MechHead User Guide

Welcome to MechHead

MechHead keeps every vehicle you own on schedule — oil, brakes, tires, fluids, all of it — and tells you exactly what's due, what's overdue, and what it cost last time. It works for a single family car, and it scales up to a small business fleet of work trucks, vans, and food trucks.

MechHead covers cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, RVs, boats, trailers, ATV/UTVs, and golf carts. If it has a maintenance schedule, it belongs in your garage.

This guide walks through every feature in the current release. Features still being built are clearly marked Coming soon — we don't pretend otherwise.

Getting started

1. Create your account with your email and a password (8 characters or more). If you already have one, choose Log in.
2. Add your first vehicle — you'll land in My Garage. Tap Add vehicle and fill in the basics (next section).
3. Add your maintenance tasks, or log the services you've already had done, and MechHead starts keeping score from there.

Your garage

The garage is your home base. Across the top you'll see four numbers for your whole garage:

Adding a vehicle

Tap Add vehicle and complete the form:

• Make, Model, Year — required. Type them carefully; your due-status math and recall checks depend on them.
• Type — Car, Truck, Van, Motorcycle, RV, Boat, Trailer, ATV/UTV, or Golf Cart.
• Nickname (optional) — "Dad's truck," "The food truck," whatever you actually call it.
• Current mileage — today's odometer reading — or, on a boat, the hour-meter reading (see Track by, below).
• Track by — Miles or Engine hours. Boats default to engine hours, everything else to miles; pick whichever meter your vehicle actually runs on.
• Color and VIN (optional) — the VIN is worth adding: it powers VIN decode (next paragraph) and helps recall checks identify your exact vehicle.

Fastest way in — decode the VIN. The form opens with a VIN box. Paste or type the VIN and tap Decode VIN (pasting a full 17-character VIN decodes on its own) and MechHead looks the vehicle up in NHTSA's free factory database: year, make, model and type fill in for you, and the factory specs it finds — trim, engine, drivetrain, fuel type, body style — are saved with the vehicle and shown on its page under Factory specs (from VIN decode). Every filled field stays editable, so correct anything the record gets wrong before saving. Coverage is honest: the database is strong for cars, trucks and vans, partial for motorcycles, and has no real coverage for boats, RVs or trailers — those stay manual, as does any vehicle whose VIN has no factory record. If that happens you'll see a calm note, not an error, and the form works exactly as before.

Adding a truck or van for a fleet? The form's class presets — sized after U-Haul's rental lineup, from Pickup Truck and Cargo Van up to a 29' Box Truck — set the type and class in one tap; you can still adjust everything before saving.

Updating mileage

Open any vehicle and use the Mileage field with the Update button. Two things also update mileage for you automatically: completing a task with a higher mileage reading, and recording an inspection with an odometer reading. MechHead never lowers a vehicle's mileage — a higher reading always wins, which keeps your records honest.

Boats run on hour meters, not odometers — and MechHead knows it. Add a boat and it's set to track by engine hours automatically: the field reads "Engine hours," task intervals and due points count in hours, and fuel shows your burn in gallons per hour instead of MPG. Wrong meter, or something else that runs on hours? Change it any time with the Track by choice on the vehicle's page.

QR labels & scanning

Every vehicle has its own QR label — there's nothing to set up or generate; the code is simply the vehicle's address in MechHead, drawn fresh whenever you print it. Open a vehicle and tap Print label to print one label (or download the PNG), then stick it on the vehicle, a key tag, a magnet, or its paperwork folder. From My Garage, tap Print labels to tick some or all of your vehicles and print a whole sheet at once. Labels are built with extra error correction, so a scuffed or weather-worn label still scans.

Standing at the vehicle, point any phone camera at its label and tap the link — or open Scan in the top bar and use the in-app camera (there's a paste-a-link box if your browser can't use the camera). If you're not signed in yet, you sign in first and land right on the vehicle you scanned. Crews with handheld scanner guns are covered too: open the Scan page and pull the trigger — a keyboard-wedge gun types the code in for you, no tapping needed (a gun with a 2D imager reads the QR code itself). Every label also carries a Code 128 barcode strip printed with the vehicle's MH-number — MH-1024, for example — so a laser scanner gun can read the strip instead, and anyone can type the MH-number into the Scan page by hand. A label only ever opens the vehicle for its owner's account: if anyone else scans it, they get a plain "not found" — never your records. Print labels from the address you actually use MechHead at, so the codes point home. QR labels and scanning are included on every plan.

