Your car can be one of the most expensive and important investments you’ll ever make, but many of us don’t give our vehicles the kind of maintenance attention they need. Mechanics and technicians would know: As the doctors of cars, they see it all.
“My job is to give you an overall state of health of your car, so you can make educated decisions on what to do with it, and to alert you to things that you may not know about, and that you won’t necessarily recognize or see,” said Bogi Lateiner, a Phoenix-based master automotive technician and the owner of Girl Gang Garage, a network that provides hands-on training for women in the trades.
Too often, technicians say, we are making maintenance decisions ― or failing to do so ― in ways that create potential safety hazards and can lead to costly mistakes. We spoke with car repair experts about their own big “won’ts” as lessons for us all:
1. I won’t neglect car maintenance.
Of all the mistakes she sees, Lateiner told HuffPost this is the most common. “They think, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ And they can deal with it later,” she said. “In reality, preventative maintenance is going to be always less expensive than the repair.”
Lateiner said she would never ignore regular oil changes, for example. “Oil is the lifeblood of your car,” she explained. “Its job is to keep your engine cool and lubricated.”
“When the engine oil starts to get thick, or it breaks down, when the additives in [the oil] stop doing what they’re supposed to do... the engine can break prematurely and deteriorate in either minor or massive catastrophic ways,” she said. “So keeping fresh oil in there is really just crucial.”
Lateiner recommends changing the oil about twice as often as the 15,000-mile intervals that car manufacturers typically recommend.
“I cut those oil change intervals in half most of the time,” she said. “The longest I would go is 8,000 miles on a full synthetic oil change on a European car with high-quality oil.”
2. I won’t rely solely on car maintenance reminders.
