Buying and maintaining a car in Singapore is very expensive. In addition to fuel, road tax and insurance, cars require regular servicing and maintenance to function smoothly and avoid breaking down, which will lead to hefty repair bills.
Even with a new car, preventive maintenance is necessary to keep the vehicle at tip-top condition.
Car Servicing One-Stop Portal
Fortunately, CarCare.sg, Singapore’s first car-servicing portal, seamlessly connects both drivers and car workshops from all across the island.
If you are looking for affordable and reliable car servicing, CarCare.sg partners only with reputable workshops (each workshop is personally assessed and vetted).
All pricing is transparent and you can rest assured you’ll get your dollar’s worth when servicing, maintaining or accessorising your car – no additional fees are charged for using CarCare.sg (your only bills are your workshop bills). Best of all, CarCare.sg’s encrypted transaction system protects both workshop and customer.
Say Goodbye to Stressful Car Servicing
You can Post a Request for your customised car servicing, maintenance or accessorising needs along with their preferred budget. They will receive multiple Quotes from our partnering workshops, pick their preferred Quote and make a deposit (which is part of the total bill) to confirm the appointment.
Alternatively, you can Make a Booking by choosing from an extensive list of car services. Simply indicate your preferred timeslots and once confirmed, make a deposit (which is part of the total bill) to confirm the appointment.
CarCare.sg also provides drivers with important car servicing and maintenance tips, so that you are familiar with the maintenance needs of your car and what it will cost you. Sign up now to start using CarCare.sg right away!
And if you a good, honest and reputable car workshop, contact CarCare.sg at [email protected] to find out more about how to become a CarCare.sg partner today!
While many parts of the world are enjoying declining petrol cost, Singapore faces an inverse trend. The copious number of traffic lights and low speed limits are no stranger to Singaporeans; they work together to stretch the energy bill further. But overcoming these loathsome road characteristics is not exactly an Herculean task. Essentially, it just requires some minor tweaks to your driving behavior and the car.
Tires inflated to the proper pressure can improve petrol mileage by up to 3.3%. Such information on the proper tire pressure can be found in the car’s instruction manual.
Ensuring that the car has a properly tuned engine or has passed an emissions test can improve petrol mileage by an average of 4%, while addressing a severe maintenance issue can improve it by as much as 40%! Therefore, sending the car for regular inspections is a good practice!
Use the manufacturer’s recommended grade of motor oil which can improve petrol mileage by 1-2%. Besides, purchase motor oil with the “Energy Conserving”label to ensure it contains chemicals that reduce friction.
Stay above 48km/h as much as possible because the car consumes greater energy to combat wind resistance than rolling resistance at a lower speed. Carrying more loads and rolling down the windows can yield greater resistance at higher speeds, effectively cutting 1% to 15% of the fuel economy.
Time your acceleration adequately where you neither strain your motor nor trap your car in lower gears for too long which erodes fuel economy. A good estimate would be to accelerate to 80km/h within 15-20 seconds. Thereafter, keep a constant speed to prevent energy wastage on frequent deceleration and re-acceleration. Use cruise control function if available.
Brake less since braking converts useful kinetic energy into useless heat energy. Choose the route that has the least traffic – use the much vaunted Google Maps to plan the best route – to reduce unnecessary fuel wastage.
There is simply no need to warm up modern cars that are produced after the mid-1990s. Advanced engineering feat has made warming up irrelevant since sensors are now built into such cars to ensure the right mix of air and fuel in the engine – instead of relying on a warmed up engine to do the job uneconomically.
Given the legion of car models available in Singapore, settling on a final purchase decision is no easy feat. Indeed, it is both time-consuming and cumbersome to test-drive the myriad of cars to make an informed choice.
However, relying on time-honoured brands, word of mouth and (preferably independently produced) statistics could effectively pose as practical shortcuts to the lengthy decision-making process.
Additionally, the flowchart below serves to aid you in identifying the specific car attributes that fit your personal wants. Nonetheless, it is imperative to understand and assess yourself such that your behavioural, social and physical wants can be adequately supported by your financial ability.
Singapore has always prided itself on being competitive. We thrive and prosper when we stay ahead of competition. To achieve this, the Singapore government has diligently invested large sums of money and committed significant efforts to various productivity measures and educational initiatives.
