Can my car tell me how long ago it was serviced?

[jeremy156]

Is there a way to read the distance/time since the last service interval reset?

I’ll play on the safe side and drop the oil in my new girl anyway unless she can tell me fresh oil went in recently.

[ptjs1]

Jeremy,

I can't remember if the x350 has an internal service indicator. I think not.

However, if you've just got the car, I'd change the oil anyway, irrespective of what the car, the service book or the previous owner said!

Cheers

Paul

[jeremy156]

Paul, the more I think about it, the less I wish to trust what a previous owner or garage did - I'll just get on with it and justify it as part of the purchase price:)

[J44EAG]

Ideally, you should have a complete service file and stamped service log with the car. If not then you have to treat the car as a completely unknown quantity and start stripping it down for examination. Service history really is the key to knowing what you are buying. Blunt but true.

Mike

[PaulGover]

...
I can't remember if the x350 has an internal service indicator. I think not.
...

My 2008 TDVi does, but it's not human-readable. If I drive the car too long without the indicator being reset, a message appears in the LCD window in the speedo. AFAIK the number of miles to "too long" depends on some computerised evaluation of driving style - I suspect something to do with DPF cleaning cycles, and is presumably maxed out at the official service interval.

All that said, at my last two services, the (Jaguar) dealer failed to reset the counter (or I've been driving VERY badly) as it popped up a couple of thousand miles later. At first I also had a problem resetting it.

I suspect if the car has SatNav installed and it was the last thing displaying on the centre console before the service, when the technician starts the service counter reset process it gets blocked by the "Are you clever enough to use a SatNav while driving, texting, applying non-gender-specific make-up and eating a Ginster's pasty" warning.

Net of that is, even if I could extract a service-last-done number from the system, I wouldn't trust it.