Percussive Car Maintenance vs. Preventative Car Maintenance

by Marjorie, Cars for Keeps Social Media Manager

All of us have been guilty of performing "percussive maintenance" at one point or another. For those of you who don't know what percussive maintenance is, I'll give you a hint: it usually involves hitting things with a hammer.



Wikipedia describes "percussive maintenance" as "the malediction of an ill-behaved device to make it work, that is to say, swear at it and hit it." (Don't you love Wikipedia?) I've performed this countless times on countless items, such as my door lock, my computer (before I bought a Mac), and of COURSE, my car.

True enough, percussive maintenance may work sometimes - like it did for Marty McFly when he needed to start the DeLorean in Back to the Future I, or as it worked for Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad when trying to remove a piece of equipment from the 1969 space shuttle (true story!). But eventually, hitting things with a hammer only ends in having lots of broken things.

When I think about all the things I've sworn at and hit to make work, I realize that they all could have benefited from some preventative maintenance before percussive maintenance was necessary. My computer could have been de-dusted and de-bugged; my door lock could have been greased, and my car could have been better maintained with regular oil, fluid and filter changes.

Percussive maintenance may be therapeutic, but preventative maintenance is effective. So if you've been having to kick the tires or hit the steering wheel lately, try giving them one more kick, then roll on in to Cars for Keeps. We're a percussive maintenance-free zone!