Each year, the Car Care Counsel supports two months for vehicle owners to pay extra care to their vehicle’s care and preventative maintenance. October is Fall Car Care Month, and April is National Car Care Month. With April fast approaching, now is the perfect time to start thinking about your vehicle’s spring care, and a visit to your friendly Chicagoland Jiffy Lube can help you easily and quickly identify all your vehicle’s needs to keep your vehicle healthy and family safe through the spring and summer months.
You Spring Clean Your Home…. Don’t Leave Your Vehicle Winterized
As winter’s gloom passes and spring’s life begins to brighten days, it’s time to give your vehicle a spring cleaning. Start by removing all your winter gear from the trunk and interior of the vehicle. It’s also time to rinse all that salt and road grit from your vehicle with its first wash and wax of spring. Now, you have your vehicle looking spring-ready to the naked eye, it’s time to ensure the mechanical elements are road-worthy for spring and summer. Find a Jiffy Lube near me so that you can ensure your preventative and spring care maintenance is done with professional attention to every detail and nothing gets overlooked on the checklist.
Your Spring Vehicle Maintenance Checklist
At Jiffy Lube, service center technicians can preform an array of services to ensure your vehicle is roadworthy for those upcoming warm weather road trips and routine mileage.
Nothing is worse and more unsafe than sitting on an unfamiliar roadway miles and miles from home because a preventable problem wasn’t addressed beforehand. So, don’t let your refreshed exterior lull you into thinking that’s the only spring cleaning your vehicle needs.
Here is the five-point recommended spring vehicle maintenance checklist brought to you by your local Chicagoland Jiffy Lube:
1. Oil Change
Your engine is one of the most costly mechanical parts of your vehicle. As such, you want to ensure it has the care it needs to stay clean, cool, and functioning with ease. A large part of this care is in lubricating the mechanical parts with motor oil. Of course, this oil and its accompanying filters age. Driving past the life of your oil can result in the engine preforming poorly, consuming more fuel than normal, and even costly mechanical failures. So, a top priority in your spring maintenance should be getting your oil and filters routinely changed.
How often should motor oil be changed? Look to your vehicle’s owner manual for the vehicle manufacturer’s recommendation, which will vary per make and model and your own driving habits and environmental conditions. Can’t find the info? A Jiffy Lube tech can always look up the information for you.
Don’t just get any oil change, either. Go with a comprehensive oil change, such as a Jiffy Lube’s Signature Oil Change. There’s no need for an appointment, and whether you need a high mileage, synthetic blend, full synthetic, or conventional oil change, Jiffy Lube’s expert technicians will perform a comprehensive preventative maintenance check, change filters, and inspect and fill all the essential fluid systems in your vehicle. They’ll even clean your windows and vacuum the interior of your vehicle after the oil change.
One of the great things about a Jiffy Lube Signature Oil Change is that it comes with an invaluable service you can take advantage of between your vehicle’s oil changes. It’s called the Top-Off service, and it’s complimentary up to 3,000 miles after your oil change for up to 2 quarts of fluid. Just stop by anytime for a service tech to top-off all your vital fluids like motor oil, transmission, washer, differential, and power steering. Now, that’s comprehensive service, right?
2. Battery Check And/Or Battery Replacement
From energy storage to powering the starter and ignition, proper battery care is critical to your vehicle cranking upon demand. It also powers the electronic components of your vehicle, such as the time clock, when the vehicle isn’t cranked.
Batteries only last so long, which is usually three to five years. To get the fullest life out of a battery, you’ll need to have battery maintenance. This routine maintenance also identifies problems early so that you aren’t left with a vehicle that won’t crank.
Spring battery maintenance is particularly important because cold temperatures have likely deteriorated the life of a battery and wet and bumpy road conditions have a tendency to cause problems like corrosion and/or lose connections or mounting. These aren’t problems you want to go undetected.
It’s inconvenient on the best day when it happens in your driveway or workplace parking lot, but a dead battery can put your safety at risk and be a major expense when it happens in unfamiliar locations and far from home. You might not be able to rely upon a battery, but you can call upon Jiffy Lube’s Battery Replacement Services to help keep your engine starting reliability.
