Car servicing on lockdown: should you skip it?

Not using your car that much on lockdown? You’re not actually thinking about letting the servicing slide, are you? Bad idea…

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So, a couple of reports ago I covered the somewhat happy reduction in holiday road death, thanks to the 15 Corinthians and the Easter bunny locking us all down while freedom and the economy gets crucified. (Resurrection: pending)

In other words, people just aren’t driving as much. So we’re not croaking as often in car crashes. The roads are, like Woody Harrelson in Zombieland meets Mila Jovovich in Resident Evil. Your car is sitting there in the driveway, forlornly, hoping you will ride her to the supermarket again, some day soon.

Unfortunately, your car’s service requirements are not mitigated by a zombie pandemic. In fact, the kind of driving many people are doing right now, the infrequent supermarket sorties once or twice a week, Operation Dinner In, Again (#RobertRedford); that kinda driving is hell on earth for engine oil. This is why >>

Engine oil gets very contaminated during short trips, and the contaminants break it down. Wear rates skyrocket. That’s the truth of it. It doesn’t feel like hard work for a car, but it is hell down there.

The car suffers in silence. Don’t they always. Except Volkswagens and the Three-pronged Suppository, of course. And Jeeps. They tend to complain loudly and often.

Every Ming Moll I have ever met has been such a staunch advocate of regular servicing. Go figure. And bolt-on accessories. Genuine is best, obviously, but it is possible to be far too hard a marker on this. I think you’d agree. Some aftermarket add-ons really are inspirational. Or at least novel. Just saying.

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No-go zone

So, a couple of things on servicing: Firstly, dealerships and independent mechanics remain open, so there’s really no excuse not to get your car serviced on time.

Secondly, a lot of people are going to be shifting from distance-based servicing to time-based servicing this year. Or they should, even if they don’t know it. See, cars get serviced on a time or distance basis - whichever comes first.

For mainstream cars out there in Australian driveways now, the two common intervals are six months or 10,000 kilometres, or 12 months or 15,000 kilometres. 

Most new cars are 12 months/15,000, but a lot of cars out there are six months/10,000. It’s in the manual... take a lot if you don’t know your servicing interval.

The key point here is: The ‘service due’ trigger is whatever clocks over first, the time or the distance. You can’t go, ‘I’m at the time, but I’ll wait for the distance’. A lot of people do this and it’s risky. This will happen, increasingly, as people drive less on lockdown.

If your car is still under warranty and you miss a service, because you rolled on the time, even though the kms had not yet come up, because: zombie apocalypse, you were busy building a bunker in the backyard and lining it with hoarded toilet tissue - whatever.

And if the powertrain fails - for whatever reason - there’s a really good chance your warranty claim will be denied. And you can bitch about it, threaten to go to that arsehole… ahhh… what’s his name? That guy all the carmakers hate? On YouTube... I forget...

If that happens, you won’t have a leg to stand on. They’ll have a point. You will lose.

Likewise, if your car is out of warranty but still a kinda new, you’ll lose any protection you might have had under the ‘Acceptable Quality’ Consumer Guarantee in Australian Consumer Law. Because not servicing your car counts as abuse - and abuse is not covered either under warranty or under Consumer Law.

The cruel thing here is that the failure to service your car might be completely unrelated to whatever it is that blows up expensively on the car. But if the manufacturer can join even the most tenuous of dots between these two events, your claim will be toast. And it’ll be expensive. Which is why the biggest defibrillators in dealerships are located in the service departments.

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Your mansplaining mechanic is not an excuse to avoid servicing.

Scheduled hit

Finally, remember that your factory warranty cannot be leveraged against getting your car serviced by the dealer. 

Manufacturers and dealers want you to presume that only authorised dealers can provide servicing. But in fact, denying a warranty or consumer law claim because you didn’t get your car serviced by them is A) bullshit and B) quite illegal.

Dealership servicing is typically expensive, so if money’s tight because of lockdown and the apocalypse and the fact that the Prime Mincer is an unmitigated dick who excels at only one thing (sucking at everything he does) then consider saving a few bucks by getting your car serviced independently.

The prerequisites there are:

A) The dude with his hands on the tools needs to be a qualified mechanic,

B) The service needs to be done on time and according to the schedule, and;

C) The parts don’t need to be genuine (like the brake pads or the oil filter etc), but they do need to be fit for purpose. In other words, a quality aftermarket oil filter, brake pads is fine.

Just don’t skip the servicing, whatever you do during the zombie apocalypse. 

The situation has liberated you from the imperative to catch up with your mother-in-law over Easter, perhaps, but you can’t escape the obligation to service your car quite so easily.

If you do, you’ll be out in the cold if something goes wrong.

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