Austin, love your site and all your thoughtful comments you post here. I have a question for you. My neighbor said he heard you say that taking your car to the Honda dealer for routine maintenance was not a great idea. Can you please elaborate on that more for me?
Debbie
Hi Debbie,
I am assuming your neighbor saw my video about NOT taking your car to the dealership for routine maintenance. First, I have to say I am NOT out to get car dealers. They have a place in this world and do awesome at what they really want to do best…sell new cars.
They also do a pretty good job at selling parts, and diagnosing complicated mechanical problems when the local repair shop gets stumped. Are they the best place to go for routine maintenance work…in my opinion probably not.
Most dealerships have a higher labor rate than the smaller mom and pop repair shops and they have lot more overhead as well, which might justify the added expense on their end anyway.
Most routine maintenance work is not complicated and has not really changed much in 50 years or so.  Changing brakes, hoses, spark plugs, belts and fluids is pretty much the same principle as it was wayyy back when.
Now, granted some cars are MUCH more complex in the fact that just getting to the spark plugs takes 4 hours of work to remove a bunch of other items in the way, but the process is remove and replace.
What really irks me the most about car dealers is they have “packaged” their services together to make it appear you are getting a ton of really good stuff for one price.
In reality what you are buying is a lot of “inspections” and checking rather than replacing. So you pay them to inspect your vehicle and find things that might need to be replaced or repaired THEN you pay them to do the repairs.
In most cases, a GOOD oil change guy should be able to see and inspect many critical items on your vehicle and do it for the price of the oil change.
When we change your oil we visually inspect EVERYTHING we can under the hood, and do a walk down under your vehicle while it is in the air. We can see tires, tire wear, alignment issues, shocks, exhaust, oil leaks, coolant leaks and even get a good feel for brake wear.
We do this for FREE as we change your oil, and we do hope we find something that we can repair but I don’t charge you for this inspection.
A good and honest repair shop that you go to for all your repair needs should be doing this to your vehicle every time you visit…and for free during some service you are paying for like an oil change. I even test drive EVERY vehicle that comes into our shop, even for an oil change.
So you get my walk around and underneath inspection but also my test drive inspection as well. I can find a ton of things wrong just during a quick test drive…if there are things wrong.
So my point was, stop over paying for routine maintenance work and find a mechanic who does a thorough job during an oil change and stick with them.
Here is the video that your neighbor probably watched. If this was helpful to you…share it with your friends.
Blessings,
Austin Davis