My girlfriend has a fairly recent Honda Accord. It’s a regular family sedan type car, with the only concession to anything sporty being the V-tech engine.
Today, she got the oil changed at EZLube. They tried to upsell her on all kinds of things (the car has ~ 90,000 miles on it):
[ul]
[li]Synthetic oil (instead of regular)[/li][li]Engine flush (to get “sludge” out of it)[/li][li]Radiator coolant flush[/li][li]Power steering flush[/li][li]Clean fuel injectors[/li][/ul]
Are any of these services useful and/or necessary? She only uses it to get from “A” to “B” - no sporty driving or anything like that. The Honda dealer had told her previously that the engine flush is never necessary with Hondas since the engine is sealed, so sludge can’t accumulate.
The same EZLube shop also suggested similar things to me when I took my car in there a few months back (mine’s a 1997 BMW 328iC, ~45,000 miles at the time.)
So, is this just cynical marketeering by the EZLube guys, betting (rightly) that she and I wouldn’t know enough to argue about it? (For the record, I told her to just have them use regular oil, and make sure it gets changed every 3,000 miles. She insisted on letting them clean the fuel injectors since last time she did this, “the car ran better”.)
IANAM so can’t comment conclusively on that list but frankly I think that a lot of it is high profit for the shop and not really necessary for the car. Check the Honda maintenance schedule for her car and you’ll see what the manufacturer recommends and they ought to know.
I do know that many of these places will happily charge you $10 for windshield wiper fluid fillups and $30-40 for an air filter (ten bucks at the Kragen, installation as complicated as changing a light bulb).
Changing oil every 3000 miles is way more than you need. It’s pushed by Jiffy Lube and other oil change places. Check the owner’s manual and you will probably find that they recommend once every 5000 miles. Consumers Union did a big test a few years ago involving NYC taxi cabs (that is, a big fleet of vehicles being given hard, daily usage, lots of start & stop driving and crappy weather) and found that there is no detectable difference between changing at 3000 vs. 5000 miles.
My standard response to this type of question is, follow whatever they tell you to do in the owners manual. First thing I’d bet is that the manual does not suggest changing oil at 3,000 miles, probably more like 5,000 or 7,500 depending on usage. They designed and built the engine, they know when regular maintenance is required.
Do not buy any regular maintenance services that are suggested by a garage/lube joint unless it matches with the maintenance schedule in your manual. I had my local lube joint do a radiator flush when I needed one, but I did it on MY schedule, not theirs.
Doing maintenance on random whims is a sure way to forget that your timing belt needs changing, letting the thing break while you’re on the highway, totally destroying your engine. If you really want to help her out, go over the maintenance schedule with her and make sure what services she needs and doesn’t need in the near future. That way, she doesn’t have to argue with anyone about anything, she just tells them what to do.
I am a mechanic, and the only things you MIGHT consider are the coolant flush and the injection clean. If you’ve never changed your antifreeze and it has that many miles on it, it may be time to do it. The machine we use where I work can backflush the system and cleans much better than just draining/replacing the antifreeze. The injector cleaner I would consider if the car is running badly and there are no other problems such as needing a tune up. The power steering flush would only be useful if your power steering system was making some kind of noise, and you wanted to try something other than replacing the pump. Forget the engine flush and the synthetic oil. If you change your oil regularly you shouldn’t need either. Some people prefer synthetic oil, but your car should get to 200K miles without it, and the rest of the car would probably be worn out entirely beyond that point.
I used to be a mechanic and I 2[sup]nd[/sup] what mike1dog says, only the coolant flush and injector cleaning are worth doing. And those only as mileage, time and/or engine roughness dictate.
A power steering system is very reliable and not subject to any incredibly high stresses. Therefore flushing & replacing its fluid is unnecessary. Just keep it filled.
An engine flush is usually a bad idea. Breaking loose any engine deposits just makes it more likely that they’ll clog up tiny oil passages and cause damage thru oil starvation (this BTW is also exactly what Slick50 and Duralube etc. wind up doing).
And that bit about a Honda engine being ‘sealed’ is nonsense. I think maybe he thought you were talking about having the engine exterior degreased or something.
Synthetic oil is also not worth the expense. It’s not snake oil, it does exactly what it claims to. But the only benefit really worth having is the low viscosity (i.e. thickness) at very low temperatures. And then only if you live in an extremely cold climate (routinely below 0°F).
I’m going to second what mike1dog said.
My wife routinely calls me to get my pre-approval when the EZ-Lube types try to upsell her on services.
A Valvoline Instant Oil Change employee told her “gee whiz, your motor oil looks awful black and dirty (shows her black-looking motor oil), you should have your engine flushed”.
The color of motor oil is NOT a good indicator of anything, and will even vary based on the dyes that were originally used to make the oil. Some motor oil is lighter amber, some deep amber, and some is DARK GREEN fer Chris-sakes.
Scammers.
MY Toyota just rolled over 400,000 miles. Orig motor (22re)
I’ve only changed fluid, an alternator, and a waterpump.
No other of the services you mention.
