My wife took her 2002 Saturn to the local NTB/Tire Kingdom for a routine oil change. The car has 75,000 miles on it. After they changed the oil they told her, “One of the rear brakes is broken. It’s not safe to drive and needs to be changed. We can fix your brakes for $325.” She agreed.
The charge on her credit card ended up being $485. The service included two rear rotors, new rear pads, oil change, labor, shop fees, etc.
I was pretty upset when she told me this. I drove the car over a hundred miles the day before, and the brakes seemed perfectly fine to me. My initial reaction was that she got ripped off. So I drove to NTB/Tire Kingdom and asked for the parts, which they gave to me.
I have them here in front of me:
There’s a little bit of rust on the flat parts where the pads do not make contact. The surfaces where the pads hit the rotor look and feel fairly smooth. On the hub it says, “Minimum thickness of 8.0 mm.” I measured slightly over 10 mm with my calipers. I’m not an expert, but visually they seem fine to me.
Thickness of friction material on each of the four pads: 3 mm, 4 mm, 6 mm, and 6 mm. One of the 6 mm pads was broken; the friction material had separated from the steel backing plate.
Based on what you have posted here, it sounds like the rear pad material separated from the backing plate. This is unusual. In fact I can’t recall the last time I saw a disc brake pad separate.
Again based only on what you have posted, IMHO the rotors are serviceable.
The cars I work on we do not turn rotors, but when they are below minimum thickness at pad replacement you replace them. Does one face of one rotor have scoring? Is the brake pad backing plate worn shinny where the material was? Can you post pictures?
Any vibration in either the steering wheel or brake pedal, would tend to indicate a warpage in either the front or rear rotors respectively. Warpage again IMHO is a reason to replace a set of rotors.
Can you post an itemized version of the bill? I am wondering how the brakes ($325) +oil change got to $485.
Again I don’t know what the laws are in your area, but here in California it sounds like they would have possibly violated the estimate laws, and you might be owed a refund.
In Florida the estimate laws allow the customer to specify at what (over-budget) point he or she would like to be consulted… but if you leave the box blank, it defaults to $100 more than the estimate amount.
Obviously, I’m making a number of assumptions here.
Assumption #1: Your description of the parts is reasonably accurate, and so is my understanding of their condition.
Assumption #2: There were no symptoms you or your wife detected, such as noise or shimmy. From this I deduce the rotors were not warped and were not badly scored by any pad’s metal backing. Hence, the rotors did not need to be replaced - they could have been resurfaced, or used as is.
Assumption #3: The pad material didn’t separate from its backing just before the car pulled into the shop’s parking lot. Given that, I figure it had been separated for some indeterminate time before it was observed, and had ample opportunity to fall out onto the road if that were possible. Since it hadn’t fallen out, I would deem “not safe to drive” to be a significant exaggeration.
Assumption #4: This place, like too many chain operations I have seen, trains its people to sell rather than to have good mechanical judgment (they may have believed it was unsafe to drive). They sell work that is not really needed more out of ignorance than greed, though the latter is certainly present.
Here I think you and I will have to agree to disagree. While I agree that I think C_M got hosed, if I have a car come in tomorrow with the friction material separated from the backing plate I would refer to it as unsafe to drive. All I would know is that the material had not fallen out yet. On the very next stop the friction material might fracture into pieces and falls out, and car gets into accident. Or maybe it doesn’t fracture and fall out but there is an accident anyway.
Either way next stop a lawsuit against my shop, and I get to spend a day in a deposition defending why I didn’t tell the the customer the car was unsafe to drive. Just like doctors sometimes practice defensive medicine, there are times I have to practice defense auto repair.
I have been known to write a 2 paragraph long disclaimer and require a signature before releasing a car.
Frankly, when we’re talking about chain operations, I’d say you can count yourself lucky that they actually did the work, whether or not it needed doing.
That is, of course, assuming they gave you your old parts and not somebody else’s.
