Sunday, December 14, 2014 Don’t cut corners with your car maintenance

 

A worker at the garage buffs a car to ensure a perfect paint finish. There is no such thing as a car maintenance system that does not require time, money or technical expertise from the owner. PHOTO | FILE  

In Summary

• The universal aim is to minimise the quantity of time, money and skill you need to achieve reliability, recognising that the more you have of one, the less you will need of the others.
• The logical conclusion should be to go to the best-trained, best equipped, most thorough and diligent service agent first. In the long run, that should be the most economical and time efficient option, too. The difficulty is finding such a place. 

By GAVIN BENNETT
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There is no such thing as a car maintenance system that does not require time, money or technical expertise from the owner.

If you try to motor without those ingredients, you’re going to break down (soon and often) and a 12-minute drive eastward will turn into a three-hour walk westward.

The universal aim is to minimise the quantity of time, money and skill you need to achieve reliability, recognising that the more you have of one, the less you will need of the others.

With lots of money, you can buy someone else’s time and expertise. With plenty of time, you can conduct regular and thorough checks to prevent problems and dabble with some clumsy DIY With technical skill, you can do your own service and repair quickly, cheaply and competently (three qualities that money can’t buy).

But most of us suffer a shortage of all three of those ingredients and our motoring is an endless search for the best compromise — personal checks and fudge fixes, trips to the cut-price corner garage, and ultimately a visit to the official agents when the other two systems have gone wrong.

EXPENSIVE AFFAIR

The logical conclusion should be to go to the best-trained, best equipped, most thorough and diligent service agent first. In the long run, that should be the most economical and time efficient option, too. The difficulty is finding such a place.  

The corner garage can be quite quick and cheap, but its fault-finding know-how varies from “what’s the matter with it?” to much funereal head-shaking and “oh no, this is awful, you’d better leave it here for five days for us to fix that, replace this, weld those, tighten them” and then “while we were pumping up the tyres we noticed that you needed two new shock absorbers, relined brakes, a new exhaust silencer and the squeaky water pump probably means an engine rebuild.”

The main agent is likely, on average, to have a better grasp of the technical, tooling, spares and skills specifics.

But there’s the booking, the getting there, the going away and getting back there, and then all that paperwork ending with a sheet which, as your eye falls upon it, looks like the title deed to your house and a gift of your life-savings covered in hieroglyphs.

And for all that, both the competence and the diligence might be less than certain.

None of this is necessarily true, of course, but we tend to think it is and act accordingly.

There’s no single or certain answer. It depends on who your corner garage or main agent is, what model and age of car you’ve got, how you use it and what its common problems are. Among other things.

What is sure is that you will save money and heartache if you take some care and some responsibility for keeping your car in decent condition.

You must spend some time. You must spend some money.  And you need to accrue some mechanical knowledge…as a shark cage.