One of the noteworthy productivity controls would be the reduction of lean waste, commonly referred to as DOWNTIME, which stands for Defects, Overproduction, Waiting time, Non-utilised or idle people, Transportation time, Inventory surplus, additional Motion to obtain out-of-reach materials and Extra-processing. The practice of lean principles has all along been championed by Toyota, the top-ranking automaker for the third consecutive year.
However, such conventional wisdom seems to have eroded with time when applied to the overall Singapore economy. An inordinate amount of time has been squandered through our increasingly unreliable public transportation system, draining productivity and crippling our competitive economy. Once reputed as an efficient train system in the 1990s, the bread and butter of our economy is no longer a boon but a bane to realising our productivity goals.
Nonetheless, all is not lost. We are still capable of living up to the titles of being the second most competitive city in the world and enjoying the second best quality of life in Asia. All we need is putting the following measures in place to adequately combat the next SMRT crisis, which requires resolve and political will across different agencies.
Yesterday’s disruption of train services on both the green and red lines “stranded” more than a quarter of a million people due to the inadequacies of the existing public transportation system. In particular, the bus and taxi fleets were insufficient to cater to the large crowd of passengers during the peak hours.
This is expected as the bus and cab populations are merely 17,509 and 27,695 respectively according to LTA as of 2013. This means given that the average bus fleet operated is 3,777 and if we assume all the cabs are in commission by individual passengers at a given time, each bus has to accommodate at least 59 passengers, which is not significantly less than the total passenger capacity of a single-deck bus.
Faced with such circumstances, it would thus be wiser for the private car population of 540,063 to pick up the slack. While taxis are profit-driven, private cars are more inclined towards cost-minimisation. Therefore, for the future rail “disaster”, it would be in the shared interests of both private car drivers and commuters to exchange a convenient ride for a nominal fee. Probably $5 to $10, depending on the length of the ride?
The implementation process is simple. It could be as easy as putting up a sign on the windscreen or using a mobile app or a site to indicate the destination and pick up passengers on the way.
Nonetheless, this requires the exemption of legal hurdles stated in the “Road Traffic (Car Pools) (Exemption) Order 2015” as shown below in times of crises:
You cannot solicit passengers on a road, parking place or public stands.
The pick-up points, drop-off points, date and payment must all be agreed between driver and passengers before the start of the carpool ride.
In Japan, passengers board the back door and alight at the front door. This may seem counter-intuitive at first but try thinking again. Japan is well-known for its legendary public transportation system which is uber-efficient and super-punctual. It is way past due to learn from our equally – if not more – developed cousin in Asia.
With the current door orientation, a common vexation in Singapore is that many passengers are reluctant to move to the rear as much as possible to allow more passengers to be able to board the bus. However, if passengers were to board the back door instead of the front door, they would be able to choose between moving to the fore or the back and thus the passenger load is likely to be more evenly spread out. Fortunately, this is a psychological issue that can be expediently rectified with an engineering tweak.
In most countries, a car is a necessity. This applies especially to large countries where people need to take great pains to traverse from one city to the next that may be hundreds of miles apart. Furthermore, for an enormous country, extensive infrastructural developments for an efficient public transportation system are not only costly but time-consuming. Not to mention the strong political will and tenacity required to win over the support of affected residents for a given construction project. Battling against all these odds is no easy feat and the results are self-evident.
In the United States last year, the number of vehicles on the road reached a record level of almost 253 million for a population size of 319 million, roughly equivalent to 4 automobiles for every 5 people. Contrast this ratio with Singapore’s 1 automobile for nearly every 7 individuals in 2014. Such statistics actually do paint a clearer picture than a thousand words. It highlights the fact that owning a car in Singapore is no longer a prerogative, but a luxury.
If a car is now a want instead of a need, how should we value the purchase so as to ensure that we are not overpaying for the convenience and comfort? Shown below is a basic flowchart that may be useful for the first round of consideration by potential car buyers. The key assumption made here is that the monthly fuel cost can be approximated to your transport fare; therefore the costs under review are incremental costs.
Note that this model has not accounted for miscellaneous expenses related to maintenance, repairs, ERP, road taxes and insurance.