Maintenance tasks & schedules

Every vehicle has a maintenance schedule — a list of tasks like oil changes, tire rotations, and brake service. Each task tracks an interval (every X miles, every Y months, or both), and MechHead computes its status from your vehicle's current mileage and the calendar. You never have to work out "is it due yet?" yourself.

What the statuses mean

The counts on your dashboard, your vehicle cards, and each vehicle's page all come from the same calculation, so they always agree with each other.

Adding a task

1. Open the vehicle and tap Add task.
2. Give it a title (for example, "Engine oil & filter change"), a category (Engine, Brakes, Tires, Fluids, Battery, Transmission, Suspension, Exhaust, Electrical, or General), and a priority (Low, Medium, or High).
3. Set the interval — every so many miles, every so many months, or both. Leave both blank for a one-time task.

Completing a task

Tap Mark complete on any task. If it recurs, MechHead stamps the completion and schedules the next occurrence from the interval — completing an oil change at 85,000 miles with a 5,000-mile interval puts the next one at 90,000. If you enter a current mileage higher than the vehicle's, the vehicle's mileage updates too.

Service history

Tasks are the plan; service history is the proof. Every time work is actually done on a vehicle, log it:

1. Open the vehicle and tap Log service.
2. Enter what was done, the date, the mileage at the time, and what it cost.
3. Add a note if it matters later — the shop's name, a part number, "they said the pads have one more cycle in them."

Your history builds a per-vehicle record of everything that's been done and what it cost — exactly what you want in hand when a shop quotes you for the same job twice, when you're selling the vehicle, or when a fleet customer asks what a unit is costing them.

History Report — your resale document Elite & Fleet

Every record you keep in MechHead adds up to something valuable when it's time to sell: a History Report — a clean, printable document generated entirely from your own records for that one vehicle. The History Report is included with the Elite and Fleet plans; on Personal, its button shows locked. Open any vehicle and tap History report at the top of its page.

What's in it

• Vehicle identity & summary — year, make, model, type, color, VIN (if you've added it), current mileage or engine hours, and the period your records cover, plus the headline numbers: services logged, total service spend, fuel spend and economy, inspections, and documents on file.
• Service & maintenance history — every logged service, newest first, with dates, mileage, and cost. Work you marked complete without logging a service appears too, labeled Completed task. A service logged from a task shows once, as the service.
• Inspections — each walk-around with its pass/fail counts, and any failed items named.
• Documents on file — labels and expiry dates for the paperwork you've stored. Names and dates only — the report never includes the files themselves.
• Tire pressure — your latest check, with any tire that wasn't on target flagged by name. (Not shown for boats — no tires to check.)
• Recalls — if a recall check has been run for the vehicle, the report notes when it last ran and how many open recalls it found.

Print it or save it as a PDF

Tap Print / Save as PDF at the top of the report. The app menus disappear — the printed page is just the report — and your browser's print dialog can send it to a printer or save it as a PDF to hand to a buyer.

Photos & documents

Vehicle photo

Open a vehicle and use Add photo (or Change photo) to upload a picture of your actual vehicle. It appears on the vehicle's garage card and at the top of its page. If a vehicle has no photo yet, you'll see a MechHead placeholder with the vehicle's initials and a "Please upload your photo" reminder for its first 48 hours — never a broken image. Once stock photos are switched on, a stock photo of your model fills in automatically after those 48 hours for any vehicle that's still photo-less — and your own uploaded photo always takes its place the moment you add one.

Documents

Store the paperwork that lives in your glovebox, per vehicle:

• Registration and insurance cards
• Inspection certificates, warranty paperwork, receipts
• Any file you want attached to that vehicle

When you upload a document, you can set an expiry date. MechHead watches those dates for you — see Reminders. Your files are private: they're tied to your account and are only ever served to you while you're logged in.

Fuel log & cost per mile

Record each fill-up and MechHead turns it into the two numbers that tell you what a vehicle really costs to run:

1. Open the vehicle, find the Fuel section, and tap Add fill-up.
2. Enter the date, odometer reading, gallons, and total cost. The station name is optional but handy.

How the numbers are calculated

• MPG — MechHead uses the full-tank method: miles driven between fill-ups divided by the gallons you put in. The more consistently you log every fill-up, the more accurate it gets.
• Cost per mile — your total fuel spend divided by the miles tracked over the same span. For a work vehicle, this is the number that tells you whether a delivery run is actually profitable.

You'll see MPG, cost per mile, total fuel spend, and miles tracked as summary chips above the fill-up history on the vehicle's page.

Tire pressure

Underinflated tires wear faster, waste fuel, and run hot — and a tire can look perfectly fine while it's 25% low. MechHead tracks pressure checks against your vehicle's placard targets, so a slow leak shows up in the history before it becomes a blowout.

