Auto Maintenance vs. Repair

John Nielsen: Hi! I am John Nielsen with AAA, and I am the Director of AAA's Approved Auto Repair Network and Auto Buying Services. Today we are going to talk about making sense out of car care. In this video series we are going to specifically talk about what you need to know about repairing and maintaining your vehicle. And what you can do to make sure that your vehicle runs properly, you get quality service, and get the most enjoyment out of your automobile.

In this segment, we are going to specifically talk about the differences between maintenance and repair and what you need to know to properly maintain your vehicle protect your investment and keep your family safe. Now maintenance is typically something that's required on your vehicle to be done on a regular basis, on a scheduled basis, and what it does is it actually keeps your car functioning properly. Examples of maintenance could be rotating your tires, changing your oil. In the next segment would actually be repairs that are covered under warranty. These are things that your manufacture provides when you buy a vehicle, and will cover veined components of a car from anywhere from 12,000 miles all the way up to 100,000 miles. Things like this could be an alternator, could be tires, could be a number of components. And finally, we have repairs that are not covered by the warranty. In other words these are parts that when they fail, you are responsible for repairing. Now the key thing to take away in this segment is that maintaining your car often prevents the failure of other components. So one of the things that everyone needs to do is to familiarize themselves with the proper maintenance procedures on their car, understand what's covered under warranty should something fail, and then understand the best thing to do when those repairs are needed to take place.

So that's the difference between maintenance and repair. Next, we are going to talk about factory maintenance schedules and what you need to know to properly maintain your vehicle.