I have to respectfully disagree with Harold on service intervals.

The primary reason for the Honda Maintenance Minder system (first introduced in the 1975 Accord) is to provide a gentle reminder to the lay automobile owner to service their car. The service intervals that the system provide are extremely conservative and inefficient, and while not inherently bad, the oils and fluids in the car have much service life left in them.

I have been a strong advocate of mileage based maintenance for many years. For the Civic I recommend 10K intervals for oil & tire rotation, 20 K for oil filters, and 30K for air & cabin filters.

I have ran extensive analysis of the oil and found that in all cases 10K was a good balance of oil life and maintenance convenience.

But in the end there is nothing wrong by following the MM recommendations, as long as you are comfortable in throwing away perfectly good fluids and filters prematurely.

 

Hi Gary:
I somehow feel that the MM of today are far more advanced than the 1975 version MM?
I agree with what you are doing, but for most of us the MM is the best thing to have hit the auto industry.[my opinion only] I believe it is the best system for the majority of owners. It sure beats the old method of change your oil every 3000 miles.
Cheers,
Hal

 

I think the maintenance minder is more advanced than the old ones, but I would like to see it go a step further and actually analyze the oil. I've see reports of Porsche's getting 20k+ miles out of one oil change before the maintenance minder requested a change.

 

I think it my be too complex or costly for a each vehicle to have a system that could do this? Hal