Maintenance Tips for Brand New Cars

Buying a new car, if it is a financially viable option, has a number of advantages over buying a used one. For one thing, it means that your car has a resale value should you be looking to trade it in at some point. Secondly, there is something quite rewarding about the feel of owning and driving a new car. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there is the matter of maintenance. 

Used cars have a lower price in no small part because wear and tear happens as a matter of course. Eventually there will be a need to repair some of this damage, but as you will no doubt have heard, a car loses value from the moment you drive it off the forecourt at the sales lot. This is standard depreciation – once you use a car, you are making it do work which places a strain on it – and without regular services will eventually become problematic. Therefore you should not be tricked into thinking that because your car is new, it will not need any maintenance for a while. Regular and fairly basic maintenance every so often is hugely preferable to major corrective action when the cumulative faults suffered by the car become too serious to bear.

A lot of the problems suffered by cars both new and used could be avoided with a bit of regular maintenance. After all, the word “maintenance” comes from the verb “to maintain” – meaning to keep something as it is. Rather than allowing your car to drop to a level from which it needs to be cured, maintenance means that it stays at the optimum level for driving and does not need so many repairs in order to be safely and comfortably driveable. Regular checking of the oil and the filters in the engine – and changes of these to keep it running smoothly – are the basic minimum that is advisable. These are simple processes that will become second nature pretty soon. 

Keeping your engine clean is also an essential element of new car maintenance. This does not need to be done extremely frequently. In fact, every 18 months to two years should be ample. This will allow the engine to “breathe”, and stop it holding in heat which will compromise the car’s performance. 

Some years back, when doctors (or physicians as they were then called) checked up on a human patient, they would address the issue of “humors” – essential bodily fluids that could, they believed, give the important clues around the cause of a patient’s illness. That was at best partially true, but in a motor vehicle there are several fluids that can be checked as a diagnostic measure or just as part of a tune-up. Brake fluid, transmission and power steering are all major elements of how to keep a vehicle running at its optimum level. Checking that the vehicle has enough of each, that they are clean and functioning as they should be, will allow you to run a motor vehicle in the way it should be running for longer.