#NOCOBoost

If you’re not a car person, and you want gifts for car lovers, you might head over to Amazon’s “Most Wished For” automotive products and find what looks like a random mix of great and terrible gift ideas, without any way of telling which one is which. That’s one of the main reasons we’ve spent the last 12 months evaluating, purchasing, and testing automotive parts and accessories, sometimes for months, figuring out which one are worth your money ( and which ones aren’t).

Between the invention of the self starter and the end of the 20th Century, the best portable car jump starters weren’t something you carried with you. They were heavy lead-acid automotive batteries that only garages and tow truck drivers used. Everyone else carried (and still should) jumper cables, which require two cars and enough knowledge not to short them out. If you had a dead or weak battery and you were on your own, you had to get to a phone or flag down another motorist to have a chance of getting going again.