Preventive maintenance is all about maintaining your car so that you can prevent a breakdown. This is as opposed to leaving your car alone until it breaks down on its own because you're not taking care of it.
You can maintain your car by yourself with products like KevianClean and semi-weekly car washes. However, that's not enough. You or an attendant at a gasoline station should check if you have enough oil, enough water, enough tire pressure, and enough brake fluid.
Serving Maintenance by Yourself or by Repair Personnel
- To Ensure Satisfactory Operating Condition: You or a mechanic should inspect the performance and parts of the car in order to check if it's working in satisfactory operating condition. The inspections should be done systematically and periodically in order to detect any potential failures before they occur or develop into something major. You should do tune-ups to avoid overhauls, in short.
- Professionals Are More Thorough: Pros are paid to do the job because they have equipment and training in order to do tests, adjustments, measurements, and part replacement as required. They do all this in order to prevent faults from occurring or to fix present faults happening in your car. Preventive maintenance testing by the pros is mainly about mitigating or avoiding equipment failure through experienced hands.
- You Should Still Do Your Part Though: Even if you don't have mechanic training, you should still do your part in order to take care of your car. You shouldn't only take care of your car by cleaning. You should also drive carefully. Don't wear your brake pad down by using the clutch too much in open roads, for instance. Go to second gear as soon as you can. You should even park in places that don't have falling debris.
- Planned Maintenance versus Condition-Based Maintenance: Most people do condition-based maintenance or go by the rule, "If it's not broke don't fix it." What this means is that they only bring their car to the repair shop if something is wrong with it while trying to drive the vehicle in a non-abusive way. The more careful motorists do planned maintenance or having occasional tune-ups and inspections of their car in repair shops.
Preservation and Restoration of Equipment Excellence
The whole point of preventive maintenance is to restore the reliability of equipment that's broken down or preserve for how long as possible the original car parts through careful usage and regular inspection.
This maximizes your vehicular investment so that you can get the most out of your car. It involves practices like partial or complete overhauls for specified periods, lubrication, tune-ups, and checking the error display on your dashboard computer for anything amiss.