ospalh quoted Far From True by Linwood Barclay (Promise Falls, #2)
"When private investigator Cal Weaver looks into a break-in at the home of a recently …
Content warning Language again. Nitpicking word choices.
a car (...), exhaust coming from the tailpipe (...) I powered down the passenger window
— Far From True by Linwood Barclay (Promise Falls, #2) (Page 274 - 275)
O, now i get it. Parts of the book is written in first person, an most of it in 3rd person. I find that annoying, but now i get why: Not to get good 1st person action scenes, but to get odd word usage like this. The author is trying for a hardboiled style, i think, but is utterly failing.
Exhaust. For me exhaust is what is called the tailpipe in America. But yes, according to Wiktionary it can also mean exhaust gas, what comes out of an exhaust or tailpipe.
Power down means switch off, and the two other transitive meanings Wiktionary has don’t fit. »rolled down«, or maybe »rolled down the power window«. The rest of the time the author is padding a lot, so using a few words more here should have been fine. Oh, well, not boiled hard enough, i guess.