It’s an unfortunate truth that cars don’t last forever, they get rusty, they get dinged, they degrade overtime. It’s not possible to stop this process but you can slow it down with regular maintenance. The question is: how regular should that maintenance be? Monthly? Yearly? Random spot checks? This article will tell you all you need to know.
Different Times for Different Parts
The thing that makes this question so difficult is that all the parts of a car don’t degrade uniformly, some things break down much faster than others, so there’s no one particular schedule you can stick to that will cover everything.
For example, Oil and other fluids need to be changed at least every 6 months, especially in Canada where you probably want to switch from Winter fluids to summer fluids or vice versa. Whereas bigger mechanical issues with the engine or suspension are much rarer, and checking for them every 6 months is very excessive.
30-60-90 Intervals
Instead of doing this by time, a much better rule is by mileage. How much the car has been driven. A common rule of thumb is the 30-60-90 rule. Meaning you take the car in for a maintenance check at 30 thousand miles, 60 thousand miles, and 90 thousand miles, this is an American rule obviously but we can adjust it to kilometres to get the 50-100-150 rule instead.
Of course depending on the make and model of your car you may need to modify this further, you can look up how reliable your car is online to get a good gauge of how long you can go between checkups, if your driving something notoriously reliable like a Jeep Wrangler then you can probably bump the kilometer milestones even further apart.
At Home Maintenance
If the worry about maintenance is the cost, which is a reasonable concern. Then it’s probably worth learning how to do some of the simpler checks yourself. The example of checking and changing oil and other fluids is an easy one to learn, just search for your car and “oil check” on YouTube and you’re sure to find a tutorial that’ll help.
If you have the space for it, investing in the equipment to change tires yourself can be a significant time and money saver, and the same goes for any equipment for maintenance checks if you’re handy enough to handle it yourself.
Cars are not designed to last forever, in a certain sense they’re almost designed to fail eventually, but you can hold off that failure for a good long will with some simple TLC.