Master Your Maintenance: Innovative Ways to Track Your Car's Health

In the digital age, proper car maintenance does not end in your garage: the lifespan and healthy functioning of your car will depend on your car’s maintenance and servicing schedule. With digital car maintenance, you will never have to carry or ever lose a small notebook for tracking your car maintenance — ever again. Using Google and other digital tools, there are easy ways to maintain your car. The article is about three digital methods of maintaining your car using Google and other digital tools.

Embrace Digital Efficiency with GOOGLE Spreadsheet Templates

Tracking the vanishing minutiae of life, from a budget to a workout schedule, is a whole lot easier using a digital spreadsheet than a spiral notebook, so why not make use of one for the hours on your car? A quick Google search will yield dozens of templates for just about any spreadsheet program you use.

Or if you are Team Microsoft Excel that provides a highly detailed Vehicle Service Record Template and a Google Sheets that is all about keeping a Vehicle Maintenance Log, or if you are a more hands-on person and are inspired by the no-nonsense LiveAbout Car Maintenance Log on Google, which offers checklist instructions to help you work through routine tasks such as monthly light inspections and three-monthly oil changes.

If templates don’t work, develop your own bespoke spreadsheet. And if you want to rid yourself of that last step completely, ask Google’s AI to write the formulas that turn data entry into a chore.

Simplify with Specialized Maintenance Apps

Your smartphone is the digital equivalent of a Swiss Army knife … And many of us use them to track maintenance and repairs on our cars. Google Play and the Apple App Store are repositories of apps to keep your car’s service schedule on track. Take one such one, Simply Auto: Car Maintenance, which gets five stars on Google Play for reporting ‘all kind of services, costs and fuel consumption!’.

The Vehicle Maintenance Tracker (again, for iPhone buffs) is rated highly by reviewers who give it high marks for functionality (ie, it stores details about your vehicle and sets reminders for when it’s due to be serviced). Our award goes to the CARFAX Car Care app which is rated highly by reviewers, especially for its easy-to-use dashboard and the fact that it tells you roughly how much a repair or service may cost, eliminating the dreaded ‘WTF’ surprises when you get the bill. iOS and Android users can download the app.

Organize with Notion: Your Virtual Maintenance Assistant

But Notion has become the de facto way to organise just about everything in my personal life and work, and the ability to start with a blank page and create any kind of document or database makes it especially well suited to managing your car’s service schedule, from remembering to change the oil to monitoring the overall health of your vehicle. Notion can be a window into the state of your car’s maintenance.

If you’re new to Notion or just short on time, pre-made templates out of the box or in the community or Etsy are a hack to maintenance management. Ranging in complexity and style, templates allow you to chart your own use preferences and case.

A Closer Look at GOOGLE's Role in Car Maintenance

In the midst of talking about all these cool new tracking tools for car maintenance, Google is the indisputable boss. Google isn’t just a way to find the right spreadsheet template or app to make it easier; most of the tracking apps we talked about – like Google Sheets or Google Assistant asking you to engage with ChatGPT – involve Google technology in some form. This new fusion of technology into how we do the basics of our lives highlights how technology is improving our lives, especially when we are doing what for many people is their most valuable material possession: our cars.

With the help of Google and special apps for smartphones and platforms like Notion, your car can be safe and running smoothly. In the digital age, no one vehicle maintenance is easier and more convenient, which means our cars can be taken to more or less good roads.