Set your targets first

Open the vehicle, find the Tire pressure section, and tap Placard targets. Enter the front and rear pressures from the sticker inside the driver's door jamb — trucks and RVs often run different pressures front and rear. Don't use the "max PSI" printed on the tire sidewall: that's the tire's limit, not your vehicle's recommended pressure.

Log a check

1. Measure the tires cold — before driving, or at least three hours after parking.
2. Tap Log check and enter the PSI for each tire you measured. You can log just some of them — only the fronts, say — but at least one reading is required. The odometer (or hour-meter) reading is filled in for you and is just context; it never changes the vehicle's stored reading.
3. The spare is judged against your rear target — check it too; a flat spare helps nobody.

What the results mean

• On target — within 2 PSI of the placard value. You're good.
• Low / High — more than 2 PSI under or over target. Top up, or bleed a little air, at the next stop.
• Critical — at or below 75% of target. That's TPMS-warning territory: fill the tire before driving, and if it drops again, check for a leak or puncture.
• No target set — the reading is saved, but MechHead can't score it until you enter the placard targets.

Reminders

The Reminders item in the top bar keeps a running list of everything that needs your attention, with a badge showing how many are open. MechHead creates reminders automatically for:

• Tasks coming due or overdue — when a scheduled task enters its due window.
• Expiring documents — registration, insurance, and anything else you stored with an expiry date, flagged 30 days ahead.

Tap a reminder to jump to the vehicle it belongs to. When you've handled one, dismiss it to clear it from the list. Reminders never duplicate — checking the list again won't stack up copies of the same item.

On the Premium, Elite and Fleet plans, reminders can also reach you by email. When items come due, MechHead sends them together as one digest email — never one email per item — listing each task or document, its vehicle, and whether it's due, overdue, expiring, or expired. Email reminders are on by default on those plans; on Personal, reminders stay in the app, and the in-app list works exactly the same either way.

Driver inspections Premium, Elite & Fleet

Driver inspections are included with the Premium, Elite and Fleet plans. A driver runs a walk-around inspection — the same idea as a commercial DVIR — right from the vehicle's page on a phone. It takes about a minute:

1. Open the vehicle and tap New inspection. Choose Pre-trip or Post-trip and enter the odometer.
2. Walk the checklist — exterior lights, tires & wheels, fluid leaks, brakes, mirrors & glass, horn, wipers, steering, seatbelts, and a damage walk-around — marking each Pass, Fail, or N/A.
3. On a failure, add a note and snap a photo of the problem.
4. Submit. The inspection is saved to the vehicle's history.

Failures become tasks — automatically

Every failed item instantly creates a maintenance task on that vehicle's schedule, so nothing found on a walk-around gets lost in a group chat or a paper form. Safety-critical items — brakes, tires, lights, and steering — are created at High priority; everything else lands at Medium. The task carries the inspection date and the driver's note with it.

Recall alerts

MechHead checks your vehicles against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recall database — the same federal data the manufacturers report to. Open a vehicle and look at the Recalls section:

• A count of open recalls for your vehicle's year, make, and model.
• Each recall's component, what can happen if it's ignored, and the manufacturer's remedy.

Results are cached for 30 days to keep things fast; use the refresh option on the vehicle's page if you want a fresh check right now. Recall repairs are performed free by the manufacturer's dealers — MechHead's job is making sure you hear about them.

Vehicle intelligence

When you add a vehicle, MechHead quietly looks it up in the official public records and keeps what it finds on the vehicle's page, in a Vehicle intelligence section near the bottom. Nothing to switch on and nothing to wait for — the lookup runs in the background, and the section simply appears once there's something to show. If a source has nothing on file for your vehicle — common for boats, RVs, trailers, and many trucks — that block stays away; there's no empty box and no error.

Official data (every plan)

• Safety ratings — NHTSA's crash-test stars for your year, make, and model: an overall score plus frontal, side, and rollover ratings where they exist.
• Fuel economy — the EPA's official figures from fueleconomy.gov: city, highway, and combined MPG plus the estimated annual fuel cost. MPG depends on the exact engine and transmission, so the block names the option its numbers belong to — and when MechHead knows your vehicle's engine (from a VIN decode), it picks the matching option.
• Owner complaints — how many complaints NHTSA has on file for that year, make, and model, and the components owners name most often. A useful heads-up about what tends to go wrong on vehicles like yours.

The official data is gathered once and kept for 90 days; the section shows the date it was gathered, and Refresh official data fetches a fresh copy on the spot. Each source stands on its own — if one is unavailable, the others still show.

