Car Repairs - I feel cheated.

Parent Cafe
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The invoice should have had a breakdown of parts and labor costs. Most auto repair places that I have used in the past charge an hourly rate for labor and use a manual that determines the standard labor required for a repair. If the repair is supposed to take an hour, for example, then the labor charge should be whatever the shop bills for an hour. Many states also require the shop to return the broken part if requested, so presumably the customer could verify that the part was actually replaced. There can be a tremendous difference in price from one after market part to another, and most repair shops will tell you that they will not guarantee parts that are not provided by their part supplier.

You should be able to find the labor schedule and a range of prices for the part on-line relatively easily, especially for a popular make like BMW.

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$5000 for maintenance in one year seems like a lot. I drive a 10 yr old car and DH drives a 5 yr old car. When they need repairs they can be expensive, but fortunately its not often. When it does become an issue for my car, we will look into replacing it. We don’t lease. Ever. But some people swear by it. If you keep a car a short time, keep it in pristene condition and keep the mileage low, it can be an option. If you keep a car a long time, it may not be a financial good decision.

JOD-
Not understanding your comment about blackmail. Who is blackmailing who? Where? When? No one suggested that OP say to the manager “if you don’t give me what I want I am posting bad reviews on yelp and contacting corporate”. Don’t know anyone who does that, nor is it likely to be beneficial. For me, in the example I gave with the natural gas provider, I had already changed providers and they (first company) were trying to bill erroneously. I had spoken to a CS rep before changing (tried to stay with them but they wouldn’t match the fixed rate price, so, oh well, goodbye) and was told exactly what to do and when. But something didn’t happen as it was supposed to. Had the CS rep’s name and date of conversation. Called back after the snafu and spoke to a second rep, who was unhelpful, and then to another who was flat out wrong and rude to boot. I probably asked to speak to a supervisor who was conveniently unavailable. No blackmail. No threats. Nothing rude or impolite. Just trying to straighten out their billing error (not worth explaining, but trust me, they made the mistake) and determine the correct amount owed, if anything, which I was happy to pay if owed. Ultimately decided to post a polite, but disappointed post on their fbk pg which was very beneficial in getting the situation rectified and the person was very kind and very helpful. Many people say to post on twitter to get the attention of someone to address concerns. Didn’t do that.

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People who don’t do their own maintenance have no business owing expensive to repair cars like almost all German cars if they want to keep expenses down. Parts and labor are higher (sometimes much higher) than Japanese cars.

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I got rid of my 2006 BMW X3 a year ago. It only had 75000 miles on it. I was looking at a huge repair that when combined with some repairs I had been putting off would have totaled almost what the car was worth. I debated fixing it anyway but I knew that something else would need repair in the future. I had already spent a large amount the previous 2 yrs on a couple of repairs. I loved the drive of that car and was sad to see it go. We used 2 different mechanics on that car. We have an independent shop that works on all of our cars. They are reasonable and try to save us money. I also took it for some repairs to a shop that specialized in German cars. They are more expensive but they work on a lot of similar cars so they know if something is a problem in certain years. When I was deciding what to do they were helpful. They did not push repairing the car. No repair on the BMW was ever cheap no matter what shop I used.
We also own several Toyotas. The repair costs on them have been minimal. My D drives a Toyota with over 130000 miles and it has needed little work.
My FIL has always driven high performance vehicles. He always replaces at about 60000 miles as he isn’t interested in racking up repairs plus doesn’t want the hassle of an unreliable car. Plus I think he is like a young man who wants the newer toy. He can afford it.
My S wanted to buy a used German car, we advised against it due to higher maintenance costs.
In my experience your car will continue to have high cost repairs.

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We have owned mostly Japanese cars, and they have been for the mostpart very reliable. We got a small Volvo once that was expensive to maintain and needed stuff frequently (even the headlight and taillights blew often, and was expensive to replace), but we bought it knowing that eventually it would become the car that DS#2 drove, and we wanted the safety of it. And that car absolutely saved his life. Worth every penny.

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@NoVADad99 I don’t know how to take your comment. Most car owners do not know how to do their own car repairs. I realize repairs on BMW’s are expensive. I don’t deny that. I would rather rely on a mechanic to do the job as I don’t have knowledge of repairing them myself. Lots of people drive luxury cars but don’t know how to do their own repairs. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be allowed to own them.
@anomander
I love my car. It is one heavy duty car and it rides beautifully. The car had a warranty up to 90,000 miles. I can expect that now that the warranty is over that there will be wear and tears and that fixing them won’t be cheap.

I can say having had a Honda civic and a Toyota camry the BMW325i has the best ride. The $5000 I spent were for things like brakes, rotors, tires, oil changes, oil leaks, coolant leaks, and other maintenance stuff. But that is all I have spent since I bought the car. It is just that I have had all this expense in one year so it is a lot all at once. Yes the camry and the civic were much more affordable to maintain.

