As you may recall from a prior thread my car, , needed an inspection. I’ve done this without a hassle in prior years at my old shop where I usually just paid for the inspection and a new light bulb or two.
This year I went to a new shop (the old one closed) where I did not pass inspection. The guy says my front brakes need work: brakes ($59), rotors ($100), labor and bleeding ($130), tie rods ($100 + $140, inside & outside), and labor ($143). All told, close to $700!!!
(The stunned, bug-eyed smilie does not do justice to my shock, so I won’t use it.)
Does this sound like a typical repair given my car’s age and mileage (a 1991 Ford Tempo with 97,000 miles) ? Do the prices sound reasonable (I live in NYC)?
Should I shop around? And how is that done anyway – do you call up another shop, read him the quoted prices and ask, “Can you beat that?”?
And is this the kind of borderline/judgement-call defect that some other shop might overlook and pass me (I’ve never detected any braking problems while driving the car)?
I can only speak from experience, but my brakes (for instance) will probably need new pads every 2nd service; I can’t imagine going ‘years’ without any major work. Can’t speak about tie-rods or whether the labour’s expensive, I’m afraid.
(And I don’t know if ‘rotors’ is what we’d call discs in the UK, but one time when I’d left it just a bit too long between brake inspections I’d managed to gauge the two rear discs - cost me quite a bit to get replaced…
Is this for all four around or just the front? I don’t know that much about that specific car, but I got new front brakes for my 1991 Nissan Stanza to the tune of $350 here in Michigan, at a very trusted mechanic who is known for their reasonable prices. So for all 4 I’d guess the $700 estimate isn’t out of the question.
If you’re talking just the fronts, that does seem high to me, even given the cost-of-living differences (registration costs me $54/year here! wahoo!)
Have you checked your mechanic’s reputation with Car Talk’s Mechan-X files?
I dont know about your particular car but all the people i know who go to the mechanic always walk away with $1000 worth of upgrades and work that the mechanics want to do.
Maybe you can get a friend or a small time mechanic to do the work and buy the parts yourself. Most mechanic places charge $70/hr but mechanics who work from their home charge closer to $25 in my experience.
A local mechanic here wanted me to pay around $500 for a new set of shocks and labor. However i can buy shocks at JC Whitney for $50 and have a mechanic change them for $25/hr. Total cost would be about $150 that way. But i dont even need new shocks so i didn’t do it.
I don’t know about the tie-rods, but last time I had to have my front brakes replaced (brakes and rotors plus labor) it cost me nearly $340. That was in Rockland County. I actually paid more once at a Toyota dealership in Florida - a whopping $450 - but I had no choice, because I would never have made it home otherwise.
As I discovered the hard way, sometimes a friendly mechanic will give you a pass or do a bare minimum repair when it would really be better not to scrimp. (That’s what led to the $450 job.) How long since you last had your brakes done?
I’m a shade tree mechanic, and would never think about spending this kind of money on these types of repairs.
I’ve been replacing pads, shoes, calipers, wheel cylinders, rotors, brake lines, etc. on my rust buckets for 20 years. The job is not that difficult, and you can save a boatload of money by doing it yourself. (Just get the tools and learn how to do it.)
As far as tie rod ends go – same thing. I’ve replaced them on my Mustangs over the years, and I replaced the idler arms on our GMC Astro van a few months ago. All you need are a few wrenches, a hammer, and a separator tool (which you can rent for free from one of the discount places). Each idler arm was around $30.
Yeah, I think the estimate is pretty middle-of-the-road for what you need done. Not on the high side, not on the low side. All in all, pretty reasonable. I mean, you could do it yourself for much cheaper (probably $300 in parts or so), but if you don’t know how, then this is the price of ignorance.
Anyway, $700 really isn’t very much for a car repair. It’s moderate. Especially considering that you don’t need brakes or tie rods every other day. There are more things on a car that cost $1000 to fix than there are things that cost $50.
North Florida checking in. Have no idea how this compares – and I’m still getting quotes, but I just was quoted $630 for the following:
60K mile service including:
standard brake job - four brakes + turn rotors
replace timing belt - plus water pump & seals
tune up - plugs but not wires
oil change - plus lube
flush all fluids, incl. radiator, A/C, windshield & brake fluid (Are there other fluids?)