I wouldn’t necessarily argue against any of this. I will offer the following for elaboration, though:
I do see pad linings separated from their backing once a year or so. Sometimes the particulars of the design are such that the lining is trapped in place and cannot migrate out so long as the caliper is still attached. Other times the lining is gone, and the backing is pressing against the (now badly scored) rotor, but the brakes still stop the car. In my experience, the chance of an accident being caused by this particular condition is very low.
I probably framed my original response with some bias against the shop (fueled partly by what seems to be selling new rotors that weren’t needed, and partly by having seen too many places tell customers they needed $600-800 worth of brake repair when pad replacement was all that was necessary). I’ve just seen so many cases where customers are told OH MY GOD IT’S SO UNSAFE YOU’RE GOING TO DIE IF YOU DRIVE IT TEN MORE FEET!!! when the reality is it’s nowhere near that dangerous, that I tend to react with instant skepticism when I hear the “unsafe to drive” line.
Gary I agree with everything you have said. I would not, nor would I ever allow any of my service writers to use the you are going to die line unless it really was that bad. (we did use it the other month, the entire face of the rotor was worn away, the piston had completely come out of the bore of the caliper, there was no brake fluid left in the system.* The rear brakes were also metal to metal, but not as bad as the fronts. We gave the customer a choice, repair or tow it. I would not allow the customer to drive the car out of my shop. If he had refused both I would have paid for a tow. (he took it for a tow) Yeah, I’m that paranoid).
It probably would not matter if the bad brake was the cause of the accident or not, you could wind up on the wrong end of a law suit and spend time defending yourself.
I too have a bias against chain shops that over sell, I am sure you have seen me refer to Iffy-Lube around here before.
All in all I think we are in pretty much agreement here, there is just a regional difference (people in California seem to be more sue happy) between our attitudes.
Informational question: why does your shop not turn rotors? I was taught to always have rotors turned if any significant scoring was apparent or linings were worn to the backing when replacing the pads, and I’ve seen several Chiltons/Haynes manuals recommend turning whenever replacing pads.
As for the o.p., I would tend to agree with Rick and Gary T that the shop ripped her off. If the brake lining were in the condition you described when removed from the vehicle I would at least expect vibration when braking and possibly damage to the rotor. Like Rick I have never seen the lining separate from the pad on a disc brake pad, although my experience is limited to working on about twenty cars, where I expect Rick and Gary T have probably seen thousands. I have seen linings separate from drum brake shoes (especially leading/trailing rear brakes for some reason) but I suspect that was due to operating the car with the parking brake partially engaged or improperly adjusted.
The tolerance on a brake lathe is not as tight as the tolerance on the brake rotors. What we found was that if we turned a rotor, as often as not we would install a brake vibration where none existed before.
The bottom line is that Volvo does not recommend this procedure, and nor will they pay for it under warranty. They will pay for replacements if there is a defect.
For those not familiar with how it should look, it’s vented rotor like these, and like this demo which has been purposely cut away to show the ribs inside. Replacement is called for if, oh, about .050" (yes, fifty thousandths of an inch or so) of metal is worn from one side. This puppy wore better than 1/4" of solid metal away before it started chewing on the ribs!
How much you want to bet the driver never heard any noise? (Sounds funny, but it actually happens that way once in a while.)
It was a Volvo.
There was still a splash of brake fluid in the other circuit, so the right front and left rear still had some braking power left.
Customer had been told about 7 months earlier that he needed new brake pads, he didn’t buy them. I guess he did not believe us.
Great Googely Moogely, those are some scary pictures!
And you say the customer had the car towed? So he didn’t want you to fix that? Please don’t tell me he towed it somewhere off the property just so he could drive off with his brakes in that condition?
This is MGB-specific. I’ve been told by more than one person who knows quite a lot about MGBs (Rick may have been one of them) that worn rotors should not be turned, but replaced. IIRC the reason is that the rotors are not very thick and turning will cause them to warp when they’re used.
Chrysler’s saying the same thing for the same reasons - you don’t want to install new vibrations (heh!) and after turning, thet rotors have less ability to handle heat without warping. So, either leave them alone if they’re thick enough, or replace them if they’re not.
Seems to be that way across the board - the days of two inch thick slabs of cast iron that can be turned a couple times are gone.
