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Hands-Free Car Care Tips

No need to get greasy with "mindful" maintenance

Effective car care doesn't require oil on your jeans, busted knuckles or burned fingertips. Just as you can keep your own body healthy without owning a scalpel, you can keep your vehicle running better without being able to identify a ratchet in a lineup of kitchen tools. Call these hands-free car care tips. For both cars and humans, knowing when professional attention is needed a key to longevity.

Loosen Up

Before exercise, humans are wise to do some stretching. After your vehicle sits overnight, give it a chance to loosen up. While long, stationary warm-ups are discouraged for modern cars, for the first several minutes after a cold start avoid flooring the gas or squealing around corners. Use a light touch on the pedal and allow the car to shift into higher gears. Removing your foot from the gas pedal causes some automatics to upshift earlier. While modern oils do a great job even at low temperatures, it's best to avoid stressing the engine before the oil—not just the coolant—gains some temperature. Also, this easy-driving period gives often-overlooked fluids and lubricants—transmission fluid, wheel-bearing grease, differential oil and more—a chance to spread out and warm up.

Elevated Rate

Effective cardio-vascular exercise requires the human heart rate to be elevated and kept there for 20 minutes or more. Your car will be in better health if occasionally it's driven for at least 20 consecutive minutes. The reason: When a vehicle sits overnight, moisture and remnants of combustion condense in the oil pan. Starting the car mixes all that together. If you drive for only a handful of minutes, the oil doesn't get hot enough to boil off the moisture and other bad stuff. If you let the car sit until it cools off, you're turning highly engineered motor oil back into crude sludge. Depending on outside temperature, it may take 20 minutes or more of driving for engine oil to become hot enough to fully boil off the moisture and contaminants. This will be a dozen or more minutes after the water temperature gauge has settled into the middle of its range. It's not imperative that you get the oil boiling hot each time you drive your car, but it needs to be done with some regularity. If most of your driving is short runs followed by long cool-offs, use the "severe service" oil-change interval that your owner's manual recommends.

Smell, Look, Listen

Just as you should tell your doctor about any unusual changes to your body, you should report to your mechanic if your car is dripping fluids, emitting strange smells, or making unusual sounds. This is even more important for cars than people. Unlike the human body, a car never heals on its own. Here's an example: If you notice a sickly sweet smell, it likely means you're about to be stranded by a burst radiator hose or a failed water pump. Look where you park your car: With the exception of water condensing off the air conditioner, the ground should be dry. Not only do drippings mean growing problems, they're serious environmental pollutants. Capture leaking fluids by parking over clean cardboard: Bring it to your mechanic for analysis. Also, attempt to determine when unusual sounds occur: Does tapping the brake make the sound stop? Does the screeching occur only in tight right, but not left, turns? Just when the car is cold? Only when the air conditioner is on? If you can't accurately describe the problem, it's possible you'll receive the despised "could not reproduce" diagnosis from your mechanic. Just as when a doctor says "I can't find anything wrong," this really means, "There may be something wrong, but I can't find it."

Refresh Your Fluids

Human blood must be constantly cleaned of impurities—that's why you have a liver and kidneys. Cars need their fluids cleared of impurities—all their fluids. The need for regular engine oil changes has been drilled into our heads. However, even some who consider themselves car buffs don't know that every other fluid in the car also must be refreshed sooner or later. Included in this list are automatic transmission fluid, coolant (a.k.a. anti-freeze), brake fluid, differential oil, transfer case oil (for 4WDs), and power steering fluid. Few of these truly break down, though that can happen with vehicles that are heavily stressed. However, all vehicle fluids become contaminated from a variety of sources. Also, a good mechanic analyzes things in the fluids he removes the same way a doctor views a blood sample from a healthy looking person: Both can show small problems that, left untreated, will become big issues.

If you keep vehicles a long time—two of my daily drivers each have more than 100,000 on their odometers and I'm planning on seeing 200,000 or more on both—you should change these fluids frequently and ask the mechanic who did the work if there were indications of problems or excessive wear. If you've just acquired a used vehicle, it's a great idea to change all the fluids, filters, and hoses. A special note about automatic transmissions: Far from all of the old fluid will flow out simply by removing the drain plug. Make sure your mechanic fully flushes out all the old fluid and changes the filter.

Follow these tips and your car will run better, longer, and cost less to do it. This article might even give you a couple of tips to help you live longer and feel better.