The Checks Worth Doing Early
Six checks cover what a vehicle needs before hurricane season. Four of them are ordinary maintenance, the sort of thing that earns its keep in any month of the year. The other two, the fuel level and the connected-services account, are here because of the season and not because of the vehicle, and each has a plain reason behind it.
| Check | What You Are Looking At |
|---|---|
| Tires, including the spare | Tread depth and pressure on all five. Nobody looks at the spare, and it is the one tire that only matters on a day when it matters a great deal. |
| Battery | Age and condition. Heat is hard on a battery, and Florida gives one a long hot season to work through. |
| Wiper blades | Streaking, chattering, or torn rubber. Blades that are marginal in light rain are worse in heavy rain. |
| Coolant | Level and condition. A cooling system that is already low has no margin left to give. |
| Fuel level | Where the needle sits. A tank kept fuller than usual takes one errand out of a busy week, and it means an ordinary trip does not turn into a fuel stop at an awkward moment. |
| Your connected-services account | Whether the app is installed on your phone, signed in, and still showing your vehicle on the account. Setting it up is a short job, and it has to be done before the first time you reach for a connected feature, not after. |
Those first four we can handle in a single visit. Book a slot online, tell us it is a pre-season check, and we will take them all in one go instead of four separate trips. The fuel and the app stay with you, since filling a tank and signing in to an account are not things anyone can do on your behalf.
The Tech Worth Setting Up Early
This is the one item on the list that has nothing to do with the shape the vehicle is in and everything to do with timing. A Chevrolet’s connected features run through a phone app and the account behind it, and that account has to be set up, signed in to, and carrying your vehicle before any of those features will do a thing. Setting it up takes a few quiet minutes at a kitchen table. Doing it for the first time on a busy day is a different experience entirely.
So the job here is a check, not a project. Open the app, check that it still knows who you are and that your vehicle is still on the account, and reset the password if the last one has slipped your memory. Then leave it alone. Which app applies and what sits inside it are not the same for every vehicle, so if you want yours pinned down, tell us the year, the model, and the trim and we will look it up. What the connected side includes is set out on our Chevrolet OnStar page.
What We Can Do for You
Our service and parts departments handle the four maintenance checks above: tires, battery, wipers, and coolant. A couple of the other things we do here are easier to learn about in advance.
- Service scheduling: Pick a time online and tell us what you want looked at. A pre-season check belongs in one appointment, not spread across several. Start at our Gordon Chevrolet Service Center.
- Courtesy shuttle: A shuttle runs from here, so booking an appointment does not have to mean writing off a morning in the waiting room.
- Loaners: Most warranty repairs come with a loaner. Say at booking what the vehicle is in for, and we will tell you before you arrive whether yours qualifies.
- Vehicle locate: Anything that is not already sitting here, part or vehicle, gets tracked down at our end. Useful to know when you would like something settled this week and not eventually.
- Roadside assistance: Every new vehicle we sell carries roadside assistance, running 5 years or 60,000 miles from the purchase.
- Free paintless dent repair: A new vehicle bought here also carries paintless dent repair at no charge through its first 90 days, which is the sort of thing worth remembering after a windy week has left marks in the panels.
- Parts: Our parts counter is where to start when something needs replacing. Chevrolet Parts
Handled early, every one of these is a small errand. Left until the week you actually need them, they stop being small. That is the whole argument for doing them early. Gordon Chevrolet is the Home of No Bull Pricing: competitive prices, no huge add-on stickers or equipment packages, no gimmicks or games, and trades wanted but not required. Whatever we have running on new cars, trucks, and SUVs is listed on our New Chevrolet Specials page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Before the season, not during it. Booking early leaves room for the awkward case: the inspection turns up a part that has to be ordered, and there is still time for it to arrive. Schedule Service
Tread depth and pressure, and check pressure cold, before driving, since a warm tire reads higher than it really is. A spare that has been steadily losing air for a year or two is not much use on the day it is needed.
Ask us, because the answer is not printed anywhere on the vehicle. Connected features vary by model, by model year, by trim, and by how the individual vehicle was ordered, so the only reliable answer is a vehicle-by-vehicle one. Give us the year, the model, and the trim and we will look yours up. What the connected side includes is set out on our Chevrolet OnStar page.
Age first, since most batteries carry a date on the case or the top label, and a battery that has already worked through several Florida summers has used up most of what it had. Then behavior: a starter that turns over slowly, headlights that dim noticeably at idle, or a vehicle that has needed a jump even once. None of those symptoms is proof on its own, which is why a battery test beats a guess. A test gives a condition reading instead of an opinion, and it is quick enough to fold into the same visit as the rest of the checks.
Run them once on a wet screen and watch what they leave behind. Streaks, a strip of screen the blade skips entirely, or a juddering chatter across the glass all mean the rubber edge is no longer sitting flat. Then look at the blade itself: rubber that has gone hard, split, or torn at the ends, or a section lifting away from the frame. Sun does most of that damage here, so blades tend to wear out by age and not by how much rain they have seen. Replacement is one of the smaller jobs on the list, and our parts department can take care of it.
Because coolant is what carries heat away from the engine, and the hardest work a cooling system does is not out on the open road. It is sitting still in traffic with the air conditioning running. A level that has dropped a little is usually the visible end of something small and fixable, and small and fixable is exactly what it stops being once the system is under load. Condition counts alongside level too, since coolant degrades over time and old coolant does not move heat the way fresh coolant does.
A vehicle that sits still is not exempt from any of this. Batteries lose charge over long idle stretches, and a weak one shows itself the first time it is asked to start after two weeks of sitting. Tire pressure drops whether or not the wheels turn, so the spare and the four on the ground both want checking. Wiper rubber and coolant age on the calendar rather than the odometer. A low-mileage vehicle is often the one most likely to have a surprise waiting in it, precisely because nothing has been noticed lately.
Day to day, it is the place where your vehicle and your account meet: the car listed under your name, your sign-in details known, and whichever connected features it carries reachable from your phone instead of from the dashboard. The value of doing it early is that none of that has to be worked out later. An app installed, signed in, and showing the right vehicle is a small job now and an unwelcome one later. The Chevrolet OnStar page on this site goes through that side in detail.