I have two other repair shops working up quotes for me and I will post those here for comparison’s sake.
BTW, the quote above includes all parts (which are in stock) and labor – this is for a '95 Honda del Sol with 75K miles on it. S’posed to be a one-day job. Which would be good because I need tires too!
$59 dollars for pads is reasonable, $100 for rotors is also reasonable. Labor of $130 is probably 2 hours at $65/ which is reasonable for here in California (actually in parts of Ca this would be cheap) I don’t know what labor rates in your area average, so you call it.
That would make the outer tie rods $50 each and the inners about $70 each. The labor charge includes a front-end alignment (The tie rods are what keep you wheels pointing in the same direction, and are adjustable). Alignments can range in price from about $45 to $100 by themselves, so from that $143 you have to back out the cost of the alignment. Doing that leaves a little over 1 hour labor which I think is reasonable for this job.
Yes the repair seems fairly typical for a car with almost 100,000 miles on it. Unless you have the brakes and rotors done in the very near past, I suspect that they are bad. Tie rod ends on many cars tend to go away somewhere between 50K-100K so again that does not seem out of line.
Typically you would take the car to another shop and ask them to diagnose the car with no prior knowledge of what shop A said then compare estimates. This however involves quite a bit of time, and what are you going to do if shop B wants $750 for the same work?
Probably not, but then again I am not familiar with the laws of NY regarding inspections. Brakes may be working fine and not pass inspection. Brake pads wear, and as they wear the lining material gets thinner. When the lining material gets to zero thickness the metal backing pad tears into the metal rotor (with large grinding noises). Also at this point the brakes don’t work for shit. Now again I don’t know the laws of NY regarding inspections, but with what I just told you, if new pads were 12mm of lining thick and you saw a car that had only 1mm left, would you call them safe? As far as the rotors go, stamped on each rotor is a minimum thickness. Rotors need a minimum amount of mass to be able to dissipate the heat generated when the brakes are applied. If say the minimum thickness on your rotors is 12.0mm and yours measure (using a micrometer) 11.95mm they are bad.
You can ask this shop what the minimum thickness specification for your rotors are, and what yours measured, and ask what percentage of your brake remains. A quality shop should be happy to supply you with these numbers. FWIW brake pad wear is not linear. The last 30% wears much faster than the first 30%. We used to recommend replacement at 25-30% remaining. This was the point that we knew from experience, on the cars we worked on, that the pads would not make it to the next service.
The longer you wrench on cars yourself, the less credit you give to your mechanic.
There is, quite literally, NOTHING I can’t do to a car, I’ve done my own stuff on my own vehicles for so long that the occasionaly non-warrantee repair really throws me. Remember two things tho:
Repairs are the bread and butter of a dealership, THAT is where all the money is made, that said. It’s a business. The duty of a business is to make a profit.
They HAVE to charge you more than just parts because they’ve got more overhead. The home mechanic doesn’t have to pay for repair bays, heat, electricity, someone to answer the phone, etc. and etc.
That said, I’ll continue to fix everything I can myself cause I’m a cheap b@stard, and consider the time I spend learning and working on cars to be well worth the effort.
Sounds about right to me. To echo others here, it would certainly be cheaper if you could at least do the brake work yourself - it’s really not that difficult, but a little more labor intensive than just changing your oil. Of course, if you don’t have the know-how (a Chilton manual does wonders) or the tools (or a place to do the work), you have no choice.
I’m guessing that if you’re that surprised at the price, you may not have ever had this type of work done. If you are the original owner, after 13 years you’re pretty much due to have this work done (surely the brake pads have been changed before).
If you can jack your car up and pull off one of your front tires, you can inspect the brake pads and rotor. You may even be able to see them without removing the tire, depending on what type of wheels or wheel covers you have. If the pad looks worn down, like 1/8" or so or less, they need to be replaced, and quickly. Wait too long and the rotors get scored. Some pads have a little metal clips on them that start to squeal or chirp when the pads wear down to a certain point.
