We Fix Cars - Do You?
As a long time car enthusiast I am often amazed at the prices mechanics charge for simple repair work that most anybody could do themselves. For instance, I was recently at the Ford shop with a friend who was getting some routine maintenance done, and the Ford mechanic wanted over $400 to change the fuel filter, flush the transmission, and replace the power steering fluid. These are three fairly simple jobs that can be done for much less than half that cost with just a few hours time. When you do them yourself, you can control the relative eco-friendliness of the products you use. You also (affordably) keep your vehicle on the road, lowering demand for the manufacturing of new ones and maintaining your vehicle's maximum fuel efficiency.
|
Auto Repair
|
Let's keep our DIY skills alive. There are some things that must be done in a shop, but for those that don't, let's teach our sons and daughters how to be independent and save some money.
|
Are New Cars Harder to Fix?
|
What About Safety?
|
Thirty years ago, if you were feeling a bit cash-strapped, you didn’t need to pay a garage to service your car. Instead you could invest the money you would have spent on a Haynes manual and a socket set. A few hours and a bit of cursing later and you’d have done the job yourself.
How things appear to have changed. It’s a frequently repeated mantra that cars are now so mechanically complicated it’s impossible for all but a qualified technician to work on them. With hard-up owners increasingly reluctant to spend money on servicing, car care is falling by the wayside to the point that the AA says half of the 3.4 million call-outs it attends annually are caused by poor maintenance. |
For decades, design engineers at car companies have been burning the midnight oil to make formerly simple repairs very costly and dangerous.
For instance, hiding headlights and turn signals behind wheel-well liners and bumpers; hiding hoses and hiding spark plugs under housings so you have to remove three hoses and struggle for access. On March 8, 2018, the battery on my wife’s 2015 Lincoln MKC was dead for the first time, and the negative pole was hidden behind a housing, which required a screw to be removed. Can you imagine this on a cold, dark night on the road when you might need a jump? It’s dangerous to lie in the road to replace a headlight or front turn signal, since you have to remove a wheel liner. |