To reduce problems with your truck, and to reduce the chance of an accident, it is very important that you take preventative maintenance and a daily inspection very seriously. Never let it simply become routine and something where you are merely going through the motions. You need to pay attention, and you need to perform these checks often. The following are some tips that you can use to create your own schedule for inspection and maintenance.
Create Your Plan
You should develop a routine that you go through each day that covers preventative maintenance and the inspection. If you have several drivers, or drivers for an entire fleet, you will want to have a standardized checklist and log that everyone will fill out each day. Even if you are a freelancer, you should create one of these lists, and you should be adamant about filling it out before you get into the truck each day. Getting lazy with the inspections is a recipe for disaster. If there are any issues with the vehicle, they need to be taken care of right away. Before you drive, the vehicle needs to be in safe working condition.
Items that you will want to include on your checklist include the brakes, tire inflation and pressure, wheel retention and deterioration, steering performance, the trailer coupling, headlights, reflectors, and all of the vehicle lighting. You will also want to check the wiper blades to make sure they are in good condition. Even if the weather doesn’t call for rain, they need to work properly, and you should make sure that you have plenty of wiper fluid so you can keep the windshield clean. Depending on the vehicle you have, you may have quite a few other things you will want to check daily.
Regular Preventative Maintenance
When you look for issues with your vehicle on a daily basis, you will notice when anything is “off” and you can then take care of those problems before they get out of hand. Even when you don’t notice anything out of place, you still have to make sure you are performing regular preventative maintenance for the vehicle, such as changing the oil and the air filters.
During the Trip
Of course, not all issues are going to present themselves before your inspection each day. Sometimes, you will be in the middle of a drive when something goes wrong. It is important that you pay attention to the performance of the vehicle as you are driving. If you notice that something’s wrong, do not ignore it. Make sure that you get off the road and check it out further.
With some simple inspections each day, along with preventative maintenance and the regularly scheduled maintenance, you can reduce the risk of something going wrong with your vehicle, and that helps to reduce accidents.