Is Your Car in Good Health? Pedal Will Let You Know

Written by

Richard Eaton

A car is a complex structure of mechanical precision. Newer all-electric cars have helped to simplify the mechanics of cars to a large degree, but EVs still only represent 1 in 250 cars worldwide. In the meantime, then, the vast majority continue to use the internal combustion engine and its many related systems. What that means is that there is always a huge list of potential things that can go wrong with your car.

Do you know much about your car’s current state of mechanical health? Unless you’ve trained for years and know the various components and systems inside out and how they all connect and relate to each other, your answer may well be “very little.” If this lack of knowledge doesn’t concern you even a little bit, then frankly it should!

When the average hourly rate for a mechanic’s labour in the UK is sitting at £47.47 (thepartsalliance.com), we can’t afford to be ignorant about our car’s health. Among the 20 unique and innovative features of Pedal® is one we call the Car Health Checker. It is designed to cure us of this ignorance and potentially save hundreds or even thousands of pounds in the process.

Pedal Car Health Checker and Why You Need It

How Does Car Health Checker Work?

When you login to your Pedal® account and inspect your dashboard, you can take a look at various sections giving information on your car’s current status, but perhaps the most important for this feature is the Engine Telematics widget. On there, you’ll find information that reveals the current state of your car. The metrics recorded include:

Average fuel consumption
Fuel consumption in the city
Fuel consumption on the motorway
Current fuel level
Current engine temperature
Battery health

Pedal® accumulates thousands of sample hours gathering this data from your engine and your journeys to help you build an ongoing picture of your car’s health. Below are some examples of the insights that are offered via your Pedal® app every day.

Fuel Consumption – Stable or Falling?

The data on fuel consumption will help provide you a very concrete indication of a problem within your vehicle. Diminishing fuel efficiency is one of the tell-tale signs that there is something fundamentally wrong, perhaps a leak or minor engine damage that needs fixing. It could be many things, but knowing about it in advance is the best way you have of protecting yourself.

Current Fuel Level

Confirmation on your current fuel level will help you know in advance if you need to make a stop at the petrol station on the way to work. In this way, you can work that into your day plan and not be given a nasty surprise as you’re setting off. In addition, you can ensure your vehicle’s fuel gauge or other reading is accurate by comparing the two.

Engine Temperature

Has the average engine temperature been increasing all of a sudden, even when you’ve been driving at low speeds? Thanks to Pedal® you’ll now know that. In modern cars, just driving along you might not notice any temperature change. You wouldn’t necessarily feel it in the cabin, nor would you definitely notice the temperature gauge on the dash display.

Battery Health

How many people have bene caught out by the sudden and shock discovery of a dead or dying car battery? You might have accidentally left the dome light on, or even the headlights overnight in the garage, and now the state of the battery won’t even let you start the car up. Imagine a system, then, where you could check on the battery or be notified when something was wrong with the battery beforehand.

Other Metrics

Besides the “Engine Telematics” widget, Pedal® will also inform you of important part replacement dates like your cam belt, as well as when your service is due, and if a crucial part, system or component need replacing, like the clutch. All of this information is displayed prominently on your dashboard, and you can receive notifications as a reminder to pay attention to these issues.

Why Does Pedal® Car Health Checker Matter?

You might be wondering what the point of all this information is. Why do we nee to know all this? Isn’t this why we take an MOT and get an annual service? Why should we pay to get the information sent to our smartphone or tablet?

The answer to that lies in a figure we gave you further up in today’s blog: £47.47, or the average hourly rate of labour for a mechanic in the UK. When it comes to car maintenance, the basic rule is to fix any existing problems as early as possible. The mechanical nature of your car means that the longer you leave something, the more likely it is turn into something much more serious (and expensive to fix).

In this way, Pedal® is actually helping to save you money. By informing you in advance, you will only pay for small problems --- unless they’re already covered by your warranty --- and avoid paying for much more serious things further down the road. Many people’s mechanic’s bill grows from tens of pounds or perhaps somewhere over a hundred pounds into many hundreds or even thousands of pounds when they leave repairs until too late.

Putting off checking your oil to see if you need to change it and the filter could save you £100 or so. Whether you do that deliberately or in blissful ignorance of the issue, you still save the £100, right? Actually, no. If you leave your oil and oil filter unchanged, it will likely end up costing you £3000-5000 in the worst-case scenario as your ruined engine is removed and replaced with a new one.

Even if your engine isn’t ruined, the more damage done by your not knowing the optimum time to seek a mechanic, the more it will cost you. Pedal® and its Car Health Checker will help you to prevent that.

Arming You with Knowledge

There’s another reason that the Pedal Car Health Checker is an invaluable and money-saving tool, and that’s the way in which it arms you with knowledge. The knowledge and insight that it gives you can protect you from cowboy mechanics and others who might otherwise seek to cheat you for money by conducting unnecessary maintenance or repairs.

These bad actors get away with that kind of behaviour for a very simple reason: most of us are not trained mechanics. In fact, the majority of people don’t have a clue about what’s going on under the bonnet of their car. Pedal® is like an ally that is parked a distance away in a radio van feeding you information through an earpiece. The app will tell you where the problems are, thus you can share with the mechanic exactly what you know and keep them on track. Furthermore, you’ll be able to question any comments the mechanic makes that don’t seem to align with your Pedal® data.

At the very least, millions of drivers being armed with Pedal will help to ensure that the good and honourable mechanics are rewarded with business and the less than savoury ones are unable to continue their charade.

Know Your Car’s Health – Stay Safe on the Road with Pedal

Perhaps the most valuable gift that Pedal® gives you is additional safety and reassurance. Many accidents that are caused by defects in the car happen because the driver is unaware of that particular problem. A car’s health is impacted by many factors and many of them only noticeable to the trained eye.

With Pedal, you get the crucial insights on your car’s health that you need to keep you and your passengers safe. There’s nothing safer than knowing of an existing problem and thus not even starting the journey in the first place.