But you don’t need every tool to work on every car.
Plenty of mechanics work with a single toolbox that you can carry by hand.
It will handle 90 percent of the jobs. The one semi-specialty tool you need for the job is a phone call to Napa away.
Before long you have 99 percent of what you will actually do covered. If you look at a mechanics toolset you will find that 20 percent of the tools get 99.9% of the use. A lot, maybe more than half, basically never get used at all.
In many things, a full set consists of perhaps 16-20 sizes, but for many types of tools, there are 3 sizes that get used all the time, and two that get used once or twice a year. The rest not at all.
Also, you can buy a “$10,000” set of tools for around $2000 if you are patient, less if you identify where you need really good tools and where middle of the road will work fine, and don’t let it become a vanity hobby.
Over time, you will likely have a lot invested in tools.. but you don’t need that much to start, unless you are talking about opening a full service shop from scratch, not just being a mechanic.
$10-15k is a more realistic number for an auto mechanic, and many of them have $50k+ into their tools.