The little red light in my 1993 Plymouth Grand Voyager said "Check Engine." I appreciated the suggestion. But I had no idea what it meant.

The van, you see, had been a gift from my wife's sister. It had 187,00 kilometers (116,000 miles) on it when I picked it up in Chicago for the long drive to Boston. Halfway back the engine almost caught on fire; when I arrived two days later, I discovered that it needed nearly $5,000 in repairs. Three days after that work was done, the transmission died.

All in all, this "free" van had cost me nearly $8,000, and now something else was wrong. What was it? I didn't trust the dealership to tell me what was really going on: I felt that they were dishing out the bad news one broken part at a time, so that I wouldn't realize the full scope of my problems. So instead of turning to the experts, I turned to the Internet. I was troubled by what I learned-not about the state of the old van, but about how limited my access was to information about a product that I owned.