Thanks. I think I have seen that place, but forgot about it. Doesn’t work for me (EV) but it would fit the OP’s criteria.
Except for the “cheaper” part.
I would like to see an example where it would work in real life.
IIRC most shops will charge a fee for “storage” if you don’t pick up your car in a reasonable amount of time.
What I usually do when I visit San Francisco is park in a park and ride lot out in the suburbs where parking is free or very cheap, and take BART into the city. But I hate driving in big cities anyway. And come to think of if, what are the chances of finding an auto repair shop that’s walking distance from your destination? In my observation those places aren’t located in touristy/shopping/entertainment districts, they tend to be in the more industrial parts of the city. You’re probably going to end up having to take public transit to your destination anyway, so it probably makes more sense to just go the park and ride route.
But the OP explicitly says that you tell the garage, when you drop the car off, that you won’t be able to pick it up until the end of the day. If the garage says, “No problem, as long as you’re back before we close at 6.00 p.m.” (or whatever), then who have you scammed?
Most garages I’ve used for oil changes and servicing has policies posted about storage. Some start charging you at the end of the first day; some give you a second day’s grace to pick your car up, or something similar. And how much they charge you, per day, for storage, depends on where the garage is. It’s more in an expensive city than it is in a small town.
When I used to get an oil change at my local place in San Diego, I’d sometimes come back and get the car as soon as it was ready, and other times I told them that I couldn’t come and get it until the end of business, and they were always fine with it either way. if the car is parked on their property, and they know when you’ll be back, there’s no scam, by definition.
What do they charge for an oil change, and what would it cost to get from there to downtown?
[quote=“Joey_P, post:6, topic:913693”]
Doesn’t even sound like a scam to me. It seems more like a (for lack of a better word) 'life hack".
[/quote]I would agree with this assessment.
But why wouldn’t be a better idea to just park somewhere where it’s free like Walmart or a movie theater or a mall and just Uber to your destinations?
I understand that there may be places where some of these have paid parking, but I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where there’s absolutely no free parking anywhere.
San Diego? Park It on Market all day parking is $15.
I’m with Czarcasm on this one. Yes, there are some cities where the very center of the urban core has very expensive parking because the land is so expensive and so many people want to go there to shop/dine/tour, etc. But for that very reason, there’s not going to be a garage performing cheap oil changes and then sitting on your car for a day.
I just looked at San Francisco, and the closest mechanic to the part of San Francisco where it costs $20 an hour is… right next to a parking lot that will charge you $20 for 10 hours of parking. I bet Manhattan and anywhere else is the same.
old joke: Guy has a Ferrari , he wants to borrow $10k from the bank and he leaves the car as collateral. A month later he returns and pays $10,030 back including interest. The banker asks him why he did the loan that way. The guy says " I was going out of town and where else could I park that car for a dollar a day?"
I don’t know, that would be a question for the OP. I was just working within the hypothetical.
Shoot, I was going to post a similar version when I got home:
A woman walks into a bank in NYC before going on vacation and asks for a $5,000 loan.
The banker asks, “Okay, miss, is there anything you would like to use as collateral?”
The woman says, “Yes, of course. I’ll use my Rolls Royce.”
The banker, stunned, asks, “A $250,000 Rolls Royce? Really?”
The woman is completely positive. She hands over the keys, as the bankers and loan officers laugh at her. They check her credentials, make sure she is the title owner. Everything checks out. They park it in their underground garage for two weeks.
When she comes back, she pays off the $5,000 loan as well as the $15.41 interest.
The loan officer says, “Miss, we are very appreciative of your business with us, but I have one question. We looked you up and found out that you are a multi-millionaire. Why would you want to borrow $5,000?”
The woman replies, “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?”
Because in places like Manhattan there essentially are no places like this where you can park your car.
I have done that in Toronto. There are a couple of malls that are connected to the public transit system. I’ll park my car in the mall parking lot for free. Walk through the mall and get on the public transit and then ride that into the city. I did something similar in Boston once.
An unsaid part of the plan would be to make sure the garage where you left your car is reasonably close to the subway system.
FFS, my point had nothing to do with the specific cost of parking in San Diego.
My point, if you’d read the damn post, was to refute the notion that the OP’s plan is any sort of scam.
I’d call it a parking scheme rather than a parking scam.
A few times when my wife and I made short visits (2-3 days) to New York by car, I would drop her and our luggage off at the hotel or apartment where we were staying in Manhattan, then drive over to Brooklyn and find street parking, often in a semi-industrial area near Green Point. As long as there was no street sweeping scheduled for the days we were going to be in town, I could just leave the car for two or three nights and catch the subway back across the river.
Something I worry about, when contemplating similar schemes, is the risk that comes from any obviously good idea involving cheap/free overnight parking away from home: if it’s such an obviously good idea, then people will be on the lookout for such cars to steal or break into and steal from.
It’s come up a few times in doing long-distance bike trips originating from somewhere other than my home. The problem of where to leave a car for a couple nights (and not always in a major city, just wherever), not (thankfully) the break-in part. Some places (like store parking lots) will also have signs insisting that cars are not to be left overnight. Whether they actually do anything about it, though, is up in the air. But a complicating problem. They don’t necessarily have to call a tow truck on you, just offer a tow company a contract to sweep the parking lot at night and take their pick.
Sure, always a risk. I always made sure to leave nothing of value in the car, and to leave the center console open so they could see there was nothing in there. We were lucky enough never to have a problem.
In fact, the only place we ever had any trouble was in our own private parking lot at our condo complex in San Diego. The lot was not locked, and backed onto an alley. The thieves just walked in during the night and stole the car. We got it back, with a busted up steering column where they broke into the starter mechanism. After that, the landlord installed closed circuit cameras in the lot, and there were no more incidents.
Maybe in Brooklyn someplace? But, then you can probably either find street parking or a much cheaper parking lot if you’re in Brooklyn.
The service shop has aleady seen it. In Montreal there is a Burger King near a hospital with predatory parking. BK has a full time monitor who watches for parkers who leave the premises, and immediately has the car towed. He gets paid a kickback by the towing yard.
True story: I was in a situation once where my car didn’t work because of some minor-ish problem, and where furthermore I didn’t feel I would need a car much. (Living in Berkeley, with good public transportation, in the early 1970’s, when many gas stations had mechanical service too.)
So I took my car to a station where a friend worked. They were backlogged with work. So I told the boss there that I was in no hurry and he could fix my car whenever he had the time.
So my car sat there in his lot for something like six months. When I felt like I wanted it back, I asked him to put a little more priority on it. Then he got it fixed in a few days and I had my car back, after six-some months of free storage.