by Rand Stuck
A little scratch: $1500. A wear out device replacement: $3500. A fresh trunk-release switch cover: $150. All these are genuine repair costs related to AOL Autos since drivers took their vehicles to the auto shops with apparently small problems that resulted in excessively expensive repair bills. Not all motorists can choose to repair his vehicle himself or purchase a new one as trouble occurs in the existing one. Most of the car owners are left with limited options like gathering the big bills and paying it. Let us focus on some of the regular repair jobs that resulted in exorbitant repair bills.
Bumper Damper
Deana May of AC Auto Finishing, Los Angeles, knows the nasty shocks that customers can face even with a minor matter like a bodywork scratch or scrape. Its a scary thing ” looks can be deceptive. You can calculate an estimate on a front bumper, take it off, and behind it there’s all kind of damage. Particularly with low-profile cars with low-profile tires, they often need a whole new front end if they go over a bump or up a driveway, or don’t take an angle. May says she sees a lot of this in her shop and recalls how a Lotus driver was quoted a staggering $5,400 to repair his car, though from the outside she couldn’t see much that was wrong. May also warns of the dangers ” and expense ” of drivers getting incorrect quotes for repairs that involve high-performance parts, such as an AMG or Brabus for a Mercedes, and receiving stock components in their place.
Grilled to perfection
Willy Stroppe, president of automotive engineering firm Bill Stroppe and Sons in Paramount, Calif declares that once he observed trivial damage on the frontage of a Ford pickup truck that in due course turned into a giant repair bill. “It looks like the front plastic grille got broken with a light hit, but when we got into it the housing behind the grille was cracked and broken all the way up. Replacing everything from the fenders forward, the headlight vessels, a new front end, it all adds up. In a lot of cases you gotta pull out the radiator. That’s not something you can do in a couple hours.” He discovered similar troubles on a Ford Explorer. Stroppe, primarily works with Fords and result in surprise repair bill costing nearly $1200. “It’s not like the old days when everything was steel,” he adds. He too states that car owners must know bit about techniques. He has witnessed ample of car businesses through half century. He repeatedly says that a fraudulent shop will turn the vehicle worth driving with a careless patch up job, and then put up for sale to an innocent buyer, lending a big future repair bill as the repair work falls apart.
$150 Cover Up
Mark Essig, a writer in a small town in North Carolina, was astonished to find a repair bill of $150 on his car by a local mechanic just to replace a missing cover for the trunk-release switch in his ten-year-old Mercedes 320 CLK. Though such expensive repair bills are no longer a surprise for upscale European marques, Essig says, this one really took the cake for its icing on a already frosty $2000 repair bill which he did not expect in the first place. He says that this was not included in the estimate and it came as an additional cost. He says: “It was part of a $2000 repair bill that included valve cleaning and brake work, and I was so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t quibble over $150. Best part was, I didn’t ask him to do it.” Another story involves a Porsche 944 owner, Michael Russell, an AOL Autos friend who too his old-school German car for repair and got more than he bargained for in the form of $3,500 repair bill including labor cost in place of $15 exhaust valve replacement which was what he expected it to be. He says, that they had to rip out the engine to get to the valve, which had burned out, a common enough problem in older performance vehicles. Since without the repair, he had no way of getting to work, he had to grit his teeth and bear the cost.
Air Pressure
Taking my wife’s 1995 Nissan 240SX S-ER to my local mechanics to fix the air conditioning proved to be a costly affair. I had taken the car a week before that to get the air conditioning fixed. They found a leaking gasket that had depressurized the system. So they fixed the gasket, re-filled the system with Freon coolant and pressurized it. The bill came to be $300. I heaved a sigh of relief until two days later I found to my utter dismay that the system was again blowing hot air. So much for getting it repaired. I took it back to the shop for a second look only to be told that another seal had broken and this time it was in a hard-to-reach spot which meant extra labor that ultimately translated to an $800 dollar repair bill. I pointed out the fact that the original fix was under warranty. My mechanic argued that a different component had malfunctioned this time and therefore the additional repair was not under warranty. All attempts at bargaining failed so I was $300 out of pocket, and my wife has a hot summer ahead (unless she decides have mine). Here a word of advice: Always get a second opinion in situations like this besides assessing the general system integrity when replacing individual components on older-model cars.
Coolant Chills
Ken Lavacot, working in online mechanics 2carpros.com, says that as a small vapor that appears out of a car might look trivial, but sometimes it indicates serious future repair bills. He says: “Coolant is used to cool the engine during normal operation. If coolant is allowed to enter the combustion chamber, the engine will burn the coolant creating white smoke and steam.” He says various pricey solutions contain gasket replacement. “If the gasket that seals the intake manifold to the cylinder head fails it can allow coolant to enter the intake port and then the combustion chamber. To check for this condition the intake manifold will need to be removed.” Most of the money in such a case is spent to reach the gasket and bring together the parts after replacement. If coolant is present in the combustion chamber and the gasket is working, Lavacot says the engine should be split. He adds: “This can be tricky because it is difficult to tell which is causing the problem. For example: A repair shop has told you the cylinder head is cracked, and as they start disassembly they can discover it was the intake manifold gasket that has failed. It’s up to the honesty of the repair shop to alert the customer the repair will be less. Or the opposite can happen. A repair shop has told you your engine has a blown head gasket, once the disassembly is complete they inform you the head gasket is OK, and the cylinder has been pressure checked and is OK. This only leaves the engine block as the failure and must be replaced to repair the problem, and that can be costly.”
Paintwork Blues
My brother-in-law lent his Jaguar convertible to a family member a couple of years back. But disaster struck when the car was returned with a scratch in the back panel on the driver’s side. Big deal, you must be thinking, any decent repair or bodywork shop can polish out a scratch at very low cost, but the Jaguar XK8 has an aluminum shell, which required a costly adhesive to be used to fix the scratch and not allow further damage or warping of the car’s monocoque shell. Cost: a whopping $1500. The body shop guy told him that had the scratch been deeper or in another part of the car, the repair bill would have doubled or tripled, which is now increasingly common as more luxury European carmakers, including Audi, Mercedes and BMW, use the aluminum-shell technology (owing to its increased strength and lighter weight). Solution? Get several estimates for the paintwork. Oh, and do not make your Jaguar thus accessible.
About the Author:
Rand Stuck is a BMW certified mechanic with over 12 years of experience. Rand is the manager of the online parts department of a BMW performance parts retailer. You can find additional information on
Repair and Maintenance and
BMW parts and accessories at AutoWerks.
