It's Friday and I'm bored

[SlimKlim]

but I'm also surprised it was enough to ruffle the feathers of someone rich enough to buy the car in the first place (as like his seventh vehicle, i did read that far).

You're suprised a $57,000 bill ruffled his feathers? Even for a wealthy person that is fucking outrageous for an engine rebuild for a street car.

Well if I drove my $8000 M3 to the dealership with engine issues and asked for a quote it would be $40,000+. (Seriously the short block price on an US S50 motor new from BMW is like $17,000.) Just because a dealership quotes it doesn't mean that's what it costs. Assuming the block itself wasn't trashed then I'm making the uneducated assumption a decent indy shop could do a complete rebuild on one for significantly less than $57,000.

Or he could've just bought a freaking long block on eBay for $6500. <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-2L-AMG-Engine-Assembly-M156-156-985-Mercedes-C63-E63-CLS63-CLK63-6-3L-2007-11-/281782345240">http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-2L-AMG-Engine ... 1782345240</a><!-- m -->

Found a thread from owners discussing the issue that seems to back up my logic:

After frequent calls to the dealer and head office, the recognized verbally that it was the fauly headbolts and because I am off warranty they would pay for half. I was excited thinking that was reasonable. Estimate was 42K to rebuild the motor, i would be half. That seemed crazy considereing that it was a known problem. So I researched around town and found a high performance import shop specializing in german hi-po cars and they would rebuild for 10K. So last week i had it towed from dealer into town and we will see next steps...

If you can afford that dude's car collection you can definitely afford $10k for an engine rebuild.

I'm not saying AMG cars are affordable or reliable. They clearly aren't, I'm just saying this dude has no one but himself to blame if he took a $57k rebuild quote at face value and decided to undertake it himself without having the skills to actually do it. He probably spent at least half of what he'd spend at an indy shop just fucking around with it like that, and everyone knows the price goes WAY up if you bring a car to a shop with the motor in pieces.