San Carlos & Valley Springs Auto Repair

Hey Fans! I just had a conversation with a customer about the "lifetime transmission fluid" in their Toyota. They have about 40,000 miles on their Prius and the ATF is black and burnt. The transmissions of today are fairly complex inside, and hybrid vehicles typically have high voltage electric motors in them. The goal of fluid maintenance is to keep the quality of the lubricating oil/fluid as clean and debris free as possible.  Most vehicles now DO NOT have a serviceable filter inside the transmission, making it even more crucial to keep the fluid clean. The cost to include fluid servicing in a factory scheduled maintenance is relatively inexpensive. What it does for you is keep the burnt and dirty fluid that is naturally starting to occur to a minimum. It does not all not come out of the transmission at once, it is typically only going to be a slight dilution at each fluid change interval. You can maybe see how if it is allowed to get&nb ... read more

Hello all! This is our first Blog post. We just wanted to touch up on our theory/opinions on true maintenance of a vehicle. Since we are Honda vehicle specialists, our view on maintenance goes back a long way. When most vehicles were taken into the shop to be "fixed", certain manufacturers had a "maintenance schedule" for their vehicles. This brought about statements like.."Wow, they last forever".. and "It has how many miles on it?" To say that fluid maintenance and adjustments are important is an understatement. The cleaner you can keep a fluid, the less wear will occur, period. It cost approximately 10 cents less per mile to drive a maintained vehicle as opposed to the exact vehicle non maintained due to premature repairs. If you let your quality repair shop maintain your vehicle on average 3 to 4 days out of the 365 days in a year, you should have a vehicle that runs well with a high reliability factor. A simple approach that we take to help maintain our own cars is setting up a ... read more