Essential Summer Car Care Tips for Optimal Performance and Longevity
As you know, an extended summer vacation allows you to relieve the exhaustion and stress of the year, so most people look forward to the arrival of summer. One of the most important elements that speak to your soul is the enthusiasm to travel in your car because a long vacation means at least two good road trips! 
If you want the freedom to explore new places during your summer vacation, you should pay more attention to summer car maintenance. When your car is exposed to excessive sunlight, heat, salt, and dirt in summer, you may have to deal with serious repair bills.
Even though the car overheating problem is not entirely dependent on the summer, some car parts, especially the engine, tend to overheat more in summer compared to other seasons. For this reason, you need to create a summer car maintenance checklist that will help you avoid serious damage to your car.
However, if you have no idea about summer car maintenance, you should read our summer car maintenance blog. Without further ado, let’s talk about summer car maintenance tips.
Key Car Parts Susceptible to Damage During Summer Conditions
We can sort some of the most important car parts directly exposed to the hot weather as the car body paint, engine, and tires. When the parts mentioned earlier are damaged or broken, you will have to spend a lot of time and money. If you don’t want to interrupt your summer vacation because of annoying car breakdowns, all you need to do is take a quick look at our car maintenance tips for summer.
Essential Tips for Protecting Your Car's Paint in the Summer Months
One of the essential summer maintenance for cars is based on the measures you take to maintain your car’s paint. Unfortunately, your car body is exposed to excessive direct sunlight during summer, which impairs the certain qualities of the car paint. According to where you travel, other elements like salt, hot winds, and bird droppings can also damage your car paint.
For example, if you plan a summer vacation in a coastal environment, you should know that hot winds carry salt that will accumulate in your car body. We can define this salt as a dangerous enemy of steel because it leads to rusting. Also, you can encounter a lot of very acidic bird droppings in your car body, which ruins your car paint.
Accordingly, regularly washing and drying your car will keep your car paint safe. But, there are some significant criteria for how to wash and dry the car in summer. The best time to wash a car in summer is to find a cloudy day or a cool shade, so you never start washing your car without checking the weather forecast.
As for how to dry your car after washing, you should use suitable types of equipment like microfiber towels and blow dryers. These allow you to clean the water spots and preserve your car paint.
Another important measure that you take to maintain the quality of your car paint is to wax your car. Waxing the car creates a kind of durable layer that protects the car paint from detrimental ultraviolet rays. But, when you decide to wax your car during the summer, you should prefer moderate temperatures. If you want to learn more about summer car washing tips, click here to read our in-depth guide. Let’s talk about other important summer car maintenance tips!
How to Change Engine Oil
As you know, engine oil allows moving car parts to run smoothly, so there’s less heat-producing friction. When the engine oil is exposed to excessive heat, your engine oil can break down prematurely. If that happens, you can face some problems like friction, heat, and wear in the engine operation.
For this reason, one of the most necessary car maintenance in summer is to change the engine oil because fresh and clean engine oil makes your car perform better in summer. After getting the suitable materials and tools, all you need to do is follow these steps below:
- Determine the necessary type and amount of oil.
- Gather your filter, wrenches, and other supplies.
- Lift the car onto the jack stands.
- Locate the oil filter and drain plug.
- Drain the oil.
- Tighten the drain plug.
- Change the oil filter.
- Add the new oil.
As the engine is one of the main parts of a car, it requires expensive repairs that take a long time in case of breakdown or failure. For this reason, simple preventative maintenance tasks such as changing the engine oil in time will help your car tremendously.
How to Correctly Store Summer Tires
One essential summer car maintenance tip is correctly storing summer tires. If you correctly store your summer tires during winter, you won’t worry about issues like dry-rotting. As you know, most tire stores can keep your tires in storage for a small amount of fee during winter. It is a great idea. But you must keep reading if you don’t want to pay the extra money.
Before storing summer tires, you must remove all kinds of grime and oils from tires with water and soap. Then, you can follow these stages below:
- Clean the surface where the tires will be stored.
- Keep the tires stored away from direct sunlight.
- Put the tires in a dry place during storage to prevent moisture build-up.
- Place each tire in a separate opaque and airtight plastic bag.
- Store the packed tires in a safe place away from chemicals, light, and excessive temperature changes.
Maintenance is Done, Now What?
After you take care of your car, your car is almost ready to take care of you! Almost, because we believe that you need to Live Life Full Throttle starting this summer! Install Pedal Commander on your car while completing your summer maintenance checklist and double the fun on your next road trip!
