Main Character of the Week: The mechanic reminding you to change the filter in your glove compartment
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
During the past year, the Daily Dot has become a secret car blog. That’s by design.
It is the most traffic-friendly topic we report on site-wide. We publish 5-6 daily car stories, 7 days a week.
We’ve found newsworthy space between the general public and the conventional car publications that cater to fans and experts. That’s because in 2025, driving is a reflection on your political values.
Shoot, not having a car is a political expression more than an economic consideration for millions of Americans. And society has changed in the past two years in that everyday citizens as well as dealership experts and mechanics are exposing everyday car problems, tips, and tricks on TikTok. Their wisdom has spread across the land like warm Irish butter on a roll.
Industry-wide, cars continue to be poorly regulated. As consumers, we always feel like we’re being worked. So having this clarity via traditional forums such as Reddit, but chiefly TikTok, has been eye-opening.
From the learning of the real problem with center console touchscreens to planned obsolescence to that weird recall with Hyundais that makes many models give out around 100,000 miles, car content on the internet is about conspiracies, solutions, and news you can use.
Air filter nation
To that end, one of our biggest stories of the week is about a mechanic who reminds everybody to change their cabin air filter. He’s the Royalty Auto Service guy, and we’ve been fans for about a year now.
That’s the air filter in your glove compartment! And because most people don’t know what it is, it never gets changed throughout the course of a car's life. So one day you pull it out of the glove compartment and it looks like a raccoon corpse. Suddenly, you realize the poor performance of your air conditioning is directly correlated to the restricted airflow. Which is caused by said dead raccoon in your glove box.
It is a short repair solved by an AutoZone run, easily delivered after watching a YouTube tutorial.
This is something many of us learned embarrassingly late in life. I was 36 years old when I learned that car filters in the cabin need to be changed.
But the experts at Royalty Auto Service (@royaltyautoservice), a shop in Alabama which regularly goes viral for its expert advice, has another reason you need to change the air filter. The filter prevents debris such as leaves from getting into your engine, causing potentially serious damage.
“At the very least, it's keeping these, all this debris and everything from going into the blower motor," chief Royalty mechanic Sherwood Cooke Jr. said in a viral TikTok.
And the restricted airflow can have long-term consequences too, he says. "This will, in extreme cases, cause the evaporator coil to freeze up," Cooke Jr. notes.
(More than 90% of new cars and trucks have cabin air filters.)
So dear reader, I encourage you to open up the glove compartment and spot-check that cabin filter.
It might look like the filter on my old Chevy. (See below)
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