Your car needs a lot of routine maintenance, from changing your oil to rotating your tires, and a bunch of things in between that you forget about until they start to break. Fortunately, Dash makes it easier to keep track of when you need to perform basic maintenance. Here’s how to set it up.
We’ve mentioned Dash before as a handy way to keep track of basic information about your car, like your license plate, VIN, and odometer read out. Dash can also remind you when you need to do regular maintenance. If you use an OBD-II adapter to pair your phone with your car, Dash can even track your mileage and remind you when it’s been 5,000 miles since your last oil change, for example. We’ll assume you’ve already added cars to your garage in Dash, but if you haven’t, check out our guide here. You can also download the app for Android and iOS here.
To set up notifications from Dash, open the app and click the car icon in the bottom left corner of the screen.
Next, tap on the car you want to get notifications for in the list of cars you’ve previously added on Dash.
Tap the Maintenance tab underneath the picture of your car (if you added one).
Next, you can scroll through a list of recommended maintenance for you car. You can enable notifications for each one individually. For example, if you need a reminder to check your ball joints, but you’re covered on getting your oil changed, you can just enable the former. Tap Add To Notifications to get reminded for each type of maintenance.
A box will appear that shows the last known mileage if you’ve connected your car to Dash with an OBD-II adapter. This will be where Dash starts tracking, so you should change it to whatever your odometer was at the last time you got this type of maintenance. So, for example, say you’re tracking an oil change and you have 94,000 miles on your car, but you last changed your oil at 92,000. Enter 92,000 in the box. Dash will then remind you at 97,000 miles that you need an oil change. Assuming you regularly connect your car to Dash, of course.
Most types of car maintenance are required after X,000 miles or Y months. If you’d rather track it by number of months (or if you don’t have an OBD-II adapter), tap Use Calendar Instead. This will open your calendar app and let you add a reminder for the future. Of course, you can just do this from your calendar app directly, but Dash will at least let you know at what intervals you need to perform maintenance.
If you use an OBD-II adapter, you should connect your car every once in a while so Dash can update your odometer. You don’t need to use it for every trip, but at least enough that you don’t drive for thousands of miles without letting Dash know. If you don’t want to use an OBD-II adapter, you can also update your odometer manually. Again, this is only helpful for tracking your maintenance if you do it fairly regularly.
