A couple days ago I posted some tips from Yahoo on how to save on car expenses. At the end of that post, there were a couple suggestions from readers of the Motley Fool (where the article originally came from). Here are the two (great) tips:
From Craig Glaser: "You mentioned changing your oil as recommended. Changing your type of oil could have a much greater impact. I've used synthetic oil for the past 10 years. I change my oil only once a year or every 25,000 miles. Synthetic makes your car more efficient, you produce less waste (since you're not throwing out oil every 3,000 miles), and it saves you a lot of money. My first car in which I used synthetic lasted 156,000 miles. I would probably still have it, but it was totaled in an accident eight years ago. My current car has 136,000 miles, and I plan on keeping it the rest of my life -- hopefully 30 or 40 years!"
From Paul Wyles: "Regularly check your gas mileage -- how many miles you're getting per gallon of gas. If the gas mileage drops, it often indicates that something needs to be repaired. Example(s): The gas mileage dropped on my Dodge Grand Caravan, and I didn't pay attention to it. The engine had allowed a lot of unburned fuel into the exhaust system, which destroyed the catalytic converter, muffler, and resonator. Had I picked up on this earlier, the $600 repair would have been unnecessary, and I would have saved some gas, to boot. The second example involves the same vehicle. This time I paid attention to the reduction in gas mileage. I started to do a tune-up and found a bad spark plug wire. This time it was a $20 repair instead of replacing the entire exhaust system again. Also, I know that summer gas mileage is higher than winter mileage for my vehicles. I use a program to track all vehicle expenses and gas mileage. It tells me when scheduled maintenance is due, and I will notice when gas mileage drops. The program I use is Vehicle Record System, a shareware program that can be used free for up to three or so vehicles and for a registration fee can be used to track additional vehicles."
Great tips!
wow cool really good stuff
Posted by: brown's gas | March 04, 2009 at 10:04 AM