Top 5 Car Maintenance Tips

Hey there, Aldo here and today I’m going to give you the top five car maintenance tips to make your car last as long as it possibly can. A car is an expensive investment, so knowing how to keep your vehicle in tip-top shape can save you tons of money.

The first tip is to change your engine oil regularly, and if you do no other maintenance on your car, do that, that’s what makes them last the longest. Be sure to use the oil that’s specified and with late-model cars it’s even more important, because a lot of them are made only to use synthetic oil.

With variable valve timing, they have to have very good oil flow, so you’ve got to keep it clean, and you have to use the correct viscosity.

The next maintenance item and one that’s often forgotten is power steering fluid. When you’re checking the color of the fluid it is supposed to be red. If you hear a  whining that means the pump is worn or it’s really low on fluid. You don’t need to change the power steering fluid very often, maybe once every four or five years.

The third tip has to do with your body, if you want to keep your car shiny, you want to wax the thing. It’s a good idea to wax it four times a year, once a season. As nutty as it sounds the paint on your car has to remain somewhat flexible. Waxing keeps it flexible, if it’s not and it dries up then your paint all cracks and looks horrible.

The fourth maintenance item is coolant. Now decades ago you had to change the coolant every three years because that’s all it was good for but modern cars use extended life. So check with your car guide to see what it uses. For example, Peak is 150,000 miles or five years, so that’s when you change the fluid.

Some even go seven years or 200,000 miles, just check on what yours is and change it at those intervals. Just look at it this way, coolant is cheap, engines are super expensive.

The fifth tip is to change your automatic transmission fluid, it gets dirty over time. Again decades ago when I was young, they told you to change the fluid every 30,000 miles, now modern cars have better metal and technology in them.

You can change them a lot less frequently but I still don’t believe in this lifetime fluid nonsense. All fluids get dirty and start to wear internally from friction and you’d want to use the correct fluid just like the oil.

You want to use the one that the manufacturer uses but you still want to change it say every forty to seventy thousand miles. If you’re like me and want to drive your car a long time, my work cars have the fluid changed regularly and it’s got two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles and still shifts like a dream.

Thanks for checking out the top 5 car maintenance tips and good luck with your vehicles. If you found this post helpful share it with your friends and leave a comment.