From The Rock

A little scratch: $1500. A wear out device replacement: $3500. A fresh trunk-release switch cover: $150. All these are genuine repair costs related to AOL Autos since drivers took their vehicles to the auto shops with apparently small problems that resulted in excessively expensive repair bills. Not all motorists can choose to repair his vehicle himself or purchase a new one as trouble occurs in the existing one. Most of the car owners are left with limited options like gathering the big bills and paying it. Let us focus on some of the regular repair jobs that resulted in exorbitant repair bills.

Stump up for the Bumper

Deana May of AC Auto Finishing, Los Angeles, knows the nasty shocks that customers can face even with a minor matter like a bodywork scratch or scrape. Its a scary thing ” looks can be deceptive. You can calculate an estimate on a front bumper, take it off, and behind it there’s all kind of damage. Particularly with low-profile cars with low-profile tires, they often need a whole new front end if they go over a bump or up a driveway, or don’t take an angle. May says she sees a lot of this in her shop and recalls how a Lotus driver was quoted a staggering $5,400 to repair his car, though from the outside she couldn’t see much that was wrong. May also warns of the dangers ” and expense ” of drivers getting incorrect quotes for repairs that involve high-performance parts, such as an AMG or Brabus for a Mercedes, and receiving stock components in their place.

Grilled to perfection

Willy Stroppe, the president of automotive engineering firm Bill Stroppe and Sons in Paramount, California, says that once he had seen a minor damage to the front of a Ford pickup truck turn into a major repair bill. “It looks like the front plastic grille got broken with a light hit, but when we got into it the housing behind the grille was cracked and broken all the way up. Replacing everything from the fenders forward, the headlight vessels, a new front end, it all adds up. In a lot of cases you gotta pull out the radiator. That’s not something you can do in a couple hours.” Stroppe, who works mainly with Fords, has seen similar problems on a Ford Explorer and the pickups repair bill was more than $1200. “It’s not like the old days when everything was steel,” he adds. In his nearly half-century of experience in the car business, he has seen a lot of instances where a car whose frame and shell are in good condition but it needs a lot of work on its suspension is bought and sold off to an unwary buyer after doing a shoddy repair work on it. This leads to a gigantic repair bill in the future for the unsuspecting customer when the repair work crumbles.

Broke over Brake Work

Mark Essig, a writer in a small town in North Carolina, was astonished to find a repair bill of $150 on his car by a local mechanic just to replace a missing cover for the trunk-release switch in his ten-year-old Mercedes 320 CLK. Though such expensive repair bills are no longer a surprise for upscale European marques, Essig says, this one really took the cake for its icing on a already frosty $2000 repair bill which he did not expect in the first place. He says that this was not included in the estimate and it came as an additional cost. He says: “It was part of a $2000 repair bill that included valve cleaning and brake work, and I was so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t quibble over $150. Best part was, I didn’t ask him to do it.” Another story involves a Porsche 944 owner, Michael Russell, an AOL Autos friend who too his old-school German car for repair and got more than he bargained for in the form of $3,500 repair bill including labor cost in place of $15 exhaust valve replacement which was what he expected it to be. He says, that they had to rip out the engine to get to the valve, which had burned out, a common enough problem in older performance vehicles. Since without the repair, he had no way of getting to work, he had to grit his teeth and bear the cost.

Air Pressure

It is advised to search out a second opinion, and always review general system reliability as you decide to replace individual parts on older-model cars. Look into this story to know the brutal truth of car repair: I found this to my cost when I took my wife’s 1995 Nissan 240SX S-ER to my local mechanic’s last week to fix the air conditioning. I’d already taken it into the shop the week before, where they’d diagnosed a leaking gasket that had depressurized the system. So they duly fixed the gasket, re-filled the system with Freon coolant and pressurized it. Bill: $300. Not bad for an AC fix, I thought, until two days later the system again began blowing hot. So it was back into the shop, where they took a second look at it before telling me another seal had broken, this time in a hard-to-reach spot, meaning extra labor. Estimated cost: $800. When I pointed out that the original fix was under warranty, my mechanic agreed but argued that a different component had malfunctioned and therefore the additional repair was not under warranty. Many more attempts at bargaining failed. Result: I’m $300 out of pocket, and my wife has a long, hot summer to look forward to (unless she nabs my car, which is likely).

Coolant Chills

Ken Lavacot of www.2carpros.com advises you to never ignore little signs. A bit of steam coming out of the exhaust may seem like nothing, but it could be a warning of huge repair bills. For example, he says, “Coolant is normally used to cool the engine, but if coolant gets into the combustion chamber, the engine will burn it, generating white smoke and steam.” Among the expensive solutions is gasket replacement. “If the gasket that seals the intake manifold to the cylinder head fails it lets coolant into the intake port and then the combustion chamber. In which case, the intake manifold will need to be removed.” And getting to the gasket and reassembling the parts once it is replaced is the expensive bit. If there is coolant in the combustion chamber but the gasket is functioning, Lavacot says the engine must be taken apart. He adds: “This can be tricky because it is difficult to tell what is causing the problem. For example: A repair shop has told you the cylinder head is cracked, and as they start disassembly they can discover it was the intake manifold gasket that has failed. An honest repair shop will inform the customer that the repair bill will be lower. Or the opposite can happen. A repair shop may tell you that your engine has a blown head gasket, but once the disassembly is complete they inform you that the head gasket is fine, and so is the cylinder, which has been pressure checked. This only leaves the engine block as the failure and must be replaced, and that can be costly.”

Paintwork Blues

My brother-in-law had lent his Jaguar convertible to a family member who took it to a wedding. He returned it with a scratch in the back panel on the driver’s side. Generally, a good repair or bodywork shop can erase scuffs at minimal cost, but the Jaguar XK8′s aluminum shell demanded a costly adhesive to repair the scratch to prevent further corrosion or damage of the car’s monocoque shell. The whole repair work was as costly as $1500. The technician told him that he was blessed the scratch was light otherwise repairs might turn out double or triple in cost, an increasingly general incident as more luxury carmakers counting Audi, Mercedes and BMW harness the aluminum-shell technology (taking advantage of its increased strength and lighter weight). So, it is better to get several estimates for the paintwork. It is also better to think twice before you lend your precious car.