I strongly disagree. Change your timing belt when your owners manual suggests it. The belts last a lot longer now (100k vs. 40k) than they used to. I've been stranded in two 80s cars that had belts that were old. When I repaired the cars (after a tow) I found the belts looked great. They had just slipped a few teeth. Luckily they were not interference engines and the Pistons and valves survived. The belt has a spring loaded idler that is sometimes replaced during maintenance (depending if it is spring or hydraulic). This happened on second hand cars where I assumed the belt had been changed (I was young and poor) and kept driving obliviously. Dumb.Chad wrote: @RealPerson and Dragline
I had a Jeep Cherokee for over 13 years. Never changed the belt once. I'm not sure this needs to be checked by a professional. Maybe a cursory check by yourself every year, but no need to pay anyone.
Brake fluid can be funny. I find it depends on the actual system. Some makes have seals and corroding metal that just gunks up faster. Two extremes are my mercedes which goes 60k between flushes and flushes clear, to my ex-Harley that gums up every 10k and needs the black gunk flushed out to cure a sticky piston.
The schedule in your owners manual came from test data. It is not superfluous stuff. The superfluous stuff is the maintenance the dealer adds on as the OP stated. I used to install test equipment in auto manufacturers dynamometer test labs where they did HALT. There are mountains of dead engines sacrificed just to find out what breaks. If they say you need to change a hose or wire every X miles they mean it. Also, the way the replacement parts game works, the manufacturer sometimes has no profit in suggesting you change a hose. In fact, they sometimes lose money on the OEM part they are forced to stock depending on how they negotiated the price of the part with the supplier or how long a legacy part needs to be manufactured. It's the dealership who makes the profit on the replacement service.
This is a good article with an insiders perspective.
http://www.edmunds.com/car-care/confess ... tment.html
Like Jacob says about most things, the less you know the more you pay.
My suggestion for knowing the known failures is choose a low mile used car with a big following of enthusiasts. Like Civics...or Cherokees. Read the forums and find out what breaks in the real world because HALT testing misses real world stuff like entropy. Let other people put high miles on the model and discover the faults and fixes for you and watch the YouTube videos about how to find and fix the issues. Like all well manufactured goods your car will eventually fail the same way as theirs. Then change the specific parts before they break.
In grad school my roommate had the same model of car as I did but with 100k more miles. I quietly listed to him complain about this breaking and that breaking and I just replaced the same thing on my car. My car never broke down. This was pre Internet. Now look at all the good info people share out there. You don't need the roommate!