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+--- Thread: Tales from the Stealership (/showthread.php?tid=3523)
- Andy - 01-18-2006
.RJ Wrote:TurboOmni08 Wrote:100,000mile service on a Honda  If you plan to seriously follow the book and do the tune up at 100,000you have lost touch with reality. That is car company jive to keep people from bitching about maintenance costs and keep calling Hondas the most durable cars in the world. The technology is getting rather amazing, but spark plugs, wires, and the related items (which isnt much any more) are just not 100,000mile type things.
What tech do you have to back this up? Are 7500 mile oil change intervals bad too, then?
Sounds just like the dealership gibberish they are feeding to customers.
It wouldn't make sense for car manufacturers to tell their customers to not maintain their cars especially when most folks accept the costs of a tune-up. My family has a 03 Camry, Accord and 05 Accord, 06 Xa and they all recommend 7500 oil intervals with the Accord recommending 10,000 mile oil changes. I can't imagine Honda/Toyota would risk their engines and reputation if they didn't do a butt load of research into it.
- Feersty - 01-18-2006
Andy Wrote:Feersty Wrote:This is exactly the thread I needed to read because I was about to take my car to the dealership because the battery light came on.
It's your charging system light. Most of the time, it'syour alternator. Either you've got a bad connection or your alternator crapped out.
How many miles are on your Focus? Is it still under warranty?
Yeah I was pricing out an alternator online and it came to about $210.00 obviously remanufactured. The car is still under warranty. 100,000 mile warranty actually. I have about 46,5xx miles on it. Would a new alternator be covered?
- Andy - 01-18-2006
I would think so but I've never owned a car with a warranty.
- JohnC - 01-18-2006
Feersty Wrote:I have about 46,5xx miles on it. Would a new alternator be covered?
Read your warranty documentation very carefully. Its probably covered, but do the legwork and find out for sure.
- Ryan T - 01-18-2006
TurboOmni08 Wrote:Also, another thing that pisses me off about people bitching about dealerships is how little MOST people know about what the franchisers do to the dealers. The dealers are just passing on the level of F#@Katude given to them by their company. Chevy is really bad these days. They are loosing ground to Toyota and are taking it out on the dealers. I know the owner of our local Chevy dealer and he has told my father and I how wonderful he gets to take it in the butt from GM. Chrysler passes it on to us too. I mean really...why MAKE us buy paper service manuals AND make us buy the online manuals... Why make the scan tools cost $10,000...and still suck so much we have to get a MATCO Determinator to really find problems. And thats not all; try explaining to a customer that the ONLY fluid that will work in their transmission is proprietary to Chrysler and costs $13 a qt. Its the truth though....and as mad as people get...it is. Now I don't know about Honda and how they work their dealers. I would imagine it is little different. I just see it from both sides. I have done business with other places; I have done business as a customer with our place and there are times when I get angry about how much I pay. But then I think about what it takes to run the thing, and I realize that for the most part, the prices are fair for the work quality and the backup of the work. There is much more overhead to running a dealer then a mom & pop place, which is why the prices tend to be higher. The large dealers dont care as much about the customers, small dealerships must. We havent been around for 80 years by telling people they need whole new rear brakes at 30,000miles. Try to find an 80 year old Honda dealer in the UShell try to find a 50y/o one! (Oldest Google turned up was in Washington state est. in 1971) Maybe there in lies the problem, there are no truly customer oriented dealers anymore.alas.tangent = over.
The reason you don't see 80 year old Honda dealerships is because Honda wasn't founded until 1947.
I understand why dealerships charge more, just passing the buck, but the average consumer doesn't care. Noone wants to take their car to a dealership when they can get the work done just as well or better for significantly less somewhere else. From my experience, not many dealerships honor their work. After we let Chevrolet replace the headlight gear on moms car, at an astronomical cost, they didn't put it back in right. A week later when I came home we realized that the headlight was binding with the headerpanel when it came down. Chevrolet wouldn't honor the work they had done and wanted over $100 to fix it...Hillbilly Vette fixed it for $45.
