I've had bad luck with independent mechanics taking on jobs they weren't capable of doing properly and ruining a car in the past. Although it sounds like you had an honest one, independent mechanics aren't necessarily above selling you goods and services that you don't need, especially if you don't know the maintenance schedule or have maintenance records.
Unfortunately they also have a habit of doing things in too much of a hurry, such as leaving fluid levels low (possibly from not letting bubbles settle out), misaligning hubcaps, and using incorrect (low) tire pressures. The last of which helps fulfill their goal of wearing out tires sooner so they can pitch replacements. This is sort of a risk with most garages, though.
The schedule on my leased vehicle is stretched out further per oil change than a local garage suggests (15,000km vs 5,000km).
I've never had an oil-related failure.
And before you ask, yes, they're all high-mileage; for a while I was doing 25,000 miles/year.
However, it is great for people who wants to work on their own car and resell value isn't really a concern.
Adam saruwatari on youtube shows it in action.
Willing to risk destroying the car to save hundreds of dollars.
I don't get it. Those two things seem incompatible to me. Ferrari isn't about frugality, and cost of ownership necessarily means hundreds of dollars is not a problematic expense.
Very much easier said than done for most people. Assuming you aren’t lucky enough to have a mechanic in your circle, how do you tell whether they are trustworthy?
Simple things like going for a replacement tyre and being given a choice of price ranges and an explanation of each option, then watching them do the change and hand torque to the correct spec.
Or an air con regas at £50 at a small garage vs £120 at the main dealer.
Most recently I had the discs changed, was able to order the parts myself and drop them off for fitting at the cost of labour only. That'd never be an option at a main dealer or chain type garage but is pretty common for smaller outfits apparently.
I knew he was trustworthy because I asked him to explain what he was doing and why. He went into great detail. Brought an unidentifiable problem to him and he found a corroded wire vs 700 in repairs the dealer suggested. Just little things like that will let you know. Check their certificates, make sure at least ASCE (sp) certified.
Also take a look at the shop and see what cars are in the lot. Bunch of 5-10 year old cars in great shape seems to be a good sign IMO as people who take care of their cars trust the mechanic
Car dealerships are mechanics, nothing special about them, and I've had incidents with small paces as well.
>I had to bring my car in for a recall previously, and they said right away that the brakes also needed replacing immediately.
So what? Say no if you don't want the work. Done. Do you get mad at every salesman who pushes their product on you?
>Ended up replacing the back after a year and a half
You can ride bad brakes pretty much forever if you want, nothing stopping you (pun). As he says, depends on "how you drive".
I'm still trying to wrap my head around why you're so upset about your dealer suggesting you get your brakes done...
Non-functional breaks mean death. If its okay for an expert to lie to you to sell you unnessesary service, then it's okay for a doctor to tell you you need urgent surgery when in fact you don't?
I have had exactly that happen to me when I visited a very fancy dental clinic, replete with photos of household name celebrity clients on its lobby's wall.
After doing a fancy 3D scan of my teeth they've concluded that I urgently needed to remove a wisdom tooth that had been lying dormant in a horizontal position in my mouth or else.
That "else" hasn't happened in 10 years since my first and only visit there.
This is definitely true for most car dealerships (Ford, Honda, etc) but I've found it not the case at all for higher end cars.
When I took my Porsche to my trusted mechanic they recommended I take it to a Porsche dealer, and advised me not to even adjust the oil myself. I've owned less expensive cars for most of my life and am used to doing a lot of maintenance myself. It took me awhile of owning a Porsche to realize things are a bit different with more expensive cars.
I imagine this is even more true for a Ferrari.
They didnt want the added liability of replacing oil and then having you come in a month later with (unrelated) blown engine.
If you're selling cars $300k+ minimum, you're selling much more than the car. Your dealership is going to be treating you the same way enterprise software companies treat a corporate account (dedicated sales, customer success, etc).
2. This is not in the context of "no one knows whether these pads are above minimum spec" but rather in the context of a dealership recommending service before the pads have worn down to minimum spec. There are valid reasons (mostly convenience) why someone might choose to have brake pads replaced before they're at minimums and valid reasons why others would choose to run them all the way out.
The dealership is doing work under warranty, so are motivated to fix things quickly and permanently. A freelance mechanic is motivated to find more things wrong and to never really fix them so you have to keep coming back.
I have a mid 2000s sedan from the Ford motor company, recently the air conditioning stopped working; initially I engaged with a few different freelance mechanics, one billed me for a pressure system check / recharge, another said they didn't know what was wrong but could do "diagnostics" until I cried uncle on the costs. The car is worth maybe $3,000 so I can't justify a lot of repair costs on it, but at the same time the powertrain is still in great shape. The Ford dealership was able to pinpoint the actual problem, which was a $25 ambient temp sensor-- but it's buried in the center of the dash requiring $1000 worth of labor to replace.
Ultimately I was able to find the ambient temp sensor pins on the glove box wiring harness and bridge them with a 47 cent resistor, tricking the computer into turning my AC back on.
Cars could be so much better. We'd generate less waste if perfectly good vehicles weren't getting thrown away because Ford and GM designed them to fail in opaque and unserviceable ways, unfortunately things have been trending the opposite direction with BEVs and Tesla in particular.
I've worked most of my career writing software to control physical objects. Nobody designs like this, it wouldn't even make sense.
The reality is that there are always competing interests. The Service team wants things to be easy to repair, but the Sales team wants it to be cheap and easy to sell, while Marketing wants it to never breaks at all. You can't reconcile all of those.
