John Nielsen: Hi! I am John Nielsen with AAA. Today, we're talking about making sense of car care. In this segment, we're going to specifically talk about factory maintenance schedules and what you need to know to properly maintain and care for your vehicle.

Now the vehicle manufactures are going to great lengths to determine what needs to be done to keep your car running properly and in good shape for the longest possible period of time, and that's schedule is located in your owner's manual. But what we will specifically cover in that would be things like oil changes, and that's important because it lubricates the inside of your motor, failure to properly maintain that oil is going to result in engine damage and premature failure. The reason is, it's important to understand maintenance schedule is because the factory could recommend to changing that oil anywhere from every 3000 miles, to in some case as much as every 15000 miles. In fact, so many people over-maintained some fluids and under-maintained others, that they actually waste money and yet don't properly protect their vehicle.

Some other things that could be covered in the factory maintenance schedule would be rotating your tires, changing your transmission fluid, replacing an air filter, or wiper blades. Each of these is very important to keeping your cars safe, to maximizing its potential fuel economy and safety features, and then keeping your investment well protected.

While we speak of protecting your investment, and nearly that's often overlooked is simply maintaining the interior and exterior appearance of your car. When you give rail dust or contaminants in your paint, that will start to fade your paint. In long term, it will reduce the value of your car when it comes time to sell it or trade it in. Much the same on the inside of your vehicle sand and salt works its way into the carpet and the fabric or fibers and over time will cause them to degrade and look poor. So again, maintaining your vehicle is important to keep the investment protected.

So these are all examples of things that are normally considered maintenance, but a couple others that every one should consider would be your belt and hoses. While they don't have normal replacement intervals, checking them to make sure they're in good shape is critical and preventing extremely across the breakdowns.

In fact, if a hose fails and a car continues to drive, it can cross two or three maybe $5000 in damage and similar expenses with even a belt. So those are items that need to be checked and your brakes are another great one. We don't want to wait until those have failed in and we're not getting good performance. What we want to do is, make sure we check our brakes on a regular basis and when they start to wear, we want to replace the pads before it damages other components like disks and calipers.

So really when we talk about maintenance, we're talking about preventative maintenance. We're trying to prevent things from failing and protect that investment long term.

So in this segment, we've talked about maintaining your vehicle according to manufacturer's recommendations to protect your investment and keep your cars safe. Now in the next segment, we're going to talk about how you can maintain your vehicle to increase its longevity, its safety and its reliability.