<< I stick with the longer service intervals. No point in me maintaining an engine every 10K miles to save someone else from future problems. >>
That's exactly the attitude most advisers on this forum tell buyers to avoid, much the same as a rental company getting rid as soon as servicing falls due. But if you are just trading in to a dealer I suppose that buck passes with the car.
But surely you'd get a lower offer in PX if you only serviced it at 20k instead of 10k (or 25k instead or 12.5k)? I would, if I was the dealer, in case I resold the car onto another punter and it developed a fault outside of the manufacturer's warranty buy inside mine. Just to offset the risk of issues related to a long time/distance between oil and filter changes, and especially on upmarket/more expensive cars.
Are 'service indicators' so sophisticated that they can combine the type of usage (speed, acceleration, whether the engine is laboured, low speed acceleration and braking in heavy traffic, faster country driving or motorway miles, pollution levels [air intake], how often its run from cold or otherwise and the length of journey, how the clutch is wearing) all to tell how the oil filters, moving parts, spark plugs, etc are all doing.
Do all the componets/areas related to these have loads of sensors and the ECU a huge storage and processing capacity to actually make such a determination (over just using the car) like a qualified mechanic would? Despite all the tech and money in that sport, F1 cars still rely on people interpreting the data before deciding whether to bring a car into the pits in advance of a serious/terminal issue.
I'm personally not convinced by service indicators for the same reason I'm not as far as long service intervals that suddenly shot up from 9 - 12.5k to double that in only a few years. Fully synthetic oils may have contributed some to the increase, but engine oil isn't the only thing that makes up services on normal 10k intervals and, in my view, may well be offset by the use of a far higher percentage of modern cars in heavy traffic, urban journeys that rarely get out of 3rd/4th gear or go much over 40mph if at all, especially when used from cold for short journeys.
I've seen friends and colleagues who've owned (mainly German) cars with service indicators that, despite them using the car in the way I've described above, STILL says the gap to the next service is 20k+ and no different to if it was primary used as a motorway car in light traffic.
I suppose today with our me-me-me (and stuff everyone else) society that I'm not surprised that so many people go along with obviously sharp practices designed to pretend a car is afforable to run (when it isn't), but also so many idiots (IMHO) buy into this buying so-called 'premium' make cars at the 5-7yo mark and then wonder why they lose ££££ scrapping the car when the engine goes bang a year or two down the road.
I suppose they've only got on one side a (possibly, but seemingly not by some comments here) guilty conscience or themselves to blame for buying into the hype of long service intervals/oil changes = no problems as the car ages. Ironically this makes more money for the main dealers and manufacturer and far less for the independent workshops who could, in theory, do a LOT of business keeping older cars on the road in a cost-effective way if people bothered to look after them throughout their life. Funny how we always support the small/idependent trader until our neglect of a product to pass the buck onto the next owner (mug) comes into the equation.
Maybe I'm too much of an idealist.
|