Estimated market value (every plan)

MechHead also watches what's being asked for vehicles like yours. The Estimated market value block is built from comparable vehicles currently listed for sale on eBay Motors — real asking prices, filtered to whole vehicles (parts and accessory listings are thrown out) — and shows a range, the middle (median) price, how many listings it rests on, and the date it was gathered. Because asking prices move, it's refreshed every 30 days. Your vehicle's own current mileage is printed right beside the range, so you can judge how well the comparison fits. On Elite and Fleet, the AI research card below adds a second, independent web listings estimate from listing sites across the web. Treat both the way they're labeled: an estimate from current listings — not an appraisal or an offer. When a value exists, it also closes out the vehicle's History Report, so a buyer sees it alongside your records.

From the web — AI research Elite & Fleet

On Elite and Fleet, tap Research this vehicle and MechHead's AI studies your exact vehicle — year, make, model, trim, and engine — across the web, then saves a card to the vehicle's page: a short owner's summary, maintenance notes, the known issues for that vehicle, typical repair costs, and a market estimate from current listings. The rules are strict, and they're the point:

• Nothing unsourced ships. A known issue, a repair cost, or the market estimate only appears if the research can point to a source — and the source link is printed with it. Anything it couldn't source is left out entirely.
• General specs are labeled as such. Fluid types and capacities, tire size, and battery group are shown under General reference — confirm for your exact vehicle.
• The card carries its warning on its face: Sourced from the web — verify before relying on it, with the date it was researched. Tap Re-research any time to run it fresh.

Plans & pricing

MechHead is a paid app — no free tier, no selling your data. Four plans cover everyone:

The AI is part of Elite and Fleet — there is no separate AI tier or add-on. Premium's flat price covers up to 5 vehicles and Elite's up to 14; past that, Fleet is the step up.

Membership & billing

Everything about your plan lives on the Membership page — your plan, your trial, and billing, all in one place. Once billing opens:

• Subscribing: pick a plan on the Membership page and tap Start free trial. Checkout is handled securely by Stripe, our payment provider — your card details go to Stripe, and MechHead never sees or stores your card number.
• Free trial first: every plan starts with a 30-day free trial. If you start your trial at signup, no card is taken: when it ends, your account returns to Personal unless you subscribe — your vehicles and history stay right where they are. If you start a trial through checkout, with a card on file, the plan continues at its regular price unless you cancel before the trial is over. Signing up as an individual runs the trial on Premium (AI, reporting, and printouts stay locked — Elite is the step up for those); signing up as a fleet runs the trial on full Fleet. The Membership page always shows your trial countdown.
• Managing or canceling: tap Manage billing on the Membership page to update your card or cancel in Stripe's billing portal. If you cancel, you keep your plan until the end of the period you've paid for; after that, your account returns to Personal. Your vehicles, service history, and records are never deleted — they're yours, on every plan.
• Per-vehicle pricing: Personal and Fleet are priced per vehicle, so your charge adjusts automatically as you add or remove vehicles — no need to tell us. Premium and Elite are flat prices up to their vehicle caps. Fleet covers 15 or more vehicles.
• Ads: Personal is ad-supported — the ads are part of how the $1.99 per-vehicle price stays that low. Premium, Elite, and Fleet are ad-free.
• Changing plans: tap Change plan on the plan you want and check out — when the new subscription starts, your previous one is canceled automatically, so you never carry (or pay for) two plans at once. To switch between monthly and annual billing on the same plan, or to update your card, use Manage billing.
• If a payment fails: Stripe retries the charge automatically, and your plan stays active while that happens. If the subscription is ultimately canceled, your account returns to Personal — again, with all your vehicles and history intact.

Coming soon

The Parts Advisor and auto-generated schedules used to live in this section — both are live now, in the top bar (Elite & Fleet). Still on the way:

• Service provider search — rated shops within 20 miles of an address, paired with the Advisor: here's the part, here's who installs it, here's when.
• Push notifications — due-date nudges that pop up on your phone without opening the app. (Email reminder digests are already included in Premium, Elite and Fleet.)
• Multi-driver access & fleet reports — drivers on their own logins, and cost rollups across the whole fleet.

Getting the most out of MechHead

• Keep mileage current. It's the heartbeat of every due-date, MPG, and cost calculation.
• Log fuel every time. Two minutes at the pump buys you a true cost-per-mile number.
• Store your registration and insurance cards with expiry dates — the reminder 30 days out is the one that saves you a ticket.
• Fleets: inspect every shift. A one-minute walk-around, with failures becoming tasks automatically, is the cheapest insurance a small fleet can buy.
• Check recalls when you add a vehicle. Especially on a used purchase — open recalls are free repairs.