Repair costs

[Xist]

I randomly clicked on Carguru Auto Warranty | Your Source For Extended Car Warranties and found this goldmine:

The average American household spends $3,269 a year on dealership maintenance and body shop repairs.

I may have done that in the last twelve months of my Prelude, money that would have been infinitely better spent replacing the car. Something happened, and my mechanic told me that he just needed to fix one thing, but then he found another, and yet one more, so pretty much Gandalf's plan for convincing Beorn to let Bilbo and the dwarves stay with him, one or two at a time, not overwhelming with all at once.

I do not believe that I have ever had a dealership work on one of my cars. I am not sure how it usually works out, but Subaru estimated $3,500 to replace the head gasket on my Forester, and ten other shops estimated between $1,500 and two thousand, so around half as much, but all of them recommended selling it as-is.

I do not remember how my Prelude was driving after all of those repairs, just that the transmission went out shortly thereafter, and then the car was towed--pretty much a typical Xist story.

I found it reposted word for word twice and rephrased once. t is exactly the same here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/high-...ohn-kosmeh-phd until "The Solution is to Extend Your Car's Warranty," which they change to:

The Solution is NOT an expensive extended warranty.

It is a new amazing service called Vehicle Repair Assist Plus.

So, it sounds like they stole someone else's ad, and changed it for their product. They claim to pay twenty percent of all negotiated repair bills, so will they actually negotiate them up 25%, negotiate them down and consider that their payment, or what? It is thirty dollars a month, which is 50% of my average monthly repair expense.

HowStuffWorks actually gives the source, but it seems to be a dead link, and when I search for it, I find false positives. They then say "In fact, owners of many new trucks and sedans can expect to pay between $1,500 and $3,000 as they perform scheduled maintenance on their way to reaching the six-digit mileage mark," which does not include body work.

That is total. I found the source: The 100,000-Mile Scheduled Maintenance Cost of Automotive Best Sellers - Edmunds.com and they never mention annual costs, but have a table for regularly scheduled maintenance:

It shows estimates for the ten most popular cars for repairs to 75,000 miles, scheduled maintenance to 75,000 miles, and scheduled maintenance to 100k. It does not give estimates for repairs to 100,000. I added the repairs and maintenance scheduled and calculated cost per 15,000 miles (year):


I imagine that most repairs by 75,000 miles were under warranty, with vehicles requiring slightly more repairs each year, but over three thousand a year still seems unrealistic to me.

I found the $3,269 article thanks to the Internet Archive and it just says "according to Bundle data." It compared individual states and linked them at the end, but I could not get them to load.

[Xist]

According to AAA, the average maintenance cost is $766.50 annually (not including tires).

[redpoint5]

The average cost of repairs for my cars since I started owning a vehicle in 2003 has been whatever zip-ties and screws cost to refasten the bumper after I plow through a wall of snow or push through the forest with my Subaru. A window was broken by a thief once, and it cost $80 to have it repaired. Su used oil at about 1 quart per 1,500 miles, and the cat efficiency fell below threshold (P0420), but I didn't bother fixing those issues.

My truck on the other hand likes to nickle and dime me. Blower motor resistors, door switches, 2 large batteries, crappy transmission, rapidly failing front-end, failing rear-end... trucks are a money pit; especially US branded ones.

I expect to spend nothing on the Prius and TSX over the course of 10 years of ownership besides oil changes, wiper blades, and tires. I'll knock the dust out of the air filters periodically.

[Xist]

My mom has a 2007 Camry with 150,000 miles and she says that her major maintenance expense is tires. She mentioned needing to replace her CV joint, but she did not remember much more than that.

Yeah. Toyota.

I asked on Facebook and a friend said that he would consider a car costing three thousand a year to be a lemon and would get rid of it.

However, I realized that the quote said "household."

How many cars do you currently have? How much do you spend a year to maintain all of them?

[Frank Lee]

Numbers that are "averages" always blow me away.

I doubt I've spent $3269 on repairs in 35 years.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Xist

The average American household spends $3,269 a year on dealership maintenance and body shop repairs.

Once again, I'm SO glad I'm not average :-) If you leave out a few restorations of 50s-60s British sports cars that were barn finds, I probably haven't spent that much on repairs in my life. Heck, all but one of my cars (the Insight) cost less than that to buy.

...pretty much Gandalf's plan for convincing Beorn to let Frodo and the dwarves stay with him...

That was Bilbo, not Frodo!

[Ryland]

My parents spent $1,000 per year more on the geo metro then their Leaf...
I spend less then $200 per year on my civic vx.

The thing is, the average car is totaled after 7 years

[LitterBug]

I absolutely "H-A-T-E" letting anyone else work on my cars (house or everything else for that matter). At most shops, something else always ends up broken or messed up when the car comes back and of course they deny any responsibility for the new problems. Instead they try to sell you more service to fix what they borked. I cringe when getting recall notices because there is no way around letting someone else do the work. Fortunately I have the ability to do 99% of the work myself and know a private shop run by local racers that will let me use the lifts, alignment racks, and tire mounting/balancing equipment. They are also the few people I actually trust to do the work right if I don't have the time or special tools needed for a repair.

LitterBug

[Frank Lee]

Awesome! If I had access to the tire equipment that would virtually eliminate all the work that isn't done by me. Yes, I've dismounted/mounted/balanced tires at home but without the good equipment that is one job worth the relatively small fee to hire out.

[jamesqf]

Yeah, I've had few good experiences with dealers &c. There was the Subaru that I took in for (IIRC) a timing belt replacement, where the engine blew on the 15 mile drive home. And the tire shop where a wheel fell off after one block... At least if I screw something up, I don't have to argue about whose fault it is :-)