It’s a shame how little home auto repair people can do anymore. The design of cars has gotten less favorable to the informed driver with some mechanical skills. It’s harder to get work done on your car without having a lot of specialized equipment. The good news is that cars have become much more reliable, the bad news is that you can’t do as much yourself or get as much work done in exchange for a 6 pack of beer. However, as a car owner you can still help improve the life and drivability of your car in some basic ways. Even though cars will need to see the auto repair shops less often they can still be mishandled, and it’s embarrassing to break down in the middle of a town like Shoreline WA because you didn’t realize that your car needed oil and the engine seized.
That’s the first thing you can do, keep the oil at an appropriate level and change the oil out on a regular schedule. It can gunk up and eventually stop working properly. For most cars (Mazda RX-8 is an exception) if you start going through oil at a noticeable rate it’s a sign of a mechanical fault. So keep an eye on that. Periodically (you generally don’t have to be very aggressive on this) check the fluid levels for brakes, and transmission, if they’re low top them off with the appropriate fluids. Get the regularly scheduled maintenance for your car. A trip into one of the Shoreline auto repair centers for regular maintenance can save on needing major repair later.
The final point is to just be attentive, you want to know what your car drives and sounds like and if it starts deviating noticeably from that it’s time to go find a local auto repair shop and get it looked at. You don’t want to over react though; if your car does something weird once and never repeats it, don’t worry. However if you’re getting constant problems or weird sounds, that’s a sign you need to look for one of the local, Shoreline auto repair shops and have your car looked at. When it comes to performance, brakes and transmission are important, and bad if they start to fail. So, if your car is no longer shifting right, or if the brakes are no longer as firm and responsive as they should be you want that looked at immediately. Even though Shoreline is not a crowded city in the mold of a New York, bad brakes or a bad transmission can have disastrous results.
