Power Ports for Dummies

12-volt power outlet for car

You probably have to be of a certain age to remember when cars had cigarette lighters. We think they stopped being standard equipment sometime in the '80s, but sockets that sure look like cigarette lighters reappeared a few years later as 12-volt power ports for charging mobile devices. These day there are never enough such outlets, so people can be forgiven for wanting to know how to add a new one or replace one that seems to have malfunctioned. The problems is that some old fart googled "How to Install a New Cigarette Lighter In a Car," and eHowian Greyson Ferguson decided to oblige (see his work at ItStillruns.com).

Ferguson's "answer," such as it is, is to,

"Pick up a replacement cigarette lighter...[and]... Place the cigarette lighter into the power point."

Yes, that's Greyson's answer. Never mind that even the stupidest dunce on the face of the planet could figure out how to do that without help! It doesn't help that Fergie tried to tell his readers that,

"It is possible to accidentally blow out the charger if you have extracted too much power from it at one give point..."

...which, we'd like to point out, pretty much makes zero sense. But that's not Greyson's biggest problem: no, his biggest problem is that it's obvious that the OQ wanted to install a new power port – maybe he drives a 1988 Toyota Corolla without a "lighter," maybe he only has one port and wants two.

It's likely that the OQ was old enough to remember when people did use cigarette lighters for power ports. Maybe the OQ didn't even know the terms "power port" and "power point." It seems a lot of people still call those things the "cigarette lighter." The truth is that to replace a power port means getting up behind the dash. Installing a new one requires that you have some electrical knowledge and perhaps the wiring diagram for the vehicle. Either way, Ferguson was only pretending to be helpful in hopes of fooling some other film-school grad into paying him fifteen bucks. That would probably work, since the other film-school grad was working as a DMS content editor when our Dumbass of the Day was a "contributor" to eHow.

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