiator in that truck. Twice.
My dad loves cars but doesn't know how to work on them. When I was a kid we had a car graveyard of vehicles that just stopped working one day and that my parents never found time to fix. That used to drive me crazy, so as soon as I had a car, I got a teardown manual and started learning how to work on it and how to identify problems and how to keep it running. I got that car with 90k miles on it, sold that car at 270k, and helped the next owner keep it running up to at least 350k. At one point it had a fan belt break and my friend who I'd sold it to called me and I met her and replaced the belt in a dark parking lot with only a single wrench because I'd replaced the thermostat and the water pump and the motor mounts on that thing and I could literally fix that engine with my eyes closed.
I've had four cars that I'd consider "my" cars in the sense that I was the primary driver and I knew how to fix them. This has translated into being "the one who is good with cars" and fixing a lot of my friends' cars (at least for the friends who aren't friends with large bastard - if they know him they call him first, as well they should).
Getting to be "good with cars" comes from a lot of very specific circumstances - living in a car culture, being interested in cars and how they work, having friends who are car people and helping them and learning from them when the opportunity presents itself, not being able to afford mechanics when it isn't absolutely necessary.
If you want to get good at cars, my best piece of advice it to become an expert on your car. Get a teardown manual, start doing your own maintenance, and start learning the troubleshooting process that the manual explains. Then rinse and repeat with every other car that you get, and your family members' cars, and your friends' cars.
This is a skill that you can learn, and while some of it is physically challenging, a lot of car stuff is pretty easy.
If you haven't ever tried it, replace your air filter. Look up instructions online and get the correct filter from autozone and put it in the airbox and feel a sense of accomplishment that a simple process and a cheap filter just saved you the cost of a trip to the mechanic.
You can do this. There is car maintenance and repair that you can do on your own, even if you're an absolute beginner. I believe in you.
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