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Whether you bought a brand new car last fall and now have a couple thousand miles on the odometer, or you have an old hunk of junk that you’d like to squeeze a few thousand more miles out of before you finally concede it’s time to trade it in, odds are you’re getting it ready to make the transition from winter to spring driving, and that means you have an appointment with somebody in the not too distant future to look under the hood. Either way, you want to take care of that car so it lasts a while and doesn’t strand you when you can least afford to be stranded- but the dealer said one thing about maintenance, and your owner’s manual says something else, and your gut and experience tell you they’re both wrong. What is the recommended guideline for how and when to do maintenance on one of your most expensive and important assets?
Ron Ananian is the host of “The Car Doctor,” which is available weekly on the iHeart radio app. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning, where he suggested whether you own or lease the car makes a difference in how you maintain it. Ananian started by telling host Larry Mendte what to do for the most basic maintenance under the hood, the oil change: “There’s manufacturer’s world, there’s dealer’s world, and then there’s real world, and a lot of that is based on environment and operating conditions. I think you have to break maintenance down into some basic areas… We like to change oil every five to six months, every five to six thousand miles- synthetic oil, good filter, yada yada ya. We might be a little over-medicated, but if we own the vehicle and we want to get to the 250,000-mile mark, that’s how we’re going to do it.”
Ananian recommended replacing the batteries and fluids next, emphasizing batteries plural for an obvious yet easily overlooked reason. “If the vehicle we are driving is more than three years old, we should be testing that battery on a yearly basis and we should consider replacing it at the five-year mark. Now, a lot of vehicles have start-stop batteries… Vehicles with start-stop technology have two batteries, so when one battery starts to age and go south, so does the other.”
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