Shhhh, I have to replace CV boots on my truck tonight. I shouldn’t have read any of this.

Former shop owner here- firstly, do you expect a restaurant to sell you steak at cost?

I like the motherly tone of your post. I wish you had ended it with “Shame on you, Andrew!”

There are fees involved in looking up a part, ordering a part, stocking a part. They are a for profit business that is allowed to make an honest wage. Do you realize how much money it takes to run a garage every month between insurance, licenses, taxes, rent, training, etc..

yea everything would be find if someone like diamler were to step in and take the wheel

I have been an ASE certified master mechanic for over 30 years. If your reasoning stands about parts markup...then go to your grocery store and buy your favorite steak and proceed to your favorite steakhouse and ask them to just charge you for cooking it! This is how most service businesses operate. Otherwise go to…

I have found going to an auto show to be an eye opening experience. It really helps people like me with narrow minded brand loyalty to break from 20+ years of Honda to a Mini to now a 5.0 Mustang GT. Totally worth it!

I once thought the Fiat 500 Abarth was cool, and then I sat in one at an auto show and immediately got claustrophobic.

Anyone in the market for a car should go to an auto show. I would never venture onto an Acura or Lexus dealership; but at an autoshow I would go over and check them out and see if they offer anything that interests me. My wife was recently in the market for a new car, and the ability to see the same price range cars…

At this point, a pair of rotors for a 3 year old Caddy is almost as cheap as the hourly rate we charge for turning the rotors, so we just replace them as part of the service- probably a third of the time the rotors ended up below the discard spec anyway, so it’s just not worth doing it on a customer’s car. On my own…

You might think of it as paying a mechanic to be present at a physical location, where he can physically install the correct parts to your vehicle using the thousands of dollars of tools required to accommodate various vehicle designs. In order to be in this physical realm, the shop has to mark up parts to pay things…

Brake rotors do not warp from the heat generated by using the brakes, no matter how aggressively you use them.

Part of their profit is making money from parts. It’s hardly a new concept.

Pickup beds are 5.5’ to 8’ plus the flat tailgate (2-3’); it’s unlikely that the ramp needs that amount of length to work. The ramp can be built into the under-bed area and just go underneath, not through, the tailgate.

Rotors for most cars have gotten so cheap, my friend who runs a shop said he replaces them all the time because it in the end costs more to turn them then to just replace them.

Keep in mind that if you supply the parts, the shop has no recourse if there is an issue, and they get stuck in the middle. Plus, when you get into high performance aftermarket stuff, this can turn into a nightmare for shops when someone who doesn’t know what they are doing dumps off a bunch of parts and says “make…

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A matter for the courts.

Yeah, or something German. TopGear says they are engineered by engineers that engineer them to take corners. They’re also so high tech that they’ll never break down, you know, because engineeried by German engineers

I think “Butros-Butros Touareg” would be awesome.