Car service reminders

A service is the date on this list with no paperwork chasing you. No letter arrives, no text, no penalty notice. The only thing that marks it is a sticker in the windscreen or a line in a book, and both are easy to stop seeing.

A service is not an MOT

These get confused constantly, and they are different things.

An MOT is a legal test of whether a vehicle is roadworthy on the day it is tested. It is pass or fail, it is required by law once a vehicle is three years old, and the tester does not repair anything.

A service is maintenance carried out to the manufacturer's schedule — oil, filters, fluids, brakes, the things that wear out. It is not a legal requirement and there is no government record of it. But a vehicle must be roadworthy every time you drive it, not just on test day, and that is what servicing is for.

A car can pass its MOT in the morning and still be overdue a service by a year. The MOT tells you nothing about whether the oil has been changed.

When is a service due?

Whichever comes first: a period of time, or a mileage. Both are set by whoever built the vehicle, and they vary enormously — some makes use a fixed interval, others a variable one that the car works out from how it has actually been driven and shows on the dashboard.

There is no single number that is true for every car, so we are not going to invent one. Your handbook, your service indicator, or the garage that last serviced it are the three places the real answer lives. Once you know it, the app holds it.

Nobody official reminds you

DVSA will text you about an MOT if you ask. DVLA writes before your photocard expires, and now supplies road tax dates straight to the app. Your insurer will remind you about insurance, with a quote attached.

For a service there is nobody. A garage may send a card if it remembers you and if you have not moved. That is the whole of it.

What skipping one actually costs

Nothing immediately, which is the problem. The costs turn up later:

Warranty. Most manufacturer warranties require servicing on schedule. Miss one and a later claim can be refused.
Resale. A full service history is worth real money at sale. A gap in the book is the first thing a buyer finds.
Repairs instead of maintenance. Worn brake pads are a service item. Left long enough they become discs, and then they become an MOT failure.

The advisories tell you what to book

This is the useful bit, and it is free. Every MOT advisory ever recorded against your vehicle is in the app, with the mileage at the time. Front brake pads wearing thin at the last test is not a failure — it is a list of what the next service should deal with, written by someone who put the car on a ramp.

Most people never see those notes again after test day. They are the closest thing to a free diagnosis a vehicle gets.

Setting the date

Type it in once, from the handbook, the dashboard or the last invoice, and it joins the other dates: a bar that empties as the interval runs down, and reminders 30, 14, 7 and 1 days before, and on the day. There is a notes box on each vehicle for the rest of it — what the garage said, what it cost, which tyres are on it.

Service sits alongside MOT, road tax, insurance and driving licence expiry in one list. See how it works.