While dealerships may get screwed by the big guys, thats one reason people are ceasing to get service performed at a dealership. In the end it is all about where you can get the work done the cheapest and get the highest quality work, and dealerships just haven't been able to do it. The sooner the big suits figure this out, they better off we will be.
- Sijray21 - 01-18-2006
this is a great topic.
i don't really have any interesting stories, but when i went to Honda in Harrisonburg to have a quote for my rear bumper cover replacement here's what went down:
I first go to the dealership to have the quote for the insurance. I go to the dealership b/c i know they're going to quote the most, therefore yielding me the most money from insurance. They quoted me $528 or something for a new bumper cover. I examine the sheet and found that to take off the rear mudguards (6 phillips head screws) would cost $57 in labor....$57....ridiculous. I also found out that the Acura GS-R "fat-five" wheels cost $425/ea from the dealership
hock: . Once again, i like using the dealership for insurance quoting purposes.
- Evan - 01-18-2006
Jeff I think you may be missing the point,
the biggest complaint is not the price of the parts or service (althought the price gouging is in fact a worthwhile concern), its that the dealer service departments outright lie about what parts and work you need. That is 100% slime
- Mike - 01-18-2006
no stories for myself... a dealership wouldn't even look at the hatch and the s2000 hasn't needed any work.
my dad on the other hand doesn't know shit about tools or wrenching. he doesn't trust me to repair his cars so he regularly pays $35 for new wiper blades installed, $40 for an oil change, puts premium gas in his '96 blazer, has $500 front brake jobs done, replaces his battery after 2 years (when it shows no signs of pooping out), doesn't understand that his dryrotted tires are a bad thing and should be replaced (it is strictly a utility vehicle, he doesnt drive it often), won't let me fix his a/c system (was quoted $1000 from dealership, but won't tell me what they actually said was broken), had a coolant light come on the other day, but said it was full... i look in and sure enough there is a film line that makes it look full, but there wasn't any fluid in the reservoir. what does he do? he puts in 100% coolant. i tell him he needs to add water and he refuses. i tell him to read the back of the bottle to prove me right... he does, i am right, but he still refuses. .... annd to top it all off he bought one of the worst cars in its class a couple years back (a chevy impala, beat only a taurus) despite my recommendation against it... the tranny "went bad" in it after a month. what a fucktard. i wish him the worst when it comes to cars just cause he's a stubborn asshole. /rant
- ViPER1313 - 01-18-2006
So now we know where you get it from :lol:
- Mike - 01-18-2006
not gonna lie... my dad is stubborn, my mom is overly critical.
- G.Irish - 01-18-2006
TurboOmni08 Wrote:Saying you ÔÇ£did it all yourselfÔÇØ regarding a transmission flush is not totally accurate. You simply changed a little more then half of the fluid in the tranny.
Actually maybe I didn't make it clear, after checking the owner's manual and seeing that the tranny fluid change is not necessary, I didn't do it.
Quote:100,000mile service on a Honda  If you plan to seriously follow the book and do the tune up at 100,000you have lost touch with reality. That is car company jive to keep people from bitching about maintenance costs and keep calling Hondas the most durable cars in the world. The technology is getting rather amazing, but spark plugs, wires, and the related items (which isnt much any more) are just not 100,000mile type things.
It is precisely for the reason that Honda wants to keep its reputation intact that they wouldn't risk people having reliability problems by being too ambitious with the service schedule. And the 100k mi maintenance on most of the newer Honda is stuff like valve adjustment and timing belt change. The spark plus are also not scheduled to be changed till 110k, but you have to keep in mind that things like spark plugs have advanced a lot (since materials science has advanced a lot).
