Owning a car represents one of the biggest investments a person makes. Next to a house, owning a car is probably the next biggest investment. Not unlike maintaining a house, car maintenance can be quite costly. However, there are ways and means to help you reduce on your expenses in maintaining a car.

• Treat your passengers and your car delicately. Accelerate softly and don’t act like you’re in a Grand Prix start line at each traffic light. Gently accelerating, cornering and braking will lower fuel consumption and stretch the life of tires, engine and brakes components.

• Be sure that you use the most efficient gear. Keeping the RPMs low will reduce the fuel consumption. Don’t cruise in fourth gear on the highway if your car has fifth gear.

• Unload heavy items if you don’t need to carry them around. The heavier the vehicle the more fuel will be required to overcome its inertia during an acceleration

• If you’re stuck at a railway crossing or in a traffic jam for more than two or three minutes, turn off the car.

• Keeping the car well maintained may make it more efficient and generating fewer harmful emissions.

• If the car doesn’t run on unleaded gas you should have it converted. It’s worthwhile to do the conversion because unleaded gas is considerably cheaper than leaded gas, you’ll save money and reducing harmful emissions as well.

• Drive at the most efficient speed especially on highways. You use 25% less fuel driving at 55mph than when you drive at 75mph.

• Keep the tires at the perfect pressure: if your tires are under-inflated by 6psi, you could be wasting 5% of your fuel.

• Remove the roofrack, if you don’t need it, as it makes your car less aerodynamic and you’ll use more fuel.

• An improperly adjusted carburetor contributes to huge fuel inefficiency. Another reason for keeping the car well maintained is that it would be less likely to fail and leave you stranded. Though you’ll never know when the car will break down, it might cost you a good deal of time and money.

• Call the nearest garages before choosing which one to use. Big dealer garages frequently charge much more than smaller local garages

• Make sure to ask the garage to contact you before performing any serious and expensive repair works that you haven’t instructed them to do. It’s easier to negotiate the price before the task is started than after it is finished.

• If you believe that the garage hasn’t fixed a few things, take the car back and if necessary watch your car being repaired even if you don’t actually understand it.

• If, you think the bill is too high, ask them for more details. It is always a great idea to get an estimate before starting the work, even for trivial jobs.

Car servicing costs mostly consist of parts and labor. The labor charge is usually fixed, whilst the parts may vary in price depend on whether they’re ‘genuine’ (made by your car manufacturer), or made by third-party companies.

Tags: cars, expenses, frugal