At Jiffy Lube, you’ll get your battery tested to ensure it’s working properly. Good batteries will get terminals cleaned and connections tightened. If cables are loose, they’ll be tightened to prevent a disaster down the road. If the battery’s life is at an end and doesn’t meet the manufacturer’s performance standards, the Jiffy Lube tech will replace it and properly dispose of your used battery.
3. Tire Tread And Tire Pressure
The only points of contact between the roadway and your vehicle are its tires. It’s the main factor in everyday driving handling, traction, and stopping ability. It’s a major point of contingency for your safety and driving comfort, especially when roadways already have poor conditions due to weather or deterioration.
Given the above, it’s imperative that you have your tires routinely checked for wear and tear, tread issues, pressure, and the condition of your spare. While tires have a guideline on how many miles you can get out of them, such as 60k miles, don’t allow that estimate to negate the need for routine tire checks and maintenance. Road conditions and driving habits can lessen that mileage estimate and cause bruises, tread wear, and other factors that can shorten the life of any tire and place you in danger of a tire failure.
Tires need to be rotated regularly, and they’ll need to be replaced if damaged beyond repair or the tread is at an unsafe depth. Spring maintenance is the perfect time to optimize the performance, handling, and safety of your tires at Jiffy Lube.
Your Jiffy Lube Tire Inspection will enable a certified tech to ensure your tires are inflated to the manufacturer’s recommendations, check for excessive wear and tear damages, and a safe depth of tread. If any damages aren’t repairable, your tech will recommend the best tire replacement for your driving habits, budget, and vehicle.
4. Wiper Blades
Heat from the sun breaks down the plastic of a windshield wiper, and winter months bring damage to the plastic as the wiper runs across the coarse and heavy grains of ice and snow.
Anyone who’s ever allowed their wiper blades to go past their life likely knows just what an unassuming role they have in visibility. They’re something most drivers take for granted until it’s poring down rain and the cracked, skipping, blurring, or streaking blades make it unable to see. Don’t wait until you’re forced to pull off the road for your safety due to poorly performing wipers causing you not to be able to see.
Spring vehicle maintenance, especially given the rain of the season, is the ideal time to get your wipers inspected and ensure they’re up to par with Jiffy Lube’s Windshield Wiper Replacement service.
5. Vehicle Lights
Your vehicle lights help you see the road so that your scope of vision is sufficient to see and maneuver against things ahead and beside you, but they also help other motorists see you so that they don’t rear end you as you’re turning or stopping. Having a light out is a hazard to both yourself and other motorists, and it’s a top cause of vehicle accidents.
Yet, since you spend most of your time in, not watching your vehicle drive, it can be difficult to know when you have a light out. Drivers without routine light checks can unassumingly drive days, weeks, and even months not knowing they have a light failure. Spring vehicle maintenance at Jiffy Lube will help you avoid this potential for disaster.
Your Jiffy Lube tech will test all exterior lights and replace any bulbs that are out. Since bulbs operate from the same timeframe point, your service tech will likely recommend that you replace the pair to any burnt out light bulb since it’s failure is likely to follow.
Chicagoland Jiffy Lube Is Ready To Get Your Spring Vehicle Care In Motion
Roll up to any Chicagoland Jiffy Lube Service Center location to get all your vehicle’s spring cleaning efficiently and professionally covered under one roof. You never need an appointment, and you can rest assured that recommendations will always be aligned with your vehicle’s manufacturer’s recommendations for maintenance and service.
Ready to get your spring vehicle care rolling without even making a purchase? Google Jiffy Lube near me and select your local Chicagoland Jiffy Lube. Why Jiffy Lube?
At Jiffy Lube, you’ll get a free inspection on your battery; wipers; tires; lights; and, in select locations, even your brakes just for stopping by today. Just like that, your Jiffy Lube has checked off a goodly portion of your spring vehicle maintenance checklist for free.
Jiffy Lube® recommends following manufacturer recommendations, where applicable, for maintenance schedules and service intervals.
Not all services are offered at each Jiffy Lube® location. Please check with your local Jiffy Lube® service center for specific services offered.
Go to ChicagolandJiffyLube.com for locations and services.