If your front end wobbles when you brake, especially at high speeds, your rotors are warped and should be replaced.
Whether you do the work yourself or not, IMHO it is worth it for any owner to learn about a vehicle and its parts, and what’s involved in repairs, so you won’t be as likely to get ripped off by mechanics.
I don’t know how long you’ve had the car or when was the last time your brakes were done, but these are things that do need to be replaced with time. If you’ve never had any of them done, it’s not unlikely that it’s time. You can look at the brakes yourself or take them somewhere else, but if it’s time to do them, I wouldn’t put it off. Brake work isn’t something you want to let go. The part prices don’t sound too off the wall to me (but then again I have a Volkswagen and am used to paying 2-3 times more for any given part.) Labor sounds within range - my mechanic charges about $60 an hour and he is very reasonable.
I’ll add that I can sympathise though. I had what I thought was a simple problem last week and it has turned into almost $1,000 in parts alone. This is after spending about $700 earlier this year on other maintenance. Luckily my husband can do a lot of work himself or the cost would be at least double.
I don’t know about New York, but around here there are places you can take your car for inspection that do nothing but inspections. They have no vested interest in selling you repairs that you may or may not really need.
Do you even need some of those repairs? Check your brake pads. Are they squeaking? Is there still enough pad on it. Theres a little metal pad on them that sticks out and thats what makes them squeak when it wears down to it. If there is plenty of pad let it go. Rotors, are they uneven? Does your car pull at all when braking? Alignment messed up?
I replaced a broken tie rod end on my friends Malibu. It was very easy to do. Im not a mechanic by far. After we did it, the alignment was all messed up and we had to adjust it a bit before it would drive straight.
My point is, if you don’t notice any problems with the car, I wouldn’t worry about it. But to be on the safe side, go to another place.
As a shadetree mechanic, how do you accomplish front end alignment after replacing tie rod ends? I’m curious, that’s all.
I’ve worked for a few dealerships in my day and my experience has been that dealers hate the repair business beyond belief. Specialized tools, large physical areas that could be used to stock more cars for sale, tempermental mechanics, factory personnel who fight tooth and nail with the dealer over warranty work, jobs that have to be re-done (a “come-back” is a dead loss for all concerned), training schools at the dealer’s expense—on and on. I’ve never met a dealer who was in any way dependent on the shop for profit. If that were the case, a smart business man would close the sales area and run a shop full time.
Sounds like the certified inspector has already made the decision that in order for his vehicle to pass, these repairs must be completed (either by him or someone else). Not sure if that information is entered into any kind of database but if so, his vehicle may already be labeled as needing these repairs in the DOT system. I don’t think “letting it go” is an option at this point.
And from reading off my receipt:
Passenger Car Brake Job 4WD Wheel Disc Asian Imports Rear Axle (Disc) - Parts Only
180.00
Brake Labor
94.95
2 Calipers
0.00
Tax
24.20
Total -
$299.15
Luckily I didn’t need new rotors, that would have been an additional $150 + tax ($75 each).
This was for a 1989 Toyota Camry (and don’t question me about the 4WD, really it is, although it is referred to All Wheel Drive) with 146,648 miles. The number of miles would probably only would come into question when looking into how major the brake job might be.
I do know that if I could have done the job myself the parts themselves would have only been $50 from the local Toyota dealer…that’s it. But I would need the brains and tools to do this myself (Dad, why did you move 2 1/2 hours away? It could have been so much cheaper!). :smack:
If my regular mechanic had done the job I probably would have saved $100-150 (but they needed to get done now, not plan a vacation day, make appointment, etc.----yeah, my commute SUCKS).
Last time a rear brake job was done on my 1989 Mustang it was about the same price as the Camry’s this last Saturday.
Maybe an actual mechanic can correct me if I am wrong but basics such as oil changes, radiator flushes and brake jobs no matter the make, model or miles should be pretty much the same. For other more specialized repairs there can be differences (cost to replace timing belt on 1989 Mustang-$75, for 1989 Camry-$285). And then some vehicles have timing chains, not timing belts…you get the idea.
Me, I would not just go with one estimate, I would get a couple others from shops that are recommended by friends or family and go from there.
