Which service fluids should you buy?

Winter is exactly the time of year when all the downsides of using cheap substitutes for genuine technical fluids show up most clearly. Whatever is mass-produced for sale at car markets may, in summer, still bear at least some resemblance to the car manufacturer's requirements, but once the temperature drops below zero the properties of such fluids become completely unpredictable. That won't just inevitably speed up the replacement of expensive parts – it can also spring an unpleasant "surprise" on you at the worst possible moment.

Based on years of experience, here's the advice: you should never use any cheap substitutes for technical and service fluids, and that goes double in winter. This covers gear oil, brake fluid, power-steering fluid, and, on some car makes, coolant too. It's far more reliable to buy all of these only from your car brand's official representatives – believe me, it's not even that expensive. And the savings here can turn out to be extremely costly.

I suspect the claim about brake fluid and coolant raised some eyebrows, so let me give a small example. Running several different Audi cars for more than 8 years showed that after switching from the genuine coolant to ordinary antifreeze, over the course of a year and a half, every single rubber hose in the cooling system, the heater core, the radiator and the water pump were replaced one after another.

And with a non-genuine brake fluid bought at a car market, over the course of a year and a half every single caliper around the car was replaced one after another. Let me stress – all of this happened with the car in perfect condition at the start of the experiment, while another identical car running entirely on genuine fluids is still on the road today (for at least 5 years now) without any of the problems listed above. So listen less to mechanics who are used to dealing with Zhigulis, and go get advice from the official representatives of your car's brand instead.