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My wife and granddaughter took the granddaughter's car into a shop to have an alignment, and tire rotation done a few weeks ago. They went back to pick it up, and they handed her a bill for $170 and didn't align the car or rotate the tires!
Instead they did a vehicle inspection (which she didn't ask for) and wrote up a repair estimate totaling $3200! Of course her 1997 Mazda with 185,000 miles probably isn't worth maybe $500, so she asked me to look at the estimate. Huge red flags jumped out as I read down through the list. There were some legitimate items, but even those were all way overpriced!
Things like, needs upper and lower motor mounts. It has one mount per side, not upper and lowers. They saw I'd recently put new brakes and rotors up front, so they said it needed the rear brakes "cleaned and adjusted". Since they never pulled the rear wheels to rotate the tires, it seems they had and Xray to view inside the rear drums and know they were dirty. And how do they adjust self adjusting brakes? A look inside today showed fairly clean brakes, with 60% shoe lining, and adjusted perfectly.
On the list was a new power steering rack, and tie rod ends. Everything was dry and tight, so not sure what could be wrong there? Also said it needed a new catalytic converter, but it just went through EPA inspection last month with flying colors. And of course they had the usual maintenance items like lube, oil filter, transmission service and flush, brake system flush. And supposedly needed new tires at $278 each for a little 185-65-14 tire! I think the last set we put on it were about $65 each?
While I was changing oil and filter on engine and trans, I had to drop the crossmember that runs under the engine to access the trans. There's two studs there that have nuts underneath for the motor mount on the front side. Both nuts had been freshly removed and tossed away! Threads were still clean and shiny, so for some reason they removed them, and left them off. Maybe to let the engine shake so she'd be convinced the motor mount was bad?
By the time I was done with all the items it really did need as normal maintenance, I was so irritated with what I found, or didn't find that I wanted to drive it out to the repair shop, and have a long talk with whoever owns it. But I decided to not waste my time, and told my granddaughter to never return to the shop, and next time make sure to let me go along if she ever took it to a shop again. She laughed and said she found it a little funny that a shop would think she'd spend $3200 to fix up a $500 car.
Instead they did a vehicle inspection (which she didn't ask for) and wrote up a repair estimate totaling $3200! Of course her 1997 Mazda with 185,000 miles probably isn't worth maybe $500, so she asked me to look at the estimate. Huge red flags jumped out as I read down through the list. There were some legitimate items, but even those were all way overpriced!
Things like, needs upper and lower motor mounts. It has one mount per side, not upper and lowers. They saw I'd recently put new brakes and rotors up front, so they said it needed the rear brakes "cleaned and adjusted". Since they never pulled the rear wheels to rotate the tires, it seems they had and Xray to view inside the rear drums and know they were dirty. And how do they adjust self adjusting brakes? A look inside today showed fairly clean brakes, with 60% shoe lining, and adjusted perfectly.
On the list was a new power steering rack, and tie rod ends. Everything was dry and tight, so not sure what could be wrong there? Also said it needed a new catalytic converter, but it just went through EPA inspection last month with flying colors. And of course they had the usual maintenance items like lube, oil filter, transmission service and flush, brake system flush. And supposedly needed new tires at $278 each for a little 185-65-14 tire! I think the last set we put on it were about $65 each?
While I was changing oil and filter on engine and trans, I had to drop the crossmember that runs under the engine to access the trans. There's two studs there that have nuts underneath for the motor mount on the front side. Both nuts had been freshly removed and tossed away! Threads were still clean and shiny, so for some reason they removed them, and left them off. Maybe to let the engine shake so she'd be convinced the motor mount was bad?
By the time I was done with all the items it really did need as normal maintenance, I was so irritated with what I found, or didn't find that I wanted to drive it out to the repair shop, and have a long talk with whoever owns it. But I decided to not waste my time, and told my granddaughter to never return to the shop, and next time make sure to let me go along if she ever took it to a shop again. She laughed and said she found it a little funny that a shop would think she'd spend $3200 to fix up a $500 car.
