In fairness, a drain and fill is all you have to do per the service manual. Is Honda among them? If not, it doesn’t belong in this conversation. I went ahead and let them flush-and-fill my car’s cooling system, but next time I’ll just drain and refill it myself, like I do with my motorcycle.
The last time I asked a shop to drain and refill my car’s coolant, they said they don’t do that anymore they only do flushing. If you want to get all OCD about it, you can do it more often than the owner’s manual recommends (like every 30,000 miles instead of every 60,000 miles), but you still don’t need a flush, just a drain-and-refill.įrankly, these flush machines are getting out of hand. If you read your owner’s manual, I think you’ll find in the maintenance section a recommendation to change (just drain and refill) the transmission fluid every so often, probably every 60,000 miles, and that’s all you really need. Now they need those machines to generate enough income to cover the payments on those machines, so they recommend transmission flushes every chance they get. Ever since people discovered that draining and refilling an automatic transmission only replaces about 2/3 of the fluid, dealerships and repair shops have been buying transmission flush machines to satisfy their customers’ OCD.
