Brown Automotive Repair understands how it can be with oil changes. You’re busy and you really don’t feel like you have time to take your car in to get the oil changed. The problem is that this small maintenance step is far more important than you might realize. Here’s what can happen if you avoid oil changes for too long.
Gas Mileage Decreases
Engine oil breaks down as it ages, which means that it’s not doing as much of the hard work it was doing. From your perspective, you might not notice that happening until you realize that your gas mileage is worsening. When the engine has to work harder, it uses more fuel to do so. That means you’re at the gas pumps more often than you expect.
Engine Wear Increases
The main job of engine oil is to keep the parts of your car’s engine clean and lubricated. As the oil circulates through the engine, it picks up dirt, debris, and even microscopic metal pieces, although that’s not ideal, either. Older oil is dirtier because it’s been doing all of that cleaning and lubricating for several thousand miles. That means that the oil doesn’t have room to keep picking up all the gunk, and the engine experiences more wear.
Overheating Is More Common
Part of the job of lubricating the engine also means that the engine oil cools the engine. This is crucial, because the coolant system does a good bit of the cooling, but it doesn’t do so all on its own. When engine oil is dirty and it has less of the viscosity that it had when it was new. This can be why you might have plenty of coolant, but still find your car running hotter than usual.
Engine Failure Is a Possibility
If you let your oil changes slide too long, you might find that your car’s engine completely fails. You might have some warning signs before this happens, but that depends on how bad the situation truly is. Dirty oil doesn’t just break down, some of it burns off. So you’ve likely got lower amounts of oil circulating than the car truly needs, which makes the problem worse. Eventually, something has to give and it will likely be your engine.
Don’t let this happen to your car. Get on a regular oil change schedule. Brown Automotive Repair in Trussville, AL can help. Just give us a call and we’ll set up an appointment for you.