Johnhw2

My lexus dealer pushes exceeding lexus requirements with fluid changes at 20k miles. Do all do so? Dealers here have a huge nut to Co en it feels like they think their freed and needs drive service not what the manufacturer says?, even davenport, a toyota/lexus independent service company do so. One infiniti dealer in north dallas suburbs does this same. I am not happy about it. But wonder if there is some evidence this added service makes sense?

roadfrog

Im having a hard time understanding your post. I have no idea what you're asking. Especially this part: Dealers here have a huge nut to Co en it feels like they think their freed and needs drive service not what the manufacturer says?,

Kennyr44

I think he is saying they are up selling like they want to maximize their profits. Shocker, a car dealer trying to empty your wallet. I would keep the transmission fluid clean above and beyond the factory recommendation though. I just have a thing about dirty trans fluid.

Dr. Jekyll

iTrader: (1)

I have no idea either, the title implies extending the interval to me, hopefully he can clarify.

Doublebase

After reading this 20 times, I think understand what he's trying to say...he's saying that his Lexus dealer is saying he is 20,000 miles past the service interval of a given service/fluid, when in actuality going off of the owner's manual he is not. That sound right?

And if so I'd say yes...yes sometimes dealers kind of have their own set of service intervals. It's not uncommon. Take the tranny fluid for instance, Lexus calls it "lifetime", yet I've talked to Lexus techs that tell me to change it at 75,000 miles. And I know roadfrog says his owner's manual tells him to change it at 60,000 miles (he lives in Canada). In the Middle East I've read they change it every 50,000 miles, so it's not surprising that local dealers have their own "formula". Even oil changes are debatable - Lexus and Toyota are recommending 10,000 mile intervals on the newer vehicles, but when I talked to a Lexus shop foreman he said he wouldn't go past 5,000 miles on the older ones. Yet others on here have said they have officially extended all the 460's to 10,000 miles. I think what you're dealing with at your dealer is pretty normal, and you'd also run into the same thing with independants.

caha14

My understanding is that he's indeed talking about up-selling - very common, as others have stated - and that the dealer is specifically calling for fluid changes (coolant, differential, transmission - not sure which at all) at 20k mile intervals. This sounds extreme, especially in the context of what our cars call for, but I'd say not unheard off. Not too long ago, my Acura dealer would recommend (among other things) tranny drain-and-refill service every 15k even though the requirement was 60k.

vfr700f2

Most, if not all, dealers do this. So do a lot of service chains, etc. Not only is it an opportunity to get you to buy work of questionable benefit to you, at brutally inflated prices, it's an opportunity (for some) to bill you for work that was not even performed!

If you plan to keep the car for a couple hundred thousand miles, change the trans fluid. I'd pick an interval in the 40K-60K range. As for the rest, I'd stay with factory intervals.

Fleet management experts have said that changing trans fluid isn't worth doing. They say trans failure doesn't appear to occur much more often in neglected fleets, and savings from avoiding the cost of the service plus the cost of downtime will pay for the transmission failures that do occur. I appreciate their logic and research but I had a hard time going along.

The people who write the factory service manuals are no saints either. Remember when BMW started giving free service with new cars? Recommended maintenance intervals got a LOT farther apart at just about the same time....

Kennyr44

I agree the factory intervals for everything is good enough. The 5k interval for oil was when they were recommending non synthetic oil. Synthetic goes 10k easily. Even the lifetime tranny fluid or 75k interval will work probably for everyone. That fluid is black at 75k though and spending the 2 hundo every 30k to drain and fill 3 qts will keep it cleaner. Changing 3 qts at 75k will probably do very little to clean it up.

Oliver Enterprises

Possible translation: Dealers here have a huge burden of overhead to cover, and it feels like they think their wants and needs drive recommended service intervals ... not what the manufacturer specifies. But I wonder if there is any merit to this extra service the dealer is pushing on their customers?

My guess is he is saying that dealers push service early, beyond the recommendation(s) of manufacturers. Which yes they do. Their direction is to remove money from your wallet, not to make you satisfied. They'd recommend an oil change every 100 miles to little old grannies if they thought they could get away with it. I worked for OEM's, and in the latter half of my experience, was closely tied to dealers, and located at the manufacturing plant. There was a big mindset difference between what the plant personnel wanted a customer to experience, and what the dealers wanted the customers to experience. The OEM service recommendations are adequate.


Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) drives to satisfy their customers. Toyota Motor Sales muddies the water by trying to take all they can from you, dealer-by-dealer.

Littleguy

My guess is that he is saying his grammar is not good enough for me to be concerned for his problem.

Dr. Jekyll

iTrader: (1)

Maybe to his post he's not reading replies. For us I hope he will clarify.

enoch861

I think he's referring to Other Recommended Services. When you go in for scheduled maintenance, there's always other recommended services that are suggested.
Here's an example from a local dealership I take my car to: http://www.emenusllc.com/index.php?g...e=80000M1&vin=
As you can see, they show what the Factory Service involves and costs and then also suggests Other Recommended Service. This is something most, if not all dealers have. They will try to upsell you on them but if you're a regular they typically never bother to ask, like in my case. They only ever asked on my first visit, but each consecutive visit after I've never been bothered.

7milesout

What if he is Asian? One of my best friends in the world is Vietnamese. Came to this country at college age not speaking a word of English. Managed to get through Georgia Tech with good grades and picked up English along the way. Still to this day, I have trouble understanding him, his writing is even more difficult to understand. Similar to the OP's. One of the most honest, hard working guys I know.

I worked with Japanese at Toyota and Koreans at Hyundai who were horrible with English (better than I at their language though). So I've experienced this a lot ... maybe there's some tolerance built up in me from that. So, I'm cutting the OP some slack. Doesn't seem he's trying to morph the English language, for which I don't appreciate.




7milesout

Doublebase

I ran a fleet when I was younger and all I can say is that fleet maintenance is different than personal maintenance. With our cars we knew we wouldn't hold on to them much past 100,000 miles, so let's just say they were maintained at a bare minimum. We were strict on the oil change intervals (7,500 on conventional oil), brakes, tires, suspension components when they broke, and engine performance related problems (drivability issues). But we never had anyone on scheduled maintenance for tranny fluid or coolant. The only time coolant would get changed was when there was some sort of manufacturer defect with the engine that required us to tear into it (GM was a popular one with their intake gasket failures every 35,000 miles). The Chryslers were the worst though...almost every Chrysler we had ended up being rebuilt from the headlights to the tail lights. The trannies never lasted long enough in those cars to even consider changing the fluid. I swear to god I must have replaced every AC condenser that Chrysler ever made.

All that maintenance was designed for one thing...getting the vehicle to 100,000 miles as inexpensively as possible.

jrmckinley

LMAO! I feel the same way.