I tend to drive my cars hard and until recently I was for doing minimal maitenance and some extras. But I has since reversed my beliefs on maintenance. My grandpa was a mechanic and my dad, while not a mechanic, learned a heck of a lot of car repairs from him (I have fond memories helping him replace breaks, pumps, electric car windows [when the motors were cheap and didn't last]), etc.)
I have always done the 3k mileage oil change, air filter 6k and that was it - only replacing spark plugs and such as they wore out. It was easy on the cheap teenage-type cars and I did it all myself.
As I got older and had a few cars, they were more complicated and more to break. I started doing the extra maintence recommened by the kwik lube, etc. (could no longer change my own oil and filter when I had a car with the filter in the worst impossible place). Then my wife got her cute sports car. Repairs were costly! I decided to actually pay attention to when maintenace should occur for the oil instead of the 3k (it was 10k for her car). When we got burned a couple of times for overly expensive "extra" repairs I did more digging and come up with a simple conclusion: Just doe the maintenance in the maintenance schedule.
The time between maintenance versus the old 3k or 3 months is better, the cars can withstand that. Plus you don't get burned by extra engine tuning, etc. I have had cheaper repairs and cheaper maintenance overall doing this.
Yes, the car manufacturer can be bloating the repairs, but having a cousin get into the auto industry, mostly, those repairs come from the design engineers. It may be fluffed by execs, but not too much he said. Its the dealerships (especially the bad ones), that add the horrible upgraded repairs.
As for my 15k - it was 20 for the tire rotation 80 for the filter and 80 for the brakes. The tires were out of balance and the alignment was off so those small repairs were completed too (this makes sense, I have really bad roads in some of my commute and LOTS of bad construction zones). Am I a sucker for doing the brake fluid? maybe. But somewhere it was recommened by an engineer to do it a quicker interval that most, maybe it was bumped up earlier, who knows, but I figure its a small price to pay that doing all the other engine tunes dealerships tack on.
So far, doing things like this, my cars have been trouble free (or I could have just gotten real lucky!)
