Getting your car to its Golden Years

By Brian Klaubert

We all see them from time to time. Those cars that look as if they are only a year or two old, when in fact they are 10-12 years old. We also see the opposite. The car that is two years old and yet looks like it is 10 years old. What factors go into making up the difference?

First and foremost is keeping up the cosmetic condition of the car, both the interior and the exterior. This may seem impossible to do, but it is easier than you may think. Take your car to a full service car wash every two weeks. You can bring in a car with animal crackers all over the seats and papers and crayons on the floor. When you get your car back, you will have one neat pile of papers and crayons and no animal crackers. The outside will be shiny, and even the tires will glow.

A full service car wash will cost $15 to $18. The annual cost for this is only $400, or about 1 – 1 1/2 car payments. If this tactic increases the life of your car only 2 months you are money ahead. Our observations indicate it will increase the life much more than that.

The second thing that we see is that the golden year cars have been regularly serviced with the full manufacturer recommended services. I have to be honest. Before I was in the auto repair business I thought getting an oil change every 3,000 miles, or a coolant or transmission flush, was a marketing gimmick. But I also thought that once a car got over 70,000 miles it was time to trade it in. Now I’ve seen the proof from the inside. I’ve seen what an engine looks like that has regularly gone 10,000 miles between oil changes, or has never had the coolant flushed, or never had a transmission flush.

You can do almost no maintenance on a vehicle and get 80,000 trouble free miles from it. But if the vehicle is treated that way it isn’t going to get 200,000 miles, and you can’t wait until you reach 100,000 miles to start treating it right. You are reducing the eventual life when you don’t maintain it in the earlier miles.

Many people say “I just don’t have the time.” If time is really the issue, here are a few short cuts. Use synthetic motor oil. You can go 7,500 miles on a synthetic oil change and keep the inside of your engine sparkling clean and wear-free. It costs less than twice the cost of a conventional oil change, so you are saving money up front and extending the life of your car. Get your tires rotated every 7,500 mile oil change, and balance them every other oil change. Every 4th oil change you are going to have a 30,000 mile service. Have the coolant flushed and the transmission flushed.

Think about the timing of this. It is going to be 1 1/2 to 2 years just to have four oil changes. How can you not have time for that?

Brian Klaubert owns Christian Brothers Automotive – Hamilton Mill, on Braselton Hwy in Dacula.