Preventive Maintenance at Johnny's Automotive

Keeping a car healthy costs less than fixing what neglect breaks. That's the whole argument for maintenance, and it doesn't need any drama attached to it. Fluids wear out, filters fill up, parts that move eventually wear. Handling that on a schedule is almost always the smaller bill, and the car tends to stay predictable a lot longer. We're not going to tell you the sky is falling. We'll tell you what your car is due for and let you decide.

What gets done, and when, comes from your manufacturer's schedule. Not a list of services we sell at every visit. The people who engineered your car published intervals for it, and that's the document we work from. Bring your owner's manual if you like reading along, or just give us the year, make, model, and mileage and we'll pull up what applies. Some of what shows up on a generic quick-lube menu isn't in your manual at all, and we'll say so when that's the case.

Most manuals list two schedules: normal service and severe service. Severe isn't about abuse. It covers short trips, stop and go traffic, heat, dust, and towing, which describes a lot of Central Florida driving. Heat is hard on fluids, and a car that never gets fully warmed up on a two mile run to work is living a harder life than the mileage suggests. That doesn't mean everything comes due earlier. It means a few specific things do, and part of our job is telling you which ones instead of moving every interval up.

Every maintenance visit includes a digital inspection, and the photos go to your phone. You see the filter, the fluid, the tread, the leak, whatever we found, in your car and not in a brochure. That's what makes a maintenance visit honest. It also gives us room to say the most useful thing a shop can say, which is that something can wait. If your brake fluid still looks right, we're not flushing it to fill an hour.

Maintenance visits are also when small problems get caught while they're still cheap. The car is already on the lift, so our ASE certified technicians see the seeping hose, the belt starting to crack, the tire wearing on one edge. A note in your file and a photo on your phone beats a tow six months later. Work we do is backed by a 36 month, 36,000 mile nationwide warranty, and you can get it done at whichever of our six shops is easiest for you.

Brian and Johnny started this shop in 2006 out of a race car garage with one rule: put the customer over the money. Telling you a service can wait is that rule doing its job.