After months of deliberation, strict budgeting and visiting car showrooms you’ve finally bought your first car! Congratulations!
Now you need to work on ensuring your precious vehicle is always in tip top shape by getting into the habit of ensuring that it’s well maintained. A well maintained vehicle is a happy vehicle. You’ll ensure your vehicle’s resale value is kept up, avoid annoying breakdowns as well as extend the life of your car to last well above 300,000 kms.
To do that though, you’ll need to keep a couple of things in mind to ensure your car is in mint condition:
Read your vehicle’s owner’s manual.
Most of us are guilty of being so excited with our new car that we forget to check the owner’s manual. No two cars are alike, so it’s important to familiarise yourself with the manual and get to know your vehicle inside and out.
Among many other things, you’ll learn what type of fuel to use in your car, what all the dashboard signs mean, what kind of tyres you should use on your car, how often you should rotate them, how to check the car battery and most importantly you’ll find your vehicle’s maintenance checklist.
Learn the basics of your car.
It’s important to have a basic understanding of how your car works, why certain parts need to be maintained, and how to do that in the best way. That way you’ll have a better understanding of your car and a better appreciation for how and why it needs to be maintained. You’ll find all of this in your owner’s manual (yup! We did say it was important!) For example, you could conduct a simple check of your car engine oil with the oil stick.
Follow a regular maintenance schedule.
If you’ve bought your vehicle from a reputable dealer, new or pre-owned, it should come with the owner’s manual as well as a vehicle maintenance checklist. This will tell you how often you need to get your car maintained (e.g. every 5000kms), which of those services would be a minor or major service (e.g. You need to do an oil check each service but your timing belt may only be changed every 100,000 kms), what should be checked replaced or topped up in either type of service.
Don’t skimp on repairs.
While many people may get their cars maintained regularly, some are guilty of putting off big maintenance decisions for the future, or worse yet using fake third party parts. Using fake parts can be a serious safety hazard, it may not be apparent in the beginning but over time these parts can start to fail or other problems can arise.