READ THIS FIRST - Why this Blog?

Well the idea of starting this blog begun when my air conditioning system failed in my 4 plus year old Vios 2003. It had been working fine for the past 180,000km, until that day. I knew it was not going to be cheap if I send my car to UMW (Toyota Service Center) because I remembering them quoting me about RM755 just for a regular aircond service, which I didn't agree to pay. I figured at that time, the cost of replacing a failed parts won't cost that much anyway, therefore I opted not to service my car's air conditioning system.


As I had to travel to Penang the next day, I needed to quickly go to a workshop that will attend to my aircond problem immediately. It was a hassle to go back to UMW Service Centre because they require owner to make appointments before they can attend to the problem. As a result, I randomly drove to a workshop and fortunately met with a mechanic that had worked on Toyota cars (was formerly working as air-conditioning service contractor for Toyota Service Centers). To cut the long story short, the replacement part, cost me about RM630, and the mechanic also took time to explain how Toyota Service Center came out with the recommended service intervals. It was through this interaction that I concluded Toyota's recommended air-cond service interval does not necessarily guarantee longer life. It only meant more revenue for Toyota.


Lets work out a scenario to examine how much money Toyota Service Center makes. Say for example, Toyota rolled out about 20k units of Vios a year, so that will amount to 60k units in 3 years. Each new vehicle is dished out with 3 years warranty (or 100,000km), and that leads to about 10 basic maintenance services for every 10,000km and 2 major maintenance for every 40,000km that must be carried out exclusively in Toyota Service Center in order to maintain warranty validity. Assuming each customer pays about RM300 for basic maintenance (Synthetic Oil) and RM400 for major maintenance (replace spark plugs, ATF oil, Air Filter and etc), its total regular maintenance expenditure would amount to about RM4,000 in 3 years. From this recommended service interval, Toyota Service Center will carve a business potential of RM80 million in maintenance revenue annually just from one single model, Vios. Thats a lot of money. Imagine what kind of revenue that they rake in, when they set similar service intervals for air-cond service.


I've been sending my Vios to Toyota Service Center for regular maintenance for the past 4 years. My thoughts to remain loyal changed when I had to part ways with some of my savings to replace a faulty air-cond bearing and electrical magnet, and it further enforced my decision of switching upon learning how much money the Service Center makes from Toyota owners. I felt it was time to consider alternatives.


This is the main purpose that I started this blog, to share my experiences in exploring alternatives. My objective is to find alternate ways to lower maintenance cost of my Vios and gain a few hundreds of ringgits in savings through more efficient way of running my car. As I explored in many auto forum sites and blogs, I learned couple of ways to achieve this goal. As I go along, I will compile these information in this blog. You can access and decide what you want to do with your car. Hopefully you will find this blog useful to you. If you have questions, pls feel free to post in.