Serviced my car for the first time

According the service manual, my 2007 XV40 Aurion only requires an annual service if driven under normal conditions. I don't drive the car often - I don't have to. When my parents were here, I hardly drove to work. I walked to work because it took only 20 minutes and because my wife had all the support she needed. There was no real urgency to get back home.

Since owning the car, I had only done about 7,000km, out of which about 1500km was for driving practice (my wife and I).

After the VVT-I hose burst incident, I wanted to get the service done as soon as possible. But I didn't know where to take the car to for the service. Toyota dealerships are known for ripping off people (as that is where they make up for the little margin they make selling cars) and some others are known for misdoings (like magically finding issues that were never present in the first place, leading people to believe that they did something).

After a bit of looking around, I came across a site called fixedpricecarservice.com.au (which they have renamed since to autoguru.com.au) where you can find mechanics to get the service done. They gave me several options with mobile mechanics. Mobile mechanics would come to your place and perform the service then and there which was not only convenient, but also you could monitor their work to make sure they weren't doing anything 'naughty'.

I contacted the highest rated one, but it didn't work out. Then I contacted the 2nd highest rated one called Australian Mobile Mechanics and they arranged the service to be performed next day. I told them that I had bought some parts (engine oil, filter etc) on sale and they deducted the cost for those parts. I lose the warranty on the parts, but the 1 year warranty on labour is applicable. The service charges ended up being $134, for the 105,000km logbook service. I was at 102,500km at that time. It is not cheap, but it is not that expensive either. Car service in Australia is expensive, because labour is expensive.

Measuring the fuel economy of my 2007 Aurion AT-X

“With great power comes great fuel bill”.

When I bought my car, I did not think I would have to drive it a lot. I still believe that is the case. Everything is accessible within 5 minutes to from where I live. Work, supermarket, shopping centre, hospital…pretty much everything.

But as I wrote in my last post about getting my driving license, I had to drive a lot more than I expected to. I am fine with that – in fact, I am very pleased to have been able to drive the car a lot in the past few days. I was able to take a good look at various roads and areas. But more importantly, I was able to take a look at the fuel consumption of the car.

I knew this would not be an economical car. You cannot expect it to be with a 3.4l engine. But I wanted to see how optimistic the 9.9l/100km figure in the specifications was. It turned out that it was slightly optimistic. Here are my results.

	Distance (km)	Consumed fuel (litres)	Fuel economy
Result 1	197.9	21.60	9.16 km per litre
Result 2	326.1	33.50	9.73 km per litre

But you should know that I drove a lot in the small roads to explore the area in Broadmeadows as well as nearby. I also did not take the freeway even when I could, just to get a feel for the different roads. But this should be a good “average” figure as I drove on fast roads (80km/h to 100km/h) as well as slow ones (40km/h to 60km/h) during this span. Manufacturers always quote specs that are very hard to match in real world, because most of the times they measure them in well controlled environments. Also, my car has done quite a lot of miles anyways, so it should not be working as efficiently as it originally did. Considering all that, I think I should not be too worried about it the engine performing less efficiently than it should have.