Mazda3 long-term update: Routine maintenance? There’s an app for that

It wasn’t long ago that keeping up with vehicle maintenance meant meticulously logging dealer trips in the back of the owner’s manual, or glancing at a Jiffy Lube sticker on your windshield. Or, it meant waiting till your front tires go bald before realizing you should’ve rotated them 15,000 miles ago.

With our one-year loan of a Mazda3, the maintenance reminders are fancier with an app that’s built in with our navigation system (those without the touchscreen will have to visit the dealer to tweak the settings). The reminder lit up on the dash by the time we reached 6,000 miles, showing the spritely compact was due for an oil change and tire rotation. Toggling through the interface, we realized there were two options for gauging oil life: fixed or flexible. Fixed has the maintenance at a set interval, whereas flexible changes based on how you drive the car.

The car was initially set as fixed, and after the oil change we changed it to flexible to see how the oil life will track. We also rotated the tires, though the tread showed little wear. Total price for both jobs came out to $59.31, our first expenditure on the car aside from gas and car washes. Driving it out of the shop, we noticed no difference in how it drove—the Mazda3 is as smooth as when we first took delivery of the car.