Keeping track of the maintenance services you get done on your car should be a common practice. Do it as much as you log your exercise plans or the meals you consume as well as your calorie intake.

Car maintenance logs are an essential tool for vehicle owners as they provide a record of all your maintenance activities. This information is crucial for tracking vehicle details such as repair history, mileage, and parts replacement. With this data, you can make informed decisions regarding managing and maintaining your vehicle, which leads to a more efficient performance and longer life for your car.

You may think that your regular car care professional should be the ones who keep a maintenance log. They probably do, but so should you. It makes you more of a responsible adult who is serious about vehicle ownership. This practice is also a beneficial one as it may save you money and help to keep your car in better shape for optimal performance and safety for you, your passengers, and other road users.

Here are some benefits for keeping a car maintenance log:

Benefits of keeping a car maintenance log

Eliminate guess work and unnecessary maintenance work on your car

As brilliant as you may be, you will forget some things.

Let’s say that you go in for an oil change and your car care professional asks when you last got your tyres rotated. There is a chance you won’t remember. So in an effort to give an answer, you guess and tell them that you haven’t, so they go ahead and rotate your tyres because you want to be safe.

However, when you get home and check your expenditure, it turns out that you rotated your tyres two weeks ago and you could have gone longer without another rotation.

If you kept a car maintenance log, you would have known exactly when your tyres were rotated and you would have saved money and time. Over time, saving on unnecessary maintenance adds up.

Additionally, you don’t have to do any guesswork about when you changed your oil, topped up your fluids, or had your brakes inspected. You could just refer your your maintenance log.

Facilitates effective decision making in car maintenance

Keeping a car maintenance log offer granular insights into how your vehicle behaved in the past. Your log will be useful in determining if you repair or replace a car part or the entire car.

With the maintenance log, you can refer to check how much you have spent on repairs over the last year. This then helps you to calculate the maintenance costs for repairs to keep it and compare it with the economic benefits for selling the car. Once you do the calculations, you notice that the repair cost exceeds the benefits. So, you decide to sell instead of paying for repairs.

Thanks to maintenance log, you would have made a wise financial decision.

You may increase the resale value of your car

A comprehensive car maintenance log increases the resale value of your car for a few reasons.

First, a car maintenance log complete with receipts shows that you have been taking proper care of your vehicle. This is especially important if you have a very high-mileage (or very low-mileage) car. A vehicle that’s been properly maintained and driven 200,000km will be in better condition than one that has been neglected and a car maintenance log is an incredible way to demonstarte this.

In addition, it helps buyers know what they’re getting. A regular car report does not usually tell a potential buyer everything about the car. However, your maintenance log can give them peace of mind, and ensure that they know which parts have been repaired or replaced, and understand the overall condition of the car.

This is the 17th article in the weekly series, ‘Car Care Tips’ where we highlight various aspects of a car, how to provide care and maintenance for optimal performance while ensuring safety. This series may feature your favourite mechanic or others from the motor vehicle industry.

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