Four Things You Should Know How To Do That Will Help Reduce Your Car Maintenance Costs

If you're the type of person who drives away from BMW dealers without thinking about car maintenance costs, taking your car back to the garage whenever it needs something doing to it, check through these four points to help you reduce the amount of money that you spend maintaining your car.

1. Change the oil - when changing the oil is mentioned, a lot of people instantly assume that they can't do it themselves as it's too technical and leave it for a garage to do.

The truth is that the process is a lot easier than you're likely to think and is simply matter of unscrewing the plug on the bottom of the oil tank and letting the old oil drain out in full before you replace the plug and top it up with new oil.

You can even change the oil filter if you so wish, as it's a process that requires for you to do nothing more than unscrew, by hand, the old oil filter and screw in the new one.

2. Change a wheel - whilst a lot of people think they know how to change a car wheel, when they come to do it, it's not as easy you first think and requires for you to have gone through the process once to know how to do it effectively.

One of the most common mistakes that people make is by jacking the car up first and then attempting to loosen the wheel nuts. Whilst this in theory is possible, you'll find it a lot easier if you loosen the nuts slightly when the car is on the ground and then continue unscrewing them once the car is jacked up.

3. Check your tyres - there's two parts related to this point, both of which some people might take as a given and something that they do regularly, but there'll be plenty of others that don't know how to do either.

The first point is to know your car's correct tyre pressure. Keep in mind that this isn't how you actually inflate your tyres, but what the correct pressure should be.

Not every car is the same (in fact, not every tyre on your car will be the same) and it's therefore recommended to increase the life of your tyres, as well as to aid with maintaining an optimum miles per gallon ratio, you know exactly what level your tyres should be inflated to.

The second part is to be able to know when your tyres need changing due to having insufficient tread.

Yes, everyone will be able to pick out a bald tyre against a tyre with tread, but do you know that the minimum amount of tread you can have on your tyres, by law, is 1.6milimetres, but that it's recommended to change them when it's 3mm? This is because your car can take an extra 26 foot to stop when travelling at 50 miles per hour if your tyres only have 1.6milimetres of tread on them.

4. Check your lights - this might seem like a plain and simple one that everyone can do, but imagine you're checking your lights; how do you do it?

Chances are you'll turn your lights on, put your hazards on and walk around the car, checking that they're all bright enough and none of them are faulty or not working all together.

Sound about right?

What about your full beams?

And you can't forget the light bulb that illuminates your rear registration plate - if this is out, your car will fail its MOT.