Dealerships do have more overhead to take care of so I'd expect them to cost more than mom and pop. In return you should get a higher quality of service. I can't speak directly to other brands but at least with Honda dealers there has been a culture of arrogance that has developed because they know people will pay big money for their Hondas no questions asked, because people are afraid to take them to independent shops. This is not even the first time (or the second, or the third) I've had a problem with a Honda dealership.
Its the outright dishonesty that pisses me off. I'm sure somewhere some service manager will try to justify it by saying "we need to take care of our overhead" but fleecing customers is not the way to do it. You're not Ferrari...
- Jeff - 01-18-2006
EDIT- Gerald just posted ahead of me and I wanted to say I appreciate his post. I can see how Honda dealers might take more risks (especially in the city) with lieing to customers to try to turn a buck. I am defending Dealers because of where I plan to be in life. I have an ideal I wish we could stand for and make things truely better for customers AND us. Unfortunately there are too many dealers who don't care anymore about good customer service. Don't take any of this as personal attack, and I know I might be offbase here and there. I would never say anything that I believe (honestly) to be untrue. So take this original post for that it is worth...
I will agree, this is a very good topic to bring up here. I do get the point, and there are SRs that will lie to people to rip them off. That is the damn truth. Hell there are people in EVERY business who lie to get money from customers who don't want to do it themselves (look at CC, lol) RJ, there is much much much to be gained by car companies overstretching the service requirements on cars. Think about it. When people pay less until that "golden 100K" they are happier. All this is of course at the car's expense. They assume you will not keep it much past that 100 and if you do you will perform the tasks that should have been done 30 and 60K ago. I think its funny, given all you guys know about oil, and the way it acts, that you can't see what I am saying here. I have seen at our shop, the SR tell the oil change man (I love Karl!!) to put a dirty air filter back in a customer's car. Why in the hell would he do that? The customer would flip shit to add the normal cost to do the filter on to the car, and the book says give it another 15K. Karl (I love Karl) outright told him no and showed my uncle, who told them to charge half labor and do it if the customer wanted. Everyone is overstretching things these days to make their shit look good. Another example. So you have a 1500 Dodge, 97 with 100K on it, 318 v8 with a 5-speed. My friend gets that 15,000mile oil. Fast forward 4K miles...and about a month of my bitching about checking the oil. When he finally stops buy and I check it (note that I check it, he represents the greater part of the American public here) and it is black and gummy. Not even a little black and gummy...but BLACK AND GUMMY. He argued with me for 2 weeks before buying some GTX to put in it (and of course a trusty Mopar oil filter, I had to get him somehow, lol) I dunno, America is more about convenience these days then good sense (look at my fast food gut and tell me its not!).
- G.Irish - 01-18-2006
No disrespect but Honda's reputation has been built on cars lasting well past 100k miles. Part of the reason you haven't seen turbocharged engines from Honda until now (despite the fact that they have employed them to great success in motorsport) is because they didn't think they could get the long term durability up to their standards.
Stretching the interval on a timing belt could lead to catastrophic engine failure, they wouldn't risk that unless they knew what they were doing. Throughout Honda's history in the US there's only been one engine that had serious engine defects in its design (and they spent a shitload fixing it), they are not going to throw that away for the minimal marketing value of 100k tune ups.
I definitely see where people stretch the fluid intervals though, but that's the result of cusomter error. There are 3 ranges specified for fluid intervals. Most people try to stretch it longer in spite of the fact that the way they're driving the car might call for shorter.
- Andy - 01-18-2006
100k in a toyota/honda is not only expected but demanded. My family is as cheap as they come and they all drive their cars until 200K before they will even think about changing cars. My brother in law had 290K on his Accord before he donated it and the engine wasn't even bad, the Catalytic Converter crapped out and fixing it would cost more than the car. My brother's old Prelude had ~200k before he graduated and bought a cooler car.
- D_Eclipse9916 - 01-18-2006
I agree with G. Irish, dealerships are out for the most money. Although the 100k mile looks like a huge tactic, think of all the money they make by having you constantly come in to tune-up your car?
