Thanks, Moria, for the bargaining skills
As you may have already read on the photoblog, Karen and I have been doing a bit of car maintenance recently: A neccessary part on my car and some 70k mile maintenance on Karen's car before the road trip (plus oil change, plus she needed a new headlight)Anyhow, the thing that I appreicate about the Saturn dealership is when they gave me their assessment they said "The check engine light's on because of a bad temperature pressure sensor which with parts and labor would be $250. Other than that, it looks pretty good: looks like you're a little overdue for a tuneup, but that's all"
Over at the Ford dealership I get the whole song and dance about everything that we could have done. They, for example, wanted to flush out and change all the coolant. I didn't bother bringing in the bogus coupon for a free cabin air filter inspection since (spoiler alert) I'm sure they would tell me we need a new one. The one thing that did, however, really need to be done was getting new tires, since they were the original tires and we're sitting at 66k miles on them.
The guy wanted $560 for it at the dealer and I got him to do it for $480. So let this be a lesson to you, blog readers: when you're getting your car fixed, call around and get some more pricing information and then use that against them.
May 20, 2009 at 10:39 PM
Yay! So happy you got new tires! Hopefully driving next winter will no longer remind you of ice skating... top