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Preventive car maintenance…Discover what fleet owners already know to get the most of their vehicles.

When driving expensive luxury vehicles, preventive car maintenance cannot be neglected because although the vehicle is already under a regular maintenance schedule, this is the insurance that expensive repair cost can be avoided. This holds true especially if the vehicles are numerous as in the case of a fleet where there are different drivers who are using it which allows different driving habits in using the vehicles. There are important highlights of preventive car maintenance which you should consider if you were to avoid emergency repair surprises.

Preventive maintenance as word implies means those actions performed on the vehicle on the following guidelines:

Routine test and inspection out of the scope of regular maintenance
Making preventive maintenance checklist of critical components for regular monitoring
Gathering of routine and inspection information which could be used for analysis.

There will be a lot of preventive maintenance software available for this fleet but I would highly recommend the above in starting such program. In the regular maintenance, although the routine oil and filter changes are performed, an additional procedure is added. Instead of just changing the oil, an oil sample is taken and send to a laboratory. This extra process is made for every power train which is later analyzed. Example; an engine oil sample is tested for presence of bearing metals which indicates a worn engine component. The same can be carried on transmission oil sample which could be evaluated for presence of bronze which indicates bushing failure. Analysis like this gives us the luxury of determining if future repairs can be scheduled or budgeted before the actual breakdown occurs. A checklist will come into play when we want to get an input from the drivers in their daily operation which again will tell us if there is abnormal usage of gasoline or irregular performance like noise which otherwise is not evident if the vehicle is in the garage. Finally, once we have these reports from the lab and a daily checklist, we can set a weekly or monthly analysis meeting among our technicians so we can determine maintenance priorities and arrange a maintenance schedule.

Preventive car maintenance importance cannot be under estimated and this holds true also especially if the car fleet has different makes and hard to control. There are lots of maintenance programs readily available but I would rank this high as one of the most important. Example are those latest luxury models used in limousines, taxis where customer satisfaction is in great demand in order to operate. The last thing you need is when you have a funeral and your limousine is being used and suddenly, the vehicle breaks down in the middle of the city. This will not only embarrass the driver but your company itself because everybody will see it. This is why top companies in the fleet industry will not allow this at all cost because it means the beginning of the downfall of their services.

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