Sometimes engineers screw up. OK, often engineers screw up! But more often than not, functionality wins over everything and the engineer puts the sensor in the best place she can, given the constraints that she had to work with. Someone runs the reliability analysis and says that the sensor isn't likely to fail during the car's expected lifetime, so service isn't a big concern. Sometimes your specific car falls on the wrong side of that reliability curve, sometimes the engineer who did the analysis screwed up, or sometimes Shit Just Happens.
But no one designs things to be hard to service: that would mean it's hard to build in the first place and just take too big a bite out of profits.
Why exactly does the 'expected lifetime' of durable goods keep getting shorter?
Forest, meet trees
not ambient, Im guessing Evap Temperature Sensor. You can cut a hole in the dash to get to evaporator, JB weld compatible temp sensor to the side of it, and patch it to the wiring loom. One hour and a $10 thermistor to fully working AC.
>bridge them with a 47 cent resistor, tricking the computer into turning my AC back on
tricking your AC system into permanently engaged compressor clutch
It's no mystery of course, if you think about it from the manufacturers perspective - it all about greater sales. The environmental perspective is just another sales angle really.
I'm not big on cars. I would happily drive an open source car.
Which car are you thinking of? All of the EVs I know of let you replace the battery (granted, it may be an ordeal like the new Model Y with structural pack, but at least it's still possible and officially supported).
The scenario is that an old battery can only store so much charge, which limits your range. However newer versions have better batteries and therefore longer ranges.
The kicker is that the better battery cannot be fitted into a perfectly functional older car.
Don't forget that the functionality of older batteries decreases too, with a loss of range. So you can fork out for a very expensive battery but it is for the old version only. Feels like a lose-lose scenario (expense and poor range).
Frankly the electric car economics in general don't make sense for anyone that actually needs to cover some miles - the older cars lose range and will be an expensive headache in the future, and the newer versions are way too expensive for what they do.
That was my analysis anyway, when I looked into buying a second hand EV.
It's quite rare for this to be possible in any component of anything you buy these days. Why single out EV batteries here?
In EVs though, replacing the battery is so expensive - thousands of pounds/dollars - it makes no sense to do it. So once the battery starts degrading after only a few years, the upgrade is incredibly expensive - essentially the cost of a car.
If by doing so you could at least extend the range and see a benefit, perhaps it would make sense. And why couldn't you do it. Because its a design anti-pattern. If you stick to a certain space in the car for the same model, you could easily make this a feature. But you wouldn't if you just want to sell cars.
As it is, I think these cars will have a shorter life span than non-EV cars - they will be scrapped earlier as they are not economically viable. I don't see how they not far less environmentally unfriendly than non-EVs.
Honestly not sure if it was a scam by the dealership or if the car was really that poorly designed.
So yes, it is now ridiculously complicated to replace lights. But here’s the kicker — my wife’s dealer had never had to do it before. They are so reliable that this was the first time they had to replace a light in that model. We walked in and asked them to replace it as if it was routine. They didn’t believe us that it was out.
So, my guess, not knowing anything about the VW in question is that it really was that complicated, but not something that is expected to happen often.
However, while it's possible to do it without removing the bumper (I go in through the wheel well), it's harder that way. The reality is that there isn't a lot of room in the first place, and headlights can last a very long time, so for an infrequent service it does make sense.
The car dealership is doing work under warranty, so they don't make any real money from you (they can put in the work/time/labour for whatever the manufacturer wanted them to fix, but that has a set margin that's determined by corporate - who for sure have counted their beans) - the real money is in upselling - getting you to do brakes while you get the warranty repair done, selling you new windshield wipers while you're there, etc.
Hey while you're in for servicing, why don't we do a fuel system treatment too? it's only $50 and we'll get your car fixed for the warranty and get it to run better too!
The other side for car dealership warranty repairs that I've also seen is that they get so many repairs in the shop that they can't do each one properly cause they are under pressure from corporate to do the servicing for a certain dollar amount, and they can't spend any additional labour hours/time to do it right.
this happened on engine recalls, due to the complexity of an engine recall, the mechanics didn't get allotted enough time to do each one, so basically, corporate tried to shove 4 hours of work into 2 paid hours - the end result is shoddy workmanship due to the mechanics only doing 2 hours of work on a 4 hour job (so rushed, loosed bolts, parts left over, not installed correctly, etc) - there ended up being a 2nd recall on top of the first recall because it wasn't the dealer mechanic's fault - they weren't being given enough time to do each one
The idea is that you buy several normal cars from them, then, if you are lucky and really, really on best behaviour, they will let you on to the lottery to get an allocation for one of their special edition models.
If you get the special allocation then you can't 'flip' it, you have to play by the game because otherwise Ferrari won't sell you another special edition model.
If I was a dealer and I had to replace 1000 fuel filler widgets free of charge in my own time in order to keep those customers happy enough for one of them to come back and spend a million, then it would not be a problem. Getting those 1000 customers through the door again (or even a dozen of them) is all good.
Funny how few of these Ferraris get to put in any miles. It isn't range anxiety, it is mileage anxiety. If you had to drive 400 miles you would not do it because of the miles and how that affects the value. Hence these cars spent their time in garages, connected to wall chargers, turning a wheel once or twice between services in order to ensure everything is mechanically peachy.
In the UK the likelihood of finding a Ferrari is high in London where the average speed is in the single digits. Some of these cars don't get to escape the capital, they don't drive at speed, they just sit there as a speculative asset.
Even for high end race cars, tyres you need to pay out of pocket for - since they are total wear items.
I've worked at a car dealership before. Find a mechanic you trust, the car dealership will rip you off time and time again. I had to bring my car in for a recall previously, and they said right away that the brakes also needed replacing immediately. I brought it in to my mechanic instead to do it, they said I had at least another year on the back brakes, and 2 years on the front depending on how I actually drive. Ended up replacing the back after a year and a half, and am on year 3 for the front (will probably be replacing them shortly).