Take a few minutes to check the condition of your tires before you hit the road. You can save money at the gas pump, keep your car safer and help it last longer as long as you keep your tires well-maintained.

Read and learn a few tips on how to keep your tires in good shape and have safe travels.

When it comes to tires, choose carefully. Selection of tires should be based on loading and size recommendations of the vehicle. Ask an automobile dealer about the proper tire that’s to used on your vehicle and typical driving patterns.

It’s important to buy a tire gauge and keep it in your car just in case you’ll need it. This will inform you whether or not it’s time to add more air to your tires.

Checking your tire pressure is required once a month or when you’ve just taken a long trip. Under inflation can damage your tire and even lead to tire failure. While over inflation cause uneven wear and handling and stopping problems as well. That’s why using the manufacturer’s recommended air pressure as a guide is important.

Slow down during wet weather. The amount of the tires tread contacting surface of the road increase if you reduce your speed, therefore providing better traction.

Try to rotate your tires every 6,000 miles. Mechanical problems like imbalance or misalignment should be corrected before rotation, and you can determine this by checking if your tires are showing uneven wear.

You also need to periodically check your vehicle alignment. If you notice your vehicle pulling to one side, ask an automotive professional to check the alignment.

Also remember to inspect and measure your tire tread. Place a penny in the tread groove and check if you can see the top of Lincoln’s head, because if you can then it’s time to replace your tires.

The tire sidewalls needs to be checked to make sure that there aren’t any gouges, bulges, or other irregularities.

Excessive heat inside your tires can be caused by overload, so make sure you don’t overload.

Another thing you need to periodically check is your tire balance. Causes of irregular wear include an unbalanced tire and wheel assembly.

If you want your vacation drives to be enjoyable, affordable, and safe, then make it a habit to regularly check your tires.

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When it comes to car maintenance, it can be expensive and the cost of gasoline in the U.S. rises and can drain the funds available for car maintenance and related cost.

Contributing to poor fuel economy are missing or loose gas caps, worn spark plugs, under inflated tires, and dirty air filters and this is according to Rich White, the executive director of the Car Care Council.

Even as the prices continue to climb, here are tips you can follow in order to save money on gasoline.

Don’t drive aggressively. Gas mileage can be lowered up to 33% on the highway and 5% on city streets because of this, which results to 7 to 49 cents per gallon.

Take care of your tires. A smart care maintenance tip in general, since driving with an under inflated tire is the equivalent of driving your car with the parking break on, and can cost you a mile for each gallon.

Worn spark plugs are things you need to watch out for. Four, six, or eight spark plugs are what vehicles have and on every thousand miles, they fire 3 million times which creates heat, electrical and chemical erosion. Regularly replace your spark plug for gas conservation and proper care maintenance.

Your dirty air filter should also be changed. Air filters that are clogged with bugs, dust, or dirt burns more gas than necessary and cuts off the air. Not only does this wastes gas, but the engine also loses power.

Watch those gas caps. Approximately 17 percent of vehicles, according to the CCC, have gas caps that are damaged, loose or missing, and this causes 147 million gallons of gas to vaporize each year.

Idling excessively is a bad idea. Idling gets you zero miles to the gallon, and you really only need to warm up your vehicle for about one to two minutes.

Watch that speed. As your car’s speed increases, gas mileage decreases, and each mph over sixty results in an additional ten cents per gallon cost.

Try losing some weight. You can reduce your MPG by up to 2% based on the percentage of extra weight relative to the weight of the vehicle by removing unnecessary items from your vehicle in which you can reduce the weight by 100 pounds.

The best way to get the most out of your car is proper maintenance and making sure that it remains fuel efficient. The health of your car depends on the regular visits to the auto mechanic so don’t skip them.

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Inability to confirm the concern. Confirming a repair concern is a basic diagnostic principle frequently overlooked. If you don’t recognize the problem, how in the name of Jeremy Clarkson can you sort it out?

Insufficient Road Testing. Even for the simplest of oil changes, a through and thorough road test is de rigueur as per every automotive instruction manual in existence. But the definition of “road test” for many technicians is “n. – the process of driving the vehicle into the auto shoppe for invariably shoddy repair work.”

Improper diagnosis. Improper diagnosis results due to the above reasons, just to name a select few. Sure, the chap monkeying around with your car means well, but so did the likes of Hitler, Genghis Khan, Ferdinand Marcos, etc.

Solving the problem with parts. Mechanics try to make up for their abject lack of skills by arbitrarily using parts, hoping their eenie-meenie-minie-moe approach will lead to a solution. You would often hear mechanics go, “So I, like…replaced this with that and that with this, but I’m sorry to tell you this baby ain’t fixed yet.” This goes right back to mistake number one: confirm the problem with diagnostics, then proceed.

Ignoring the main problem in favour of something else. Technicians often spend an inordinate amount of time looking for easy sells that will fatten their paychecks. Upselling is all well and good as long as three conditions are met — the inspection is free of charge, the inspection doesn’t conflict with your schedule and the inspection is a valid one, but in most cases, the answer to all three conditions is an emphatic NO. However, this type of free inspection and the subsequent upselling too often overshadows the primary concern. Dude, What’s Wrong With My Car?

Overconfidence. Too often unqualified technicians get in over their heads. So they keep working and working, flummoxed as they may be, but not once do they endorse the duty to somebody with more skill and/or experience. They may be souls whose intentions are good, oh Lord, your car is going to be misunderstood!

Taking shortcuts. In the ongoing effort to beat the clock, technicians will create a host of problems: breaking parts, snapping bolts, short circuiting sensitive electronics. Read more about these mechanical misadventures in our excellent article on Auto Repair: How Can They Screw Up an Oil Change.

Poor Repairs. Mechanics often make a few crucial mistakes in their repairs, either out of sloth or incompetence. Sloppy work – that’s putting it succinctly. You’ll know it when you notice a few bolts missing, a part improperly lined up, if at all, or a component shoddily installed. And when computer repairs are a part of the repair work, one would shudder at the many programs they deprogram, the many codes they decode (albeit unsuccessfully) and the repeated failures to synchronize computer protocols — and those are just a few of the problems!

No re-confirmation done. After a repair is complete, it’s important to re-check to ensure that the problem is indeed fixed. Too often parts are thrown in and the car is pulled out only to pull in another victim.

Being a slob. We hope you’ve enjoyed the humor in this article, but funny as it may look, there’s nothing funny about a mechanic with all the finesse of a small child trying to eat a jam butty and getting the jam all over his bib — ever come home from the shoppe only to discover greasy boot marks on the carpet or smudges on the hood of your car?

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