How to Maintain Your New Car – AARP
3 min read
You just bought a new car, another shiny commodity for the garage.
You want to drive it, show this off, motor to the top of that hill outside town, open the particular windows or put the best down and let the wind blow. Just sit there with a grin while you set the particular satellite radio buttons in order to your favorite stations.
Aaaahh. Sweet. Unfortunately, it’ll never feel quite that fresh again.
Still, you don’t have to let it go stale very fast — whether you’re jazzed about that new car or even you’re taking it for granted.
Over the years, you’ve probably all-but-memorized the advice about oil changes, fluid checks, tire rotations plus the other down-the-line maintenance to keep the machine performing right as it hits the tens of thousands of miles marks.
But — other than luxuriating in that new-car feeling — there are important things to do right now, before a person get to that first scheduled maintenance.
Here’s our list, courtesy of the experts, associated with five things you should do right now to keep that new vehicle in top shape.
First, learn everything about this
“Read the owner’s manual, ” emphasizes (quite vigorously) Heath Knox, a certified master technician who worked at a Chevrolet dealership and now is a technician at Integrated Deicing Services. He maintains the big deicing trucks at Pittsburgh International Airport and tends to the particular Ford plus Jeep vehicles that maintain the rigs up and running.
He acknowledges that owner’s manuals often are written poorly and are illogically indexed, but he advises getting through it because it’ll help you get to know your new car, truck, SUV or van so well that driving it becomes intuitive.
“Be sure you understand how to use the car, ” says Ronald Montoya, senior consumer guidance editor in Edmunds. com, auto-research plus buying site. “You’ve gone through a whole day of negotiations and you won’t have the particular questions” about operating the car, truck or vehicle until after the sales transaction is over, he says. “If there’s something you can’t understand, go back to the particular dealer. inch
How can knowing your car make it last?
The last thing you want to do is buy a new car plus park it next to a curb and chew up the wheels, ” he admits that. “At the dealership, cars would come in for their first essential oil change plus the tires would look like they had 20, 000 miles on them” due to the fact of the particular scrapes and scuffs.
You’ll know from the manual if the vehicle needs specific treatment during a break-in period. Ignore this and you might wind up with an oil-burner or a hard-to-brake demon.
Or, let’s say you aren’t quite certain what each dashboard warning light means. Bingo – flat wheel. The car’s been trying to tell you that the tire’s low for miles via the instrument panel alert. You didn’t understand.
Take a more extreme example: For directions, let’s say you actually use the car’s navigation system instead of your smartphone along with its tiny screen. But you aren’t sure how in order to program the particular system. You’re rolling down the road, about to be lost, and you’re staring at the dashboard screen to figure out how to activate the navigation. Distracted driver — Crash!
A banged-up vehicle is off to a bad start on the longevity index. Never mind the particular injuries that could accompany a collision.
Have the tires plus fluids checked