Auto Maintenance Tips for The Fall

In order to ensure maximum performance for your car, proper maintenance is a must. Some maintenance has to be done by a dealer or an auto glass repair shop, but in some instances, if you want to minimize the work a technician has to do, you can perform the maintenance tasks yourself.

Once winter starts approaching, you need to make sure that you take extra care of your car so that it performs well in harsher road conditions. In order to help you, we are giving you a list of tips that will help you minimize the maintenance costs and get your car ready for the winter.

Make Sure That You Check Your Fluids

As winter approaches and the weather is starting to get colder, the fluids in your car become more viscous, and they cannot perform as well as they do during the summer. As the weather changes, you also need to make sure that you have the right type of windshield washer fluid, motor oil, and antifreeze in your car.

Check Your Brakes

When winter comes and the roads start to get snowy or icy, you need to make sure that you will be able to stop your car safely in a moment’s notice. The stopping mechanism of your car included two main things: your brakes and tires.

Brake pads are the ones doing all the heaving lifting when it comes to baking. When you check them, make sure that there are uneven or unusual signs of wear and tear on the tires. As an additional test, you can take your car out to an open area with no traffic where you can perform a few tests to see how well are your bakes reacting and how quickly are they to stop your car. If stopping your car requires too much effort and you have to press the brake pedal too hard, then something isn’t right. Usually, the brakes should respond almost immediately after you gently press the pedal.

When it comes to tires, this is a really simple task. You don’t need any special measuring instrument in order to determine if your tires are in good health. You can apply the so-called “quarter method”. When you put a quarter into the thread, you can determine the amount you have left. If the tread doesn’t reach George Washington’s hairline, you need to think about replacing your tires.

Visibility

Various systems in your car are there to help your visibility but they can also hinder it. Your car’s windshield for example is one of them, but that is a bit too difficult to maintain without a help of a professional. There are also your headlights and wipers.

Windshield wipers have a very important role in cleaning your windshield when it’s rainy or snowy while you’re on the road. The rubber blades on the end of your wipers should be fairly flexible so that they adhere to the windshield surface perfectly and clean the glass completely in one motion. However, in time, due to wear and tear, the blades can get brittle and rigid and they won’t clean as well as before. Furthermore, they can even damage your auto glass.

Just like wipers wear off in time, so can headlight. Over time, headlights can get cloudy and provide less visibility which isn’t good when you’re driving at night or in a storm. Luckily, there are headlight cleaning kits that you can buy and use, which are good in restoring the most clouded headlights.

Hopefully, these tips will help you prepare for the upcoming winter. In case you see that there are damages on your windshield or auto glass, make sure to contact Auto Glass Express and have them fixed as soon as possible.