For advice on how to make your minivan last longer, visit us at Autotronics of ST Peter
111 Jefferson Avenue
St. Peter, MN 56082
507.934.9290

These days many people in the Cleveland area are really committed to making their cars last a long time. First thing: you’ve got to start with what you’ve got. It’d be ideal if people started with a brand new car, never missed a scheduled service item, paid attention to the severe service maintenance schedule and had regular inspections. But if you’ve had the vehicle for a while, or bought it used, its maintenance history is what it is; and that’s where you start.

Go through the maintenance schedule for your minivan and see what’s been done and when. Have your St. Peter service advisor at Autotronics of ST Peter do an inspection and come up with a list of stuff that needs to be done. Review the list and prioritize the work, talk about budget and make a plan to get caught up.

Making a plan is so important. Suppose you go in for an oil change and learn you need your cooling system serviced, a transmission service and are coming up on a timing belt replacement in the next 5,000 miles. You might be pretty overwhelmed.

To make it even more stressful, these are all very important systems that are expensive to repair if there’s a failure. In consultation with your St. Peter service advisor, you might decide to take care of the transmission on this visit, set an appointment for the cooling system service next month and get an estimate for the timing belt replacement so you’ll be prepared for it in a few months.

Having a plan for taking care of these important services will set your mind at ease.

Sometimes busy St. Peter residents dream about going back to the “simpler” days of our grandparents. But if you could travel back in time and take a road trip around Cleveland in a Model T, you might change your mind. The improved designs and quality of today’s automobiles have significantly reduced the amount of time St. Peter drivers spend at the side of the road during breakdowns. With proper maintenance, today’s vehicles can stay on the road longer than ever before.

Some of those improvements, however, have led to higher repair costs. For example, older cars often broke down from vapor lock. Gas vaporized while traveling from the gas tank to the fuel pump. No gas, no power. The car quits going. The solution was simple — you just sat by the road until the car would start up again. Today’s St. Peter drivers would hardly tolerate that kind of inconvenience; and it’s likely that yesterday’s St. Peter motorists didn’t care much for it, either. So on today’s vehicles, the fuel pump is actually located inside the gas tank. Problem solved. No more vapor lock. The downside is that now it costs a lot more to repair or replace a fuel pump at St. Peter area auto service centers.

St. Peter motorists should certainly should be grateful for the improvements in auto design that keep us off the side of the road, but it comes at a price. Car care in St. Peter is simply more expensive than it used to be. So if you think about it, MN auto owners can avoid many expensive minivan repairs by preventive maintenance. If we plan for maintenance, we can avoid a lot of costly repairs.

Edmunds.com has a great calculator to help you estimate car repair costs. Cleveland motorists can enter the year, make and model for your vehicle, and the calculator will give you an estimate of what it will cost to service and repair your vehicle for the next five years. It also estimates the costs for depreciation, financing, insurance, taxes and fuel.

These estimates can be used to set up a reasonable budget to manage your car repair and maintenance expenses. Of course, they are just estimates. All Kasota motorists know that life hands out a lot of surprises — some good, some bad, so there’s no way to know exactly what your minivan will need. But a good estimate helps you make a good budget, and a good budget is always helpful when it comes to car repairs.

Let’s look at one example. For a 2003 Toyota Camry, here is Edmunds’ estimate for the cost of repairs and maintenance for the next three years (as of the time of this writing):

According to this estimate, the owner needs to set aside about $83 a month to defray the costs of car care. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the payment on a new automobile. And even if car repairs are more expensive than expected, that $83 is going to make the bills a lot less painful.

Just a bit of auto advice from Autotronics of ST Peter: If you like new cars and can afford them, then buy them. But if you are buying a new car every few years because you’re afraid of the higher repair costs for older vehicles, then you ought to take a second look at the numbers. You can save a lot of money on car payments and MN auto insurance with an older St. Peter vehicle, and preventive auto maintenance can help you avoid most car repair bills. And if you budget for critical preventive maintenance in MN, it can become as routine as a car payment — only a whole lot less expensive!