Gasiline is was of the best solvents out there. If a fuel injector gets clogged, it’s usually removed for service. The “cleaning” they tout you is nonsense.
I"t’s very rare a fuel injector gets dirty and clogged."
This from Bob Stevens, Service manager at Guy Schmidt Cad/Pontiac/GMC in Glendale Ca. Same answer from my neighbor, a top mechanic for Galphin Jag/Aston Martin in Northridge Ca.
“All those extra services beyond simple fluid changes are non sense” to them.
Heh, I used to work at one of these monkey shops. The intervals are a scam (although the services are not). I’d take the car in only when your manual dictates. 3000 miles used to be the interval for older vehicles (like my '88 Bonneville and my 92 Voyager) but my '03 Matrix has a 5000 mile oil change interval so I update the little sticker they give me with the proper “next oil change” mileage.
Save the money on the injector cleaning and just buy a bottle of Seafoam at the parts store. The experts in my car club swear by it. It can also be added to the oil or sucked directly into the intake. (You need to know a carburetor from a water pump in order to do the latter, but not much else.)
The importance of cleaning the radiator depends on the car. I’m a Thunderbird guy. My LX needs a radiator flushing about as much as any other car. It is a lot more important for my Supercoupe though. It is very important to flush it at least once a year. I just open the drain valve and put a water hose where the cap goes and run it for a few minutes.
As for conventional versus synthetic oil, I use synthetic (Mobil 1 to be exact). When you consider that it lasts around 8,000 miles instead of 3,000 to 5,000, it hardly costs any more. It’s a much cheaper upgrade than people think. Conventional oil does a good job if you change it regularly, but I drive with spirit so I use the best. Visit www.bobtheoilguy.com for more information about oil. Note that not all oils marked as synthetic are truely synthetic.
As for the other things, I agree with what has been said.
And finally, I’d like to chime in about the OP’s first sentence,
[quote]
“It’s a regular family sedan type car, with the only concession to anything sporty being the V-tech engine.”]
Is that what they told you at the dealership? Because the V-TEC engine system doesn’t mean squat in terms of “sporty” or not. I believe it’s in most of their models. I have a 1995 del Sol Si with the V-TEC engine. Do you know what that means?
Variable Valve Timing Electronically Controlled. It has something to do with your timing, which has something to do with how many rpms your engine idles and revs at. Mechanics, please correct me if I’m wrong, but “V-TEC” is one of those snazzy sounding buzzwords that means, “We got a 'puter up here in yonder engine, keeping the timing straight.” It doesn’t make your car any stronger, faster, or bionic.
You want to look for a faster car, look for lower torque ratios, printed right there on the sticker. (Can you tell I hate car salesmen as much as I hate the repair guys?)
Oh, and another thing, make sure you change your transmission fluid when you’re supposed to if you have an automatic transmission. I put off changing it because I was going to open my transmission to put in some modifications which also kept getting put off. After around 50,000 miles, the oil got so thick the car would jerk until the tranny warmed. Luckily no damage was done to it. The early 4R70W transmissions run notoriously hot so you can probably get more miles than I did, but don’t let it get to the point I did. Transmission rebuilds are not cheap.
It’s far less important in a manual transmission since there are no wet clutches. The gears hardly leave any residue in the fluid. I think my manual recommends changing it every 100,000 miles or 3 years. Just do whatever your manual says.
I am a mechanic, and essentially agree with what’s been posted. My take on the mechanical details is below, but here are the two most important things to know:
These types of places train their personnel to sell, not to have good mechanical judgment. If you deal with them, you’re generally best off to decline any additional services offered, unless they happen to correspond with maintenance needs verified by another source which is known to be reliable.
If you deal with an honorable service establishment, you won’t have to try to learn what’s horsecrap and what’s not. You can trust them not to try to sell you stuff you don’t need. It’s much easier to learn how to find honorable auto service than it is to learn every scam the less-than-honorable ones can pull.
Synthetic oil (instead of regular) – Not a bad thing to use, not a necessary thing to use, reasonable case can be made either way Engine flush (to get “sludge” out of it) – Potentially dangerous to the engine. Change oil regularly to prevent sludge, and to help clean it out. Radiator coolant flush – Best guide is to measure the pH (acidity level) of the coolant. Generally needed every 30,000 miles, less often with extended life antifreeze. Power steering flush – I’ve done this three times in a 30-year career. Clean fuel injectors – Years ago was an appropriate thing to do for most cars, now needed by a much smaller percentage of them. Lacking a performance problem, I’d say a can of good cleaner in the tank every few months is usually more than adequate.
There are probably a dozen models of car that need it this year.
The highest-volume among those are probably certain Volkswagens and Audis, especially the diesels and turbos out of that line.
Any car reccomending a 0W30 or 5W40 is reccomending synthetic, since those grades are not viable in conventional oil.
There are probably 3 or 4 cars I could think of that would inarguably profit from synthetic oil that don’t reccomend it in the manual. Every one of those actually has a design flaw that the superior extreme temperature performance of some synthetic oils would help to compensate for.
Certain model years of Camry V6 would fit in this category. Some would argue that particular models of Dodge Durango fit too.