The money they make tuning up a car FAR exceeds doinbg a little marketing gimmick of 100k miles. Most people dont even realize that they are allowed to do that with Hondas. Take my sister or mother for example, typically consumer, beleives the old saying 3,000 miles for oil changes, when her manual clearly states every 7500. People arent paying attention to things like that.
Also having timing belts and engines having problems before their tune-ups in the manual would be a catastrophy for Honda. I beleive the only reason people would buy a honda, and if I were to get one would be for the reliability. Typically their way down on power, a little pricy and parts compared to american cars are astronomical. (For example, check out o2 sensors, see which ones are pretty mucht the most expensive, honda civics...)
Honestly, it sounds like I am bashing hondas, but I do have to make this one statement. A LOT OF HONDAS dont make any power or torque which makes it much easier on the engine compared to other car companies.
A testament to honda is tons of my friend's old civics, accords and all the others lasting 250k+ with regular maintenace. They just done die.
- .RJ - 01-18-2006
D_Eclipse9916 Wrote:when her manual clearly states every 7500. People arent paying attention to things like that.
The 'severe duty' (or similar) interval is much shorter (3500?) - if the car's use is all short distance trips, it would certainly qualify.
D_Eclipse9916 Wrote:I beleive the only reason people would buy a honda, and if I were to get one would be for the reliability.
And resale value is a lot better than most other cars.
- G.Irish - 01-18-2006
D_Eclipse9916 Wrote:Honestly, it sounds like I am bashing hondas, but I do have to make this one statement. A LOT OF HONDAS dont make any power or torque which makes it much easier on the engine compared to other car companies.
That's actually the rationale companies like Ferrari and Lambo used to make when justifying why it costs so much to maintain those cars. But then the NSX came out, and subsequently the MK IV Supra and they pretty much debunked the myth that exotics/semi-exotics need to be high maintenance because they make so much power, or they are made in such small numbers, etc.
As for the power and tq being the reason Honda engines have had more reliability, that is not really the case. Honda simply engineers the required amount of durability into an engine for the application. Accords V6's make 240 hp now and that is right around the top of the class for horsepower. When the NSX came out it had among the highest specific output of any naturally aspirated engine (same with the S2000). You don't see any of those engines with any durability issues.
Neon's didn't make that much horsepower but the early ones had chronic headgasket failure problems. The Focus had plenty of problems when it came out too from stalling to engine fires. If you go further back there are plenty of other cars that had major engine problems that didn't make much power.
Conversely, you don't hear of many problems with any of the LS series engines from GM, and those all make plenty of horsepower and torque. Same with Ford's old 7.3L Powerstroke diesel and several of the other diesels which all make considerable torque. Yet, the new 6.0L Powerstroke diesel has had numerous problems because Ford didn't design that engine totally in house.
So really, the reason a given production engine is reliable or not has little to do with the power or torque it makes. You simply must equip the engine with components that can handle that level of power and torque for the amount of time you want that engine to stay together. Honda and Toyota rarely get this wrong (although they have).
If you were building a 600-800 hp 4G63 would you use stock internals then complain that 4G63's are not reliable? No, you'd upgrade the internals so the engine would last longer.
- CaptainHenreh - 01-18-2006
A note on Honda O2 sensors....the reason they're so damn expensive (some of them) is because they are wideband sensors, that only one company makes, and that company won't increase output to meet demand.
- D_Eclipse9916 - 01-18-2006
G.Irish Wrote:If you were building a 600-800 hp 4G63 would you use stock internals then complain that 4G63's are not reliable? No, you'd upgrade the internals so the engine would last longer.
Of Course I would, thats why do you think dsms get that reputation? Turn up the boost and go wild!!! Throw on huge turbo, it doesnt matter!
- Chris - 01-18-2006
all the talk earlier of drum brakes makes me worried. I'm taking a look ( probably replace the shoes) this weekend for the first time ever. I'll try sanding them though, maybe that will stop the squealing.