Reading this thread has taught me to shop around for parts and find a good mechanic for the future that I can go to that does good work. Thanks @greeninohio the idea for shopping around for parts is a very valuable tip. Just looking online I was able to see the difference in prices of the parts.

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LOL-- As a result of this discussion I decided to post something (polite but sharing my disappointment) on our internet provider’s facebook page due to toe ongoing problems and continued lack of responsibility and follow through. (The comments all go to the side, but apparently someone reads them). Got a message back and they claim they want to follow up. We shall see, but its a start.

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Brakes, rotors, tires, oil changes and a fuel pump for $5000 - that sounds quite high, though on average it’s $200/month.

You could consider budgeting / saving $200/month for future car repairs.

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@raclut what I was trying to say is that owners of high mileage BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, Volvos, etc. should know that the ownership costs will be significantly higher then for comparable Japanese or Korean cars. Sure, the Euro cars are more ‘fun to drive,’ but comes at a price. I too would love to have a German car, but can never justify that based on the cost of ownership for my needs. To me, the cost is more important than anything else.

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I agree that’s kind of a big chunk of maintenance to do all at once. Some must have been deferred for a while? But a big chunk of standard stuff hits around 80-120k, and if you can make it over the hump you should be ok for a while. Usually all the hoses, belts, and the radiator go around this time as well. I probably did spend about 5k between years 9 to 12 on mine, but almost nothing years 5-8 so I called it money well spent.

Regardless I’m glad you’re enjoying the car. I sold my 2002 330i in 2013 for 5.5k. The buyer told me he resold it recently for the same 5.5k so as far as value they’ve levelled off pretty well for well-maintained examples. CarMax had offered me 2k and I laughed all the way out the door!

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@novadad99 The car is a 2003 BMW 325i bought in 2005 with 30,000 miles on it for $20,000. With my trade in (a camry that had been really unlucky for me) the final cost came to $15,000. The car tax on the car is about $100/yr. The insurance is also very low.
For me it was cheaper than buying a new camry at that time. It is now 2015 and I think I have gotten good use of the car. Today if I buy a new Camry or Honda I’m not so sure how the quality and safety of the car is going to be and I am sure it will cost much more. I need to think about what I am going to do. I will start looking at the Honda’s and Toyota’s out in the market. The BMW is a heavy duty car and when driving a camry or civic those appear quite light weight.

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According to my son, the mechanic, German cars are way more difficult to repair than Japanese and American cars. Something about the way they arrange things under the hood, it is very difficult to get to certain parts, and he often has to take other parts out to get to the part that needs repair. I am not surprised that repairs on German cars cost more. Our standing joke is that if he says he had a bad day, I ask if he had to work on a German car.

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@advmom:
Thank you, your son basically said what I was going to say. For whatever reasons, German cars do tend to be complex to work on, and also the parts tend to be a lot more expensive as well. Fuel pumps on some cars are relatively simple things to replace, but there are cars where they are buried under a ton of things to be removed, and are time consuming, and that costs (a typical service center in my area are over 100/hour easily, Honda is like 125 (dealer), a BMW dealer is probably in the 150/hour area).

I am not all that familiar with BMW’s, but if the car went in for an oil change it is unlikely that the tech accidentally damaged the fuel pump, unless BMW does something weird, most cars have electric fuel pumps IME and they are back where the tank is. In the bad old days, when there were mechanical fuel pumps, they often were driven off the engine, sometimes off the cam, or through some other actuation, but with electric pumps they generally are at the rear, so in changing the oil the tech would not be anywhere near that. If the tech pulled of a wire from a fuel injector, it likely would allow the car to start, but it would run like crap, especially if it was a 6 cylinder, one cylinder not firing would allow it to start. Given the age of the pump, that is not a big surprise. One of the things with fuel injection is it require high psi into the injectors, and some engines have a cut off mechanism where if the pump is not delivering enough pressure, they won’t allow the car to start (I don’t know about BMW with this, but being performance oriented engines, wouldn’t surprise me), so the fuel pump may have been marginal, delivering just enough pressure, and it dropped below the shutoff level and caused what you saw.

Modern cars are a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because compared to the cars 30, 40 years ago, they are mechanical marvels in my opinion, they will last a lot longer, and in so many ways are more reliable, economical, less polluting, and more fun to drive, too , across the board. The downside is they are a lot more complicated to fix, even tho ugh you can buy diagnostic programs that run on a smartphone that use a bluetooth gizmo in the OBDII port to report the faults, it is still not easy to troubleshoot them, even changing the brakes is not as simple as it once was. Among other things, it often means mechanics resort to something that people groaned about in the ‘old days’, where they would replace parts until the problem went away, the diagnostic computers often don’t give that clear a picture what is wrong…and it can be costly. It is likely to happen a lot less often than it did in the good old days, that is for sure, but when stuff goes south it also can cost a lot more to fix.