How important is maintenance to my vehicle?



Very important if you plan on keeping your vehicle.

The subject of vehicle maintenance is a murky one at best. Vehicle manufacturers have recently found that promoting their vehicles as "low maintenance" plays well with prospective buyers. Who wouldn't want a vehicle that needs nothing more than fuel? So, their recommended service intervals are not based on what will make your car last as long as it can. After all, they want to sell cars, and they'd rather sell you one every 100,000km rather than every 300,000km.

You can find the manufacturer's maintenance schedules in the back of your owner's manual. This used to be considered the minimum required maintenance to keep your vehicle running efficiently for a long time. Note that these schedules are the minimum required. If you plan on keeping your vehicle for only 100,000km, these schedules will suffice. However, with proper maintenance, many of today's engines can easily exceed 300,000km without a major overhaul or rebuild. But that's not likely to happen if you follow the manufacturer's schedule.

Here's the main problem for the consumer when he or she shops for maintenance. It's extremely difficult to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. There is no standard for maintenance. You could ask 10 different repair shops for a price on a 50,000km service, for example, and get 10 different prices that vary dramatically. That's not because they all have vastly different labor rates, it's because all 10 have different ideas of what the service entails. One shop may have a "one-size-fits-all" approach, so that no matter what kind of vehicle you drive, a 50,000km service is the same.







The cost to replace a timing belt may be several hundred dollars before it breaks, but if you wait until it breaks, it may do several thousand dollars worth of damage to valves and pistons.

So how do you know what you need? The key here is to find a shop that you trust and follow their advice. They will have many years of experience and know what maintenance is needed based on your make of vehicle and your driving style. Maintenance is not free, but it's much less costly than a repair.

Consider the implications of not flushing your cooling system for 150,000 km. Proper cooling system maintenance will reduce corrosion in expensive items like radiators and heater cores. But it will also reduce the corrosion on inexpensive items like freeze plugs. Freeze plugs are small metal discs that seal access holes that are cast into engine blocks and cylinder heads. They may cost only 50 cents each, but some are located in the back of the block. If they rust through and leak, the engine or transmission must be removed to replace them. The other freeze plugs are apt to be in the same condition. You could easily spend $1000 to replace all of the freeze plugs, which are worth about $10 for all of them. It's a lot less expensive to flush the cooling system every other year.

Frequent oil and filter changes are critical to extended engine life. Yes, engine oil is much better than it used to be. And modern engines don't contribute as much "blow-by" to the crankcase. But modern engines also run much harder and hotter than those large engines of years past. Also, some engines are more prone to "sludging" than others. Sludge plugs oil passages within the engine and starves critical components of oil, resulting in severe engine damage. Changing the engine oil and filter every 5000km or 3 months will ensure that you won't be plagued by expensive lubrication problems.



Any more questions?

Direct them to mike